Starting free-lance reporting for Patch was a nice segue for me into retirement and turned me, at least temporarily, into more of a photographer than writer.

Writing about the Hillside-Greenhill stream renovation project opened my eyes to the down-to-earth realities of stormwater management, which until then I had seen mostly from my cubicle desk.

I live near the Hillside Underpass and so I've started tracking intermittent streams to the roadside storm drains that feed them. 

Patch has given me a venue for my bird photos and helped me develop into areas where I thought myself weak, such as covering sports and music.

Besides the usual English major goal of writing a novel, my biggest goal is saving the 25,000-some acres of federal land which to me is the real "greenbelt" (old federal jargon for a surrounding shelterbelt of trees).