WayneSL’s Weblog

I’m an Air Force brat born in Georgia, USA and raised in a dozen locations across the US and in England.
I did manage to spend my last three years of public schooling (1966 – 1969) in one high school in Jacksonville Florida,
where I learned to sight-read choral music and met a young lady who taught me to love and to play guitar.
She showed me that a life devoted to science and the military would probably not satisfy my soul.

During the three years after high school, I spent one semester as a music major and worked a bunch of jobs
in electronics, driving trucks, wood working, shipyard sheet metal, etc.
because I couldn’t afford to go to college and be lazy and spacy too.
 

Then I spent a couple of years playing guitar and singing for a living.

When I saw that I didn’t have the self-discipline to make it in the commercial music world without some formal training,
I joined the Navy for the G.I. bill.

That was six of the best jobs I ever had, from 1975 to 1985, and it took me to Hawaii
where I fell in love with and married a wonderful woman from Canada: Charlotte Slater.

Neither of us wanted to lose our surnames, so we formed the Slater-Lunsford Co-operative.

That makes Slater-Lunsford a Hawaiian name.  Really.

After ten years in the Navy, I left with a family and a bunch of certifications and still no music degree.

Because of Charlotte, I joined the Roman Catholic Church and soon became a music minister.
That forced me to learn and practice more musical technique and discipline than I had ever had before,
and brought my musical spirit back to life. 
After about ten years in various parishes wherever we lived,
Charlotte & I saw that our spiritual needs would be better fulfilled in the International Church of Christ,
and that is where we worship today.

My last and best job in the Navy had been teaching electronics, so I spent the years from 1985 to 1997 teaching and training to teach, but there was little money and much frustration in the public schools where I found employment.  I finally got fed up with it and took a job as a Technical Writer in aerospace. 

   That’s me standing in front of the wing, 4th from your right.

That means that technically I write, but not really.  I will write out a procedure or a description when necessary, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, I take a lot of digital photographs.  Then I discovered that video goes thirty frames per second, so the equivalent would be 30,000 words per second, or 1.8 million WPM (Words Per Minute) at which rate  NONE can type without a computer.  Which is my favorite tool, for writing, image processing and video editing, plus database development, web development and communication.

My steady day job and my experience with music and technology have enabled me to stay involved with the Folk Music world which I have loved since the ’60’s.
DesertSong Productions, the organization I co-founded in 2004, is finally gaining momentum and becoming an effective agent for change
in the Antelope Valley’s acoustic music scene.

And THAT is how I landed here.