Back on the Ranch

Christmas Day, Piru, CA

I caught up with Dave on a recent international phone call from Buenos Aires, Argentina (while preparing for a model photo shoot) to project headquarters – the twenty-nine foot Res Ispa yellow and white sailboat - moored in the Oakland estuary across the Bay from San Francisco. Dave just returned from Christmas in Southern California with family and managed to get a little glider testing in while down south.

Dave and I spent a good portion of our youth growing up a mile apart from each other in a small migrant farming town called Piru. Our families both migrated away from more urban areas, bought small orange orchards and built their dream houses. This was before the internet, cable television and right about the time satellite TV was making is debut. The Commodore 64 had just come out followed by the first Apple computer. Dave began doing some basic programming on a simple game that was kind of a Dungeons and Dragons, where the player had options about which way to navigate through a maze that we drafted on graph paper. Those were the days…