Me In A Nutshell
So here’s the scoop on who I am, or at least what I’ve done so far in my life.
This isn’t an autobiography or even an attempt at one, but more like laying the foundation of this whole blogging thing that I’ve chosen to do. My plan is to use my life story to lay out how abnormal it is and I guess to show others that things aren’t so bad…because I’ve been told that I’ve overcome a lot of crappy situations in my life and turned out alright, so it might give you hope whenever you find yourself in a crappy situation.
Well, here’s the overview:
- Born in the Philippines in 1974
- Mother – Shirley
- Father – Robert
- Was the ring bearer in my parent’s wedding (no they weren’t married when I was born)
- Moved to Hawaii when I was 3 years old (dad was in the Navy and got stationed there)
- Fluent in Tagalog as a kid, and learned how to speak English by watching Sesame Street
- Moved to Florida when I was 7 (dad stationed there)
- Moved back to Philippines (dad duty station) when I was 9
- I have a brother (who’s actually my cousin, but we adopted him as a baby when I was 9)
- Moved to Japan (yup, Navy moved us again), when I was 12
- Moved back to the Philippines (dad finally retired from the Navy) when I was 16 for my last 2 years of high school
- Attended the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated in 1996 (pictured above)
- Met my future wife, Chantel, while attending the Academy (also pictured above putting my new rank on my shoulders)
- Became a pilot in the Navy
- Immediately deployed after 9/11 to fight in the war on terror
- Became a test pilot
- Chantel and I have 5 kids (4 boys and 1 girl)
- Chantel and I have 4 dogs and 4 cats
- I opened a CrossFit gym in 2012 and subsequently sold it in 2016
- I heard the first 3 gunshots during the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting
- Retired from the Navy in 2016
- Living in Iowa now with dreams of eventually selling everything and traveling with Chantel in an RV.
So this kind of lays out the past 40-some years of my life and is in no way a laundry list of highlights, but it will at least give you some framework of where I’m coming from and what I’ve been up to. There are a lot of details that weave in and out and spur off a bunch of stories which I’ll be using this blog to describe for you.
I have no intention of making this a sequential-type blog..I’ll be skipping around so in the meantime, check out some of my social media links on the side and read up on some of the blog posts as they come in!
Thanks for checking me out!
Dave