Welcome to my little shop! I'm sorry, but you might say the shelves are almost empty. I was going to have lots of interesting, funny, and helpful stuff related to being a pharmacist and pharmacy in general, but I realized that is better suited to a blog format. That project is on hold because I'm preparing for a big relocation from south central Indiana to Seattle, WA. For now, I'll just say a bit about myself.

I am presently Director of Pharmacy at Daviess Community Hospital in Washington, IN. I got my R.Ph. at the University of Arizona, and since then have worked in many retail stores and even more hospitals.

I really like the clinical side of pharmacy the most, because it challenges your mind and you can see just how much you help patients and make the hospital run better.

The biggest challenge I've had so far came with an assignment from a temporary agency. Gibson General Hospital in Princeton, IN was on the verge of closing for lack of a phrarmacy director. My job was to prepare the pharmacy for a crucial JCAHO inspection and hire a new director. Our best candidate for the job turned out to have no managerial experience, so I had to train him until he got up to speed. Everything worked out fine, but there were some rough spots along the way.

In 1991 I thought of a way to find romance with a brilliant, socially ept nerd. I got smart and joined Mensa. It only took six months to find him -- and he turned out to be handsome, too! Now we have a beautiful daughter to make our family complete.

The other thing I wanted from Mensa was intellectual stimulation. I got it. Now, Mensa is widely misunderstood, and it may be because you often find out someone is a Mensan because they're bragging or otherwise behaving like a jerk. Most Mensans don't wear their membership on their sleeves.

Mensa is foremost a social organization, and few of its activities are specifically designed around stimulating topics; instead, you just put a bunch of Mensans together in a room and enjoy what happens. Mostly, it's ordinary conversation carried on with a bit more wit and depth than you'll find most other places. It's much like hanging out at Starbuck's with a bunch of interesting and fun grad students.

In my original local group, Greater Phoenix Mensa, I founded a special interest groups to explore my interest in longevity with others. I contributed articles to the local newsletter, and even edited it for a time.

We really miss Phoenix and our many friends there. We left there in 1999, and Kent and I lived in rent-free housing on the campus of Sage Hospital in Ganado, Arizona. It's right in the middle of the Navajo Reservation. We moved to Indiana in late 1999 so Kent could pursue a doctorate in History and Philosophy of Science at IU's Bloomington campus. We spent that winter renting a huge farmhouse on 300 acres outside Spencer, IN. In March of 2000 we bought our own home in a rural setting almost exactly halfway between Bloomington and Bedford, where we enjoyed our rural surrounds and the easy commute into Bloomington. In May of 2005 we sold our house and moved into an apartment on the remote outskirts of Vincennes, IN. That neighborhood was more forested than the one we left, while being much more convenient to the amenities of town. That brings us here to Washington, IN ... and all the while we've been longing to move back out West.

Now we're packing for a move to Seattle, a place I've always wanted to live. We're looking forward to its diverse and sometimes wacky culture, where we'll fit in much better than we have among Hoosiers!