I WAS BORN AND raised in the little town of Sunrise Ridge. I was a sort of outcast, from an early age. I am of Irish extraction, although it has been a few generations since my family left the ould sod. I don’t speak with an Irish brogue, nor do I look particularly Irish, save for my red hair. Well, there is one Irish thing that I do and I have done for a long time. I carry a shillelagh. My shillelagh has always been a hickory stick. After a long time and a lot of shillelagh practice, I upgraded my shillelagh to a loaded stick.
(Back in the old days, a loaded stick was produced by pouring molten lead into a hollowed out shillelagh. Now days they bore a hole in the big end of a shillelagh and insert a lead cylinder, then cap off the hole with a wood plug. A loaded stick shillelagh is indeed a deadly weapon.)
Starting back in grade school, I didn’t play games with the other boys at recess. Instead, I did a bit of shillelagh practice. Over the course of time, my arms got very strong and the muscle that I developed was fast twitch muscle, which gave me a lot of hand speed.
I didn’t fit in well with the other boys and sometimes there was trouble. The other boys found out that my punches were very hard and came in very fast. I beat up a couple of troublemakers really bad, after they started trouble. After that the other boys pretty much left me alone.
School turned into more and more of a waste of my time. I wanted to learn things that would be of use to me for the rest of my life. The schools wanted me to try things and experience what the teachers liked. I tried the things that the teachers liked. I didn’t like the things that the teachers liked. I could not see how the things that the teachers liked would be of any real use to me, for the rest of my life.
I liked math and even independently invented interpolation. I then began to do some work with diophantine equations. The school soon put a stop to that. It seemed that diophantine equations were too advanced for my grade level. (I suspected that that diophantine equations were actually too advanced for my math teacher.)
I stopped doing diophantine equations work, during my math classes.
Since I was not learning much in my school classes, I searched around for a bit and found the GED tests. I studied for and then passed the GED tests. I was then a high school graduate. Since I was a high school graduate, I started to take some classes at a local junior college.
My math work attracted the attention of a local company and I then became a work study guy.
The school powers that be didn’t want me to just study math and computer programming. I needed to take classes in other areas. I didn’t want to take classes in other areas, but I had no real choice in the matter.
I then managed to take some classes in automotive engineering.
It happens that there are a lot of math applications in automotive engineering. I solved some problems and my solutions earned me a little money, along the way.
I then bought what is called a replicar, from a bankruptcy. My replicar looked something like a 1941 Willys coupe. The top of my replicar had been ‘chopped.’ (Material was removed from the top and top supports to lower the top, for less wind resistance.) My replicar had a fiberglass body that was mounted to the lower edge of the frame, rather than on the top of the frame, to lower my replicar, for less wind resistance. The frame and the suspension elements were all new items, not 1941 items. However, my replicar had no engine. I then helped a racing team develop a Ford V-8 engine for racing. The engine developed good power, but what the racing team had designed lacked enough top end and couldn’t flow enough air to produce the needed 700 plus horsepower, to dominate a particular racing class. The problem was that the basic design needed to start over from scratch. The racing team then got a sponsor and started to build an engine to dominate a particular racing class. That left the racing team with the problem of what to do with the first engine. They didn’t want to sell the engine to another racing team and also sell the secrets that they had learned while building the first engine.
The racing team developed Ford engine was then sold to me at a giveaway price and installed in my replicar. I re-tuned the turbo chargers’ system and I had an engine that was well suited for street use, but could then be reconfigured, on the fly, for high performance use.
I used my replicar to get me back and forth to work. The girls liked my unusual looking car, and I was able to give several girls a test ride adventure.
I suspect that my troubles started with the test ride adventures in my replicar.
My project manager didn’t like me giving girls a test ride adventure in my replicar. My PM ordered me to stop the test ride adventures in my replicar.
As ordered, I stopped giving girls test ride adventures in my replicar.
