I spent the morning studying animal anatomy and physiology.  Once I retire from engineering, I hope to become a vet tech for wild animals.  These classes will take a long time since I am working full time, but at least I can pay for them while earning money from work.  Also, because I work full time and support my family, I am taking the classes from an online (and accredited) school, Penn Foster.  So far, the classes are good.  Biology has changed a lot since I took it in high school!  Back then, everything was taxonomy.  Now it’s a lot about genetics.

The big time-crunch will be when I need to take my internships.  Two hundred hours, then 400 hours in clinical settings.

So, what about engineering?  I love engineering!  I’ve gotten to travel the world, do cool stuff like dive in NASA’s neutral buoyancy facility, fly on the vomit comet, design cool experiments, and run really cool tests.  So, when I retire, I don’t want to “sit behind the geraniums” (a saying I heard in Germany).

I look at the next phase of my life as being about cats and nature.