Owen Krout
Well-known member
Just joined the forum and will be posting from Panjin, Liaoning Province, China at the present.
I have recently started on disability retirement and at this posting am living with my Chinese wife and daughter in Panjin. Benefits require me to be present in the US for at least half the year for the next couple of years, so will be back and forth between here and Kansas City, KS as well as some traveling in the US and Canada.
I was teaching spoken English at the Shenyang Aerospace University until the Chinese government decided that I was too old for another work visa.
I quickly found I needed a hobby to keep me occupied, especially while in China and to keep me from driving the wife nuts. I dabbled at a return to an old interest in astro-photography but soon decided that it was too rich for my means. Same went for a home machine shop, besides the lack of anywhere to put it here. (I am also retired as a Certified Manufacturing Engineer and having taught Engineering Technology in higher education in the US) Reaching way back to having spent my formative years in a rather isolated area in the mountains of Pennsylvania, I found a return to bird watching/photography to be perfect. Investment is relatively low - a good digital camera - a telephoto and a good field guide or two - and it presents a real challenge in identifying birds that are often totally new to me. Besides the exercise is good therapy for my arthritis.
The locals here in Panjin eyed me with obvious suspicion at first and now a only mildly concealed conviction that I am obviously more than a little nuts. The local police followed me at a discrete distance for almost an hour one day until it finally got boring enough that they gave up and drove on past.
I have recently started on disability retirement and at this posting am living with my Chinese wife and daughter in Panjin. Benefits require me to be present in the US for at least half the year for the next couple of years, so will be back and forth between here and Kansas City, KS as well as some traveling in the US and Canada.
I was teaching spoken English at the Shenyang Aerospace University until the Chinese government decided that I was too old for another work visa.
I quickly found I needed a hobby to keep me occupied, especially while in China and to keep me from driving the wife nuts. I dabbled at a return to an old interest in astro-photography but soon decided that it was too rich for my means. Same went for a home machine shop, besides the lack of anywhere to put it here. (I am also retired as a Certified Manufacturing Engineer and having taught Engineering Technology in higher education in the US) Reaching way back to having spent my formative years in a rather isolated area in the mountains of Pennsylvania, I found a return to bird watching/photography to be perfect. Investment is relatively low - a good digital camera - a telephoto and a good field guide or two - and it presents a real challenge in identifying birds that are often totally new to me. Besides the exercise is good therapy for my arthritis.
The locals here in Panjin eyed me with obvious suspicion at first and now a only mildly concealed conviction that I am obviously more than a little nuts. The local police followed me at a discrete distance for almost an hour one day until it finally got boring enough that they gave up and drove on past.