My primary hobby is, or at least had been, philately. I have concentrated on postal history -- old envelopes, with their stamps, postal markings, labels, addresses, return addresses, and generalprovenancetime can be fascinating and useful historical documents. For several years I was heavily involved in the British Columbia Philatelic Society.
I'm here at the FineScale discussion board by way of an aircraft accident in 1962, when I was 19.
I was a passenger in a U.S. Forest Service T-34 Mentor Bird Dog plane that was sent to check out a fire in southwestern New Mexico's Black Range mountains. We flew past the fire twice; a single tree was burning. Moments after the second pass, the pilot attempted to climb to the left over the nearby ridge; we were only a hundred feet or so above the ground. The plane apparently stalled and plunged into the forest, leading to a dramatic rescue by volunteer smokejumpers and evacuation by helicopter. You can read all about it at http://www.ephemeraltreasures.net/crash-part-1.html.
I recently decided to build a 1/48 scale plastic model of the T-34. The only kit I could find locally was a USAF or Japanese Air Force T-34A by Minicraft. My crash plane was a T-34B, a former Navy trainer. The T-34A kit is supposed to be finished as an unpainted aluminum aircraft, whereas "my" crash plane was bright yellow.
I built at least a dozen models of planes, cars, and ships as a teenager, but discovered girls, which ended model making! I also ended up in Vietnam as a Marine Corps hospital corpsman. Less than four years after my plane crash, I was seriously wounded in an ambush by a combined unit of Main Force Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. I had emergency surgery on the U.S.S. Repose hospital ship (now there's a model I'd like to have!) and was evacuated to San Diego by way of Da Nang, Clark AFB in the Philippines, and Travis AFB near San Francisco. I tell my war stories at http://www.ephemeraltreasures.net/37-days-in-vietnam.html.
I've had a varied career in journalism, teaching, and photography, and now with lots of time in retirement I've returned to stamp collecting and apparently to model building.
I live in Vancouver with my wife of nearly 53 years, near our son, who is a massage therapist.