The exact time line for events in my life from 1999 to now has not been too clear to me since I got my sickest and my short term memory was failing so much, so I always shared those things with you in more general terms.

You have to understand how the human mind works concerning memories. When you experience something, brain cells send arms to other brain cells and make little "bumps" on the surface of those brain cells that contain the information or memories of that experience. When you forget something, it isn't because the information stored on the surface of those brain cells is lost but because the arms to those cells disconnect denying you access to those memories. When you repeat information, like with studying, it strengthens or reconnects those arms so they remain in tack with those memories allowing you continued access to the memories.

When I started having problems with my short term memories, it was because my brain wasn't making those arms strong enough to maintain access, they would quickly, sometimes almost instantly, lose contact with the surface of those brain cells and the memories.

The long term memories were still good because those arms had been made stronger because my body was healthier, except when I fatigued to the point of "hitting the wall" the way marathon athletes do, which was caused by the temporary failure in other parts of my brain caused by the fatigue, which denies me access to all of my memories and even cognitive thinking.

When I recovered from that fatigue, my long term memories would come back but most to all of my short term memories didn't but I learned quickly that, if I could review information for the short term memories, it would cause the short term memory arms to reconnect to those memories and almost everything about that short term memory would suddenly return for at least a while.

Therefore, a few days ago, I decided to try to figure out what happened and when, during my failing health by studying the time line on this site for my postings and, sure enough, most of it came back pretty fast. I want to share some of that with you because there are some important lessons in those memories. Note that, of course, not all of those memories have returned because either not all of those arms have reconnected or some of the brain cells containing some of those memories have died, which is normal, especially at my age.

Right after I was fired as a science teacher in high school for what everyone told me was a bogus reason but no one would tell me the true reason, telling me I could have litigated and they didn't want to be part of that litigation because then they would lose their jobs for telling me that, I quickly found out no one in town would hire me because, with a masters degree, I was "over qualified" (maybe) so I realized I had to start my own business but didn't have much seed capital.

I figured the Internet was the best place for me to make money in this small town so I got a book and started teaching myself html coding. This site was the first site I created, then I created a Coach Carl site and began growing it to make money coaching over the Internet, while writing my e-book, "A Better Way To Train", which I posted on my Coach Carl site and it quickly started making me a little money. I also started making the weekly meetings for the local Chamber of Commerce, with the person who worked for the county for developing financial opportunities for the county, which provided me with marketing information and contacts, I consulted with some locals for business management, I managed a couple of sites for a few businesses, and I was researching the feasibility of running one or more bicycle races here to make more money.

I was busy, things were looking good and growing, and I didn't have much time to write for this site, as you can tell by seeing how few essays I wrote in the early years. My research showed that, if I based my primary market for my long dreamed of velodrome on the El Paso/Juarez area, where there were more than 2 million people just 1.5 hours away, the velodrome could work as long as my athletic programming was based mostly on their favored activities, which I already knew about.

You have to understand that the most popular sports in Mexico are soccer, bicycle racing, team handball, and other more European sports, which I built my velodrome around.

My goal was to have a business already designed so that, when God opened the door for me, I could hit the ground running and not have to waste any of my time left on this planet researching for a few years to design a business to run with. I was being efficient with what time I had left. (Yeah, I know, am also an efficiency nut.)

Therefore, I began designing my advanced velodrome, getting quotes, found land that had just gone up for sale by the owner (and is still for sale two decades later), and I could even still regularly ride my bicycle around the area on 50 to 80 mile rides, while looking for other opportunities. I found an area off the beaten trail where they were selling 10 acre lots with a well, septic tank, gas, electricity, and a paved access road for less than $30K. So I started designing the little 4 bedroom home with a garage and small workshop I told you about before because it doesn't take much to make me happy. I don't need some big mansion.

I wasn't getting rich but things were doing well and getting better with my health slowly failing but I was still mostly functional. It was promising and I just figured that any week or month I would find out what was wrong with me, we would do something, I would get my health back and be doing even better, you know, hit ye ole ground running thingy. It was an increasingly promising time for me with opportunity around every corner.

Keep in mind that I didn't yet know most of what God has shown me but I did know He was going to bring my future wife to me, you know, maybe next week or next month, and I was just working my butt off and enjoying it. Hey, I'm a workaholic and enjoy it.

When I started designing my solar envelope house, God started nagging at me a number of times a day, "Dream your best dream and I will do better" about my house. I didn't want better because I already knew about the cost of ownership and was happier with less so I could spend my time and money doing other things than maintaining a big home.

The time and money you spend on one thing, you don't get to spend on other things. It is called opportunity cost.

I am an outdoor sports guy who doesn't want to spend much of my time at home. I would much rather be out bicycling, cross country skiing, hiking, camping, running a business, or something else than just hanging around a big palace being bored to death by stupid TV and movie shows.

I quickly finished designing the little solar envelope home I wanted, was still researching and designing my velodrome, and God continued to pester me with, "Dream your best dream you can and I will do better" and told me that, when He brought my wife to me, it would also include 3 of her kids, her mother, and she and I would have a kid so I decided to design a slightly larger solar Spanish Hacienda style house, you know, where the house is built around a solar courtyard.

Yes, I enjoyed engineering and solar engineering in college.

While I was researching and designing that house, God persisted in pushing me to, "Dream the best dream you can and I will do better" but I still didn't want to do better; I wanted small, simple, and easy to care for because I don't want to be a slave to my home.

It didn't take long to finish designing that home because all I had to do was redesign the house around a solar court yard, add a few bedrooms and add some other things I thought my family would enjoy like an arts and crafts studio...and God persisted in telling me, "Dream the best dream you can and I will do better" AND he reminded me that, when I was a kid in the 50s, I enjoyed watching Robin Hood TV shows and thought it would be cool to live in a castle so I decided, for fun and to appease God, to design a small castle, while still doing everything else I was doing, but I didn't want a castle like the rest of the castles because they were almost all bedrooms, bathrooms, living quarters, and some military stuff tossed in. Boring!!!

If I was going to design a castle, it has to be based on function, family, and fun, with the function including home schooling for my children, the way I was trained to design athletic facilities for universities. It was going to be MY castle done MY way. I also knew that a castle of any size would require a full time staff to clean and maintain it and the design had to include that. So I started researching different castles from all over the world, while thinking about different things I would want in my castle.

Note that, as soon as I started designing my castle, God stopped pushing me to dream bigger AND He showed me the land where He wanted me to build it and that land is still available two decades later. Gee, what a coincidence.

God likes doing big miracles because He is a big God.

The first thing I had to decide on was the type of castle and most castles look like Disney castles with lots of cool looking tall, skinny towers, in which, you can't build crap except bedrooms. I quickly realized that, to get the most per square foot from my castle, it had to be symmetrical or either square or rectangular (it is kind of hard to fit a swimming pool in one of those cool looking tall, skinny towers) and I found I like the look of the old Spanish/Moorish style castles with no windows on the outside and it being built around a solar court yard or bailey with geothermal heating, cooling, and engergy. I also studied castle terminologies, structures, and functions, you know, like draw bridges and gate houses.

I also decided that every room had to be as multifunctional as possible so we could get the maximum potential usage out of every room and facility, you know, the way I am trained to design facilities for a university. No wasted space, baby. This baby was going to take some time to design...and be fun.

Then God reminded me that the one thing I missed most since leaving college was having a gym to exercise and play in so I decided to have a small family gym and use its size for establishing the overall size and design of the castle. You know, keep it simple. I based my gym on the size of a college basketball court plus 3 to 5 feet all of the way around it for safety and to make it 3 stories high because the ball hitting the ceiling during volleyball sucks.

I placed that gym on the south side of the square castle with the castle facing west towards the paved access road and the length of the gym was the size of the 4 sides for my square solar bailey. That left gaps in all 4 corners so I just extended the outside walls of the castle until all 4 walls met in the corners and used those meeting points as the centers for my drum towers with a 25 foot radius each drum tower and that, in a nutshell, was the starting point for my castle, which left me with a medium size castle and lots of space to fill with fun stuff, lots of fun stuff. It took me a few years of research and designing to fill that castle with fun stuff for me, my wife, and my brats.

I remember the day, after I had finished designing both my velodrome and castle at the same time (gee, what a coincidence), when I sat there, just having reviewed both designs, having priced it all out and padded the pricing to make sure I had covered everything plus anything else I might have forgotten plus potential inflation, and I was very pleased with what I had done and couldn't think of anything else I wanted and could add to them. It was all done.

I had padded the budget for both plus 25% for contingency and then another 35% of all of that for investments to generate revenues to make sure I could keep everything, you know, ye ole cost of ownership thingy, at a total budget of $10 million, I happily leaned back a little and said, "If God gives me $10 million, I'll do it." This was by about 2004.

Then I put that aside and started working on other smaller ideas, you know, just in case I never got the $10 million. The latter research resulted in me designing about 100 different potential businesses of varying sizes, the $2 million sailboat, hot rodding my VW Bus, building a 32 Ford Roadster kit, and other stuff and lasted until I got so sick I couldn't even research anymore and my short term memory got really bad so that I could barely remember anything from day to day, which was by about 2008.

You will notice that I only wrote 22 essays during 2009, when I was at my worst. I have written more essays than that in just one month a number of times since I first started getting tests run, started treatments for different things, and gradually started recovering. It was a living hell I have told you about before.

Now you have to understand that I had forgotten about most of what I had done with my research and designing but I had backed all of that up on several CDs and memory sticks so the information is still there, just not available in my head.

Keeping that in mind, it was during this latter time that God let me know about the attempts on my life, my wife coming to me to marry me, Chicago being nuked, and other stuff but I still had not been able to connect enough dots to figure out the time line for all of that. I was just getting bits and pieces that would take me years to connect together and I was also learning to only go with what God taught me and not assume anything, which will get you in trouble.

During that time, God made it known to me that, following the first attempt on my life, He would give me enough money that, after I paid the taxes and my school loans, I would have over $2 million but I didn't know how much over $2 million so I just assumed the $2 million to play it safe. It wasn't enough to build my velodrome and He didn't tell me what to do with the money so I began trying to figure out what I should spend the money on, you know, like building a house for my family and starting a small business fromm one of those I had already designed, you know, ye ole hit the ground running thingy.

After a few months of working on that, I couldn't spend even one million dollars because I really don't want much to be happy and decided to just invest the rest for income. Then I started wondering and praying about what God wanted me to spend it on.

That was when I got the surprise of my life because God told me to build the $2 million sailboat, hot rod my VW Bus, and build the 32 Ford Roadster with me knowing that wouldn't leave me with any cost of ownership. I knew that, if I built that stuff, I would have to blindly believe in Him to provide more money to cover the cost of ownership so I just accepted His will.

It wasn't until weeks after I had blindly accepted God's will that He reminded me that, while I was designing the boat, I had found out about the industry where travel agents book places on boats for one and two week vacations that would pay for the cost of ownership and a two person crew to sail it for me or I could save that money by sailing the boat myself. At least that problem was solved, after blindly believing in and trusting God.

Are you getting the idea of how God works yet?

You have to trust and believe and then God will take care of it. It really helps build your faith.

It was a few years later that God gave me the vision about my future wife and her best friend, a blonde, coming down to meet with me to make arrangements for our marriage that, after she left to return home to prepare for the wedding on the next day, I was to go on the Internet and God would show me how to quickly make $10 million...without Him telling me what to spend the money on and having learned from the $2 million thingy, I asked Him and waited to find out from Him what to spend it on. I figured it was for the velodrome and nice home but that wouldn't cover the $10 million and I had FORGOTTEN about the castle thingy. I guess it wasn't that important to me and I had been ill.

That is when God reminded me that I had said that, "If God gave me $10 million, I would build the velodrome and castle." Oops!

The lesson I got from that is, be careful what you say because, if you say anything like, "If God does something, you will do something", you are offering God a potential contract and, if He accepts the contract (He may not) it becomes a binding contract and you MUST keep your end of that contract.

So, be very CAREFUL what you say, even to yourself, because you could be offering God a contract that you may change your mind about and still have to keep 5, 10, or 20 years later.

Therefore, when God gives me that money, I MUST use it to 1) build the velodrome I designed, 2) build the castle I designed and forgot about (I guess it really wasn't that important to me), and 3) save $2 million for investment but I didn't know what kind of investment but knew God would show me later and sometime later, He did show me what He wants me to invest that money in. This is all because God had accepted the contract I had unknowingly offered Him.

Both of these cases were God testing me and teaching about spending HIS money He gives us the way HE wants us to spend it regardless of how we think it should be spent, in other words, being responsible stewards with God's money.

It was some time after that when God finally revealed to me that the reason He is making me marry this young woman is Him putting together a team, using part of that money He will give me, to help rebuild our economy by providing jobs for peolpe following this current war the lefties are forcing on us.

God has taught me a lot in the last 70+ years and is increasingly using that to help you. That is the nutshell version of a few of things that I have been through in the last almost three quarters of a century.

Keep in mind that there are still many things I cannot share with you yet for various reasons and, when I do, you will understand why. There has to be a very boring book or movie in this.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

You better....