25 Year On: A Self Assessment

As it happened 25 years ago today we graduated from high school. 

No it doesn't feel like yesterday. It feels like forever, a different world for us, thankfully.

We loved science fiction and techno thriller novels. We liked watching baseball. We played tabletop war games. We wrote a little, even completing a novel our senior year. We think we still have it someplace.  We were happy to get out of high school.

Let's take a look at how we've done then.

We went off to Wesley College where we learned how to drink in the glorious Nu Chi Phi Chapter of Alpha Chi Rho. We very foolishly left Wesley, a school that was at least marginally good for us, for a non-disclosed Washington D.C. University. Georgetown? Galludet? Howard? Who can say?

We interned at the White House and the Senate.

Things began to unravel here. We view the mid to late 90's as a very vapid and useless time in our lives.

In 1998 we got married to a local girl we met at Wesley. Today we have three kids and nice house in Jersey, a state we once swore we would never reside.

After dropping out of school in 1997 we bounced around between jobs and never really got our feet under us. We were a lifeguard and pool manager, worked at CNN, and worked in direct mail. In between there were some long bouts of unemployment. We view these as the worst times of our life. 

In 2001 we and Mrs. Stroock left Virginia and moved to New Jersey. We went back to school, earning a degree online in World Military History. A professor suggested we submit one of our papers to a military history magazine and away we went. We now have nearly 100 magazine articles in print.

In 2003, one of the best years of our lives, we began writing what would become a Line through the Desert.  Nine novels later we have been writing ever since. We have also designed three war games.

During this time we've been a high school substitute teacher. We were the trouble shooter, the one they brought in to keep an eye on the knuckleheads. We were a middle school teacher at an orthodox Jewish Yeshiva. If you ever wondered why the bad guys in to Survive the Earth are Orthodox Jews, that's why. We were a history professor and we were great at it. Just look at the reviews.

In 1992 we called ourselves 'Tom' but switched to 'Will.' We weighed 205 and now weigh 260. We still have most of our hair. We still have our temper. Mrs. Stroock says we are too tough on ourselves. We became a gym rat. We got into Jogging. We gave up video games, more or less, and learned guitar.  We have a stent in our heart and gout. We went from Democrat to Republican.

We are middle aged and loving it.