{"id":32003,"date":"2025-01-23T20:44:26","date_gmt":"2025-01-24T01:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=32003"},"modified":"2025-01-23T20:45:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T01:45:10","slug":"toms-world-23jan2025-rusted-floorboards-and-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/23\/toms-world-23jan2025-rusted-floorboards-and-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom&#8217;s World &#8211; 23JAN2025 &#8211; Rusted Floorboards and All"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/tomd77\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow ugc\">Tom | Flickr<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/category\/guest-contributors\/guest-contributor-tomd\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TomD<\/a><\/p>\n<p>My 1st couple of years in engineering school (1966-1967) were with a slip stick. A number of years followed spent in the military and civilian employment before I paused my hedonistic lifestyle to complete my degree in Civil Engineering in 1975. When I started back in 1973, slip sticks were gone in favor of calculators. I started off with a $240 (in 1973 dollars!) Bowmar, by current standards, the equivalent of a current $12 scientific calculator. But I quickly gravitated to an HP 45. I can\u2019t remember who I had to kill to get the cash for the over $400 price of the HP 45. I was living and paying all of my bills and food and tuition and books from my $275\/month GI Bill and my weekend job pumping beer, shelling oysters and making Reubens at Smokeys Bar for a couple of bucks an hour.<\/p>\n<p>My transportation at the time was a Kawasaki 500 until I got so cold one winter that I paid $100 for a 1962 Valiant with a rusted out floorboard that I covered with a stolen real estate sign to keep my feet from falling through.<\/p>\n<p>Sounds tough but that was the absolute best time of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tom | Flickr TomD My 1st couple of years in engineering school (1966-1967) were with a slip stick. A number of years followed spent in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1489,1730],"tags":[3822,1731,4774],"class_list":["post-32003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-contributors","category-guest-contributor-tomd","tag-engineering","tag-tomd","tag-youth"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Tom&#039;s World - 23JAN2025 - Rusted Floorboards and All - Orion&#039;s Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/23\/toms-world-23jan2025-rusted-floorboards-and-all\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tom&#039;s World - 23JAN2025 - Rusted Floorboards and All - Orion&#039;s Cold Fire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tom | Flickr TomD My 1st couple of years in engineering school (1966-1967) were with a slip stick. 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