11/06/2008
Thanks for visiting my website! Having been a nomad for most of my life, I have befriended many people with whom I've lost touch over the years. After locating some of them through the internet, I was inspired to start my own website--thus, anyone who happens to put my name into a search engine will have a way of contacting me. Now that you've found me, drop me a line!
I have to admit that I have experienced many major life changes throughout this last decade, for starters, I got married and we just celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary on January 23! I don't mean to be terse regarding my marriage or details about my wife but I can only make the decision to put myself out on the internet; suffice to say that it was her unabashed Christian faith that attracted me to her in the first place.
Shortly after our marriage, I ended my career of twenty-or-so years as an electronics technician (I was getting bored) and returned to college. We both quit our jobs, packed up some stuff in Pennsylvania, and then drove cross-country since I had been accepted to the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. We actually jumped into this adventure without any job prospects and only an apartment that a friend had reserved for us waiting at our destination. As it turned out, my wife quickly found work at the campus bookstore and I worked part-time as a research assistant, measuring Al26 concentrations in lunar rocks brought back on Apollo missions 15 and 17 (you can read a paper here) and also monitoring radiation levels around the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. I graduated with a bachelors degree in physics (with an electro-optics concentration) in the summer of 2002. Then, having received the offer of a full-tuition scholarship from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson AFB, OH, we once again quit our jobs, packed up and moved to Ohio--again with no job prospects. My wife quickly found work and, once again, I secured a position as a research assistant. We stayed there for two years until I completed my masters degree in applied physics (you can read my thesis here). It was at this point that an offer of a dream position as a Research Engineer prompted our decision to pack up and move back to where the whole adventure began in Pennsylvania (even though I had already been accepted as a Ph.D. candidate.) While returning to college in my 40's was truly an interesting experience, in retrospect, I would have to say that it's definitely a younger person's game; it was depressing to discover that pulling all-nighters is significantly harder to do now than when I was in my 20's!
Another really big change in my life over the last decade was that I became a Christian, having felt the calling about half-way through my undergraduate studies. This is a rather unique situation because I came to my belief based upon the same scientific evidence that many of my colleagues will argue as proof against a Creator--specifically, I found everything to be far too clever for me to accept it as a random accident.
A really big part of who I am is rooted in the fact that I've traveled quite extensively throughout my life, having visited 46 countries to date (yes, I know, some of them are actually territories.) I've also traveled to many of them multiple times, the most recent being my sixth trip to Thailand in February with my wife. I have lived in nine different states at various times throughout my life as well as four years in Japan. I have also managed to set foot in every state except Alaska. In addition to my world travel during a six-year enlistment in the Navy, I was fortunate to have also worked for five years as a Field Service Representative for a company that provided quality control for the packaging industry (i.e. glass and plastic containers)--I basically got to travel all over the world (spending months at a time on the road) teaching people how to make better beer bottles! It was also during my tenure with this company that I developed a theory for a unit of time known as the K.U.
As previously stated, I am currently working as a Research Engineer and just celebrated my four-year anniversary on June 14th. This is admittedly quite a change from the rather directionless individual that many people from my past may have remembered--especially those that may have known me as a teen attending Zama High School and living at Atsugi Naval Air Facility in Japan in the early 70's. If any of my friends from those days happen upon this site, please email and let me know what you're up to! And while I'm on the subject, that also applies to all my shipmates from my Navy days many lifetimes ago--I'd love to hear from you as well!
Finally, I hold a private pilot license and have ~120 flight hours of flight time and am currently working on my instrument rating. When not piloting an actual plane, I also fly my radio controlled helicopter in my back yard (which is where the picture was taken incidentally). I occasionally consider the idea of pursuing a rotary-wing (helicopter) endorsement on my pilot's license someday (note the Hawaii entry on my favorites page) but for now, instrument flying is enough of a challenge!
I hope that this brief introduction has been informative. It's always interesting to find out what old friends are up to and I would invite any old friends that happen upon this site to drop me an email.
Cheers,
Kevin Cumblidge