I was born in 1951 , went to high school in the suburbs of Boston, MA and went to college at the University of Massachusetts.  I studied electrical engineering and was an honors student but left school in my third year. I needed to get a better sense of who I was and why I was here on good ol' planet Earth. During the next 10 years, I traveled, got involved with political activism and made a living in the construction business with a skilled trade I had picked up along the way. In the early 1980’s I designed, and with my own two hands, I  built the home shown in the fourmileisland.com website. The house was-- in a way--the materialization of the answers to my earlier questions about who I was and why I was here.  I expanded my construction business in the early 1990’s and leveraged emerging computer technologies to make it more successful and profitable. I was able to create a custom estimating program, automate materials ordering and link accounting and administrative tasks such as proposals, contracts and payroll into an efficient system. I even created a rudimentary wide area network and trained estimators who worked for me to use computers, input into the estimating program and have easy access to documents. I have loved computers since the days when I learned the Fortran programming language in engineering school. The business grew until we were doing almost a million dollars a year in sales . I finally got worn out running the business and wound it down in the late 1990’s. Since then, I finished the forest management work on my woodland and found the time to build this website. Over the years the gardens have grown, and now, it is like paradise here. I open my house once a year in the National Tour of Solar Homes , which is presented by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA).