Jane and I met in Dec 1986 at a Star Trek fan club Christmas Party in Swansea, IL. The Air Force had transferred me to Scott AFB in Oct of that year. In Feb 1987 she moved to San Diego and we kept loose track of each other through a mutual friend. Jane and I eventually got together in Las Vegas, NV in 1993, while I was stationed at Nellis AFB. We were married Jan. 15th, 1994.
We moved to Burns Flat, Ok in Mar of 2005 from Bozeman, Mt. If you want to see where that is check a map of Ok and then look a the western part of the state. Of course you'll have to zoom in to actually find Burns Flat. I currently have two dogs, Rosie, a Heinz 57, that my son-law dropped off as he was moving to Ohio in 2019 and Momo, a Chihuahua that I got from some friends.
We have had other dogs over the years since we got married, but they have all gone to run and play in God's yard on the other side of the rainbow bridge. Zuki, a Pomeranian we were given by a friend in North Carolina, and Boo (our Lab/Border Collie mix, can we say 'neurotic water dog'?). She got her name from the girl in Monsters, Inc. We were trying to think of a name for her and we just happened to be watching the movie. We looked at the dog, called her Boo and she looked up at us as if to say "Well you finally figured out my name!" We had two other dogs, besides Boo, when we first moved here, Wolfie, aka the Wolfinator, (an overly testosteroned Pomeranian who thought he was a Doberman) and Dancer our thick headed Chow Chow.
Jane Phares
My wife Jane was a wonderful lady who was full of life. Unfortunately she passed away the 5th of July 2022. I know she is no longer in any pain, though I miss her very much and always will, she was my soul mate. I know she's in Heaven watching over me and shaking her head at times and wondering what in the hell I'm doing, but God is telling her that everything is okay. Of course she's playing with all our dogs that are so happy to see her again. I also know she is bending God's ear with all the questions she has in that 55 gallon drum, which was a suggestion from a friend of ours, Mike Smith, who was the pastor at the church we joined when we first got here.
She enjoyed dancing, theatre, ballet and music (just about all kinds, except rap), especially Neil Diamond. In fact we drove from Las Vegas to Reno, in Aug 1996, to see him in concert, taking my daughters along to their first concert. I hadn't bought tickets before we drove up, but I was hoping that there might be some left when we got there. Needless to say Jane was not very happy with me. Thankfully for me, we were able to get tickets at the box office and they were excellent tickets. We saw him again in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand in Dec of 96, then in Sep of 99 in Billings, Montana and again in 2003 and most recently in Oklahoma City in Oct of 08. We had tickets to go see him in concert Apr 16th, 2017 in Oklahoma City, as part of his 50th anniversary tour, but Jane wasn't feeling well, so we didn't go. Then in Jan 2018 he announced his retirement due to being diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. After hearing that news Jane felt really bad about missing his concert
Some of her favorite movies were: Star Wars (All 9 of them, of course the original trilogy is still the better group of movies. The sequel trilogy is good and we can forget the prequel trilogy), The Fifth Element (which she refered to as "Mul-ti-pass"), Titanic, The Man in the Iron Mask, Men in Black, Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Monsters, Inc., all the Harry Potter movies, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (we read the Trilogy together after seeing the movies and she understood why I like it so much), Sweet Home Alabama, Rock My World, Shall We Dance, Strictly Ballroom, Braveheart (though the costuming is wrong, the Scots weren't wearing kilts yet), the BBC version of Ivanhoe and A Knights Tale (or as she likes to call it 'naked Chaucer', the costuming on the principles is horrendous but everybody else is correct for the time period) and Timeline (which she says the costuming for the 1300's is correct).
On television she watched: Hawaii 5-0, Elementary, Dancing With the Stars, Scorpion, Castle, The Biggest Loser, The Big Bang Theory, Royal Pains, Dr. Who on BBC America, Mike & Molly, Two Broke Girls, The Good Wife and Defiance on the SyFy channel. Then there's also the Science Channel, TLC, Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.
She also enjoyed reading some science fiction and fantasy. One of her favorite books was Mists of Avalon. Her favorite author is Richard Bach (I'm sure you know he doesn't write science fiction), her favorite book by him is Illusions. She also studied the various religions of the world and found the psychology of their peoples fascinating. She greatly admired the Dali Lama and hoped that Tibet would be a free and independent country again some day.
She tolerated computers (Macintoshes anyway, she had absolutely no use for Winblows). When we were first married her attitude was that computers were good for paper weights, lawn ornaments, boat anchors, book ends, doorstops and the like. It took me about a year, and an Apple IIGS (because she refused to touch the Apple IIc I also had at that time), to convince her they were good for other things. When she was first learning to use the IIGS I got calls from her at work threatening to throw the computer out the window because it wasn't doing what she wanted it to. I'd talk her through the problem and she'd learn to use the computer. When we got our first Macintosh, a Performa 6115CD, she enjoyed using it. Since then she's had a couple iBooks (one of which we sent to a friend when she started college), a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, and now a new MacBook Air. We got the MacBook Pro because she missed the built in DVD/CD ROM drive, but she switched back to the MacBook Air because it was lighter and easier on her arthritis when she picked it up. She used the computer like a telephone, using Yahoo Messenger, Skype and Facebook to stay in touch with friends. She also liked to cruise the Web, in fact, when I was still in th Air Force, she eventually had to start limiting her time online (using a music cd in the cd drive of the Performa) to regulate how long she was online. Due to once finding someone's doctoral thesis about King Arthur online and by the time she was done reading it I was coming home from work (6 hours had vanished that quickly thanks to the thesis and links from it to other Arthurian sites). Of course the computer was a practical thing to her, so she couldn't understand why I like to play games on it. She graduated from SWOSU (South Western Oklahoma State University) with a BS in Health Sciences, with a minor in Chemistry in '09.
She was also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group that recreates the Middle Ages from 600 to 1650 AD. Her personna in the SCA was Rowena of Falkirk. She enjoyed dancing, archery and other medieval arts. In fact, while we were living in Belleville, Il. she made sure that we made it to every dance practice the Barony of Shattered Crystal had. She knew about the SCA for several years but only got active starting in about 1993, as part of the Shire of Shattered Crystal, now the Barony of Shattered Crystal.
Dean Phares
I'm Dean. I'm a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan. I enjoy reading science fiction, and some fantasy, and attending science fiction conventions. The best SF convention I've ever been to was the 1996 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles. Jane and I attended Archon 31 in St. Louis in Aug 2007. It's a local convention that was also the site of the NASFIC (North American Science Fiction Convention) which happens when the WorldCon is outside the US. We attended Archon again in Oct of 2011. I attended it again in Nov of 22. Ther are other Ok science fiction conventions that I will attend when I can.
On TV I enjoy: Star Trek. TOS, TNG, DS9 (though I didn't watch the final season or two. Didn't care about the Dominion War. Voyager (which I lost interest in (though I should give it another try). I watched the first season of Enterprise, Discovey was okay the first two seasons. Picard's first two seasons were not thast great but the 3rd was fantastic! Now they just need to give Star Trek:Legacy a green light. Star Trek Strange New Worlds is great! It's almost a throwback to the original series! I also like all the shows Jane liked.
Some of my favorite movies are: Armageddon, The Matrix (in my opinion they should have stopped after one movie), Contact, The Fifth Element, all of the Star Wars movies (though like Jane I prefer the original Trilogy to the Prequel Trilogy), The Man in the Iron Mask, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the 1950's original, not the remake), Forbidden Planet, all the Harry Potter movies, The Lord of the Rings trilogy (let's just say I've been waiting since 1978 for this set of movies, somebody had to make up for the poor attempt by Ralph Bakshi), Monsters, Inc. and Pushing Tin. That last one isn't science fiction or fantasy, but it does deal with a subject I know a lot about: air traffic control. When it comes to what it's like working aircraft in a radar environment, this movie comes the closest to getting it right (they also do a good job of showing what air traffic controllers egos are like, after all they tell pilots where to go ;-) ).
Another of my favorite pastimes is playing games on computers and console systems. My personal choice of computers is, of course, the company that truly started the "PC" (personal computer) revolution, Apple Inc. (was there ever any doubt?). Several famous people, from Tim Allen to Douglas Adams to Tom Clancy, use Apple's Macintosh. The U. S. Army has switched their main web server from a Windows NT platform to a Macintosh running Webstar and the Department of Homeland Security also switched to using Macintoshes according to Tidbits electronic Macintosh newsletter. I got interested in computers back in 1980 (the 'Computer Dark Ages'). My first computer was a Trash-80 (Radio Shack TRS-80) Model I Level II computer, which had 16k of memory and a cassette tape drive! In 1981 a friend told me about Apple and convinced me to buy an Apple II+, which had a disk drive and 48k of memory (what a huge step up that amount of memory seemed back then), since the computer and disk drive cost $1500 I didn't have the money for a monitor so I had to buy a video adapter to use my color TV as a Monitor! After that I progressed on to an Apple IIe system(128k of memory), //c system(640k of memory) and then IIGS system(4MB). Evntually gave away the IIe and //c but hung onto the GS.
I finally switched over to the Macintosh platform in 1996 starting with a Performa 6115CD (16MB of memory), then a G3/300 (128MB of memory), a G4/450 (512MB of memory, which I upgrade to 640MB of memory using memory from the G3), a Mac Mini G4/1.42 GHz (512 MB of Memory), an iBook (512MB of Memory), a Macbook Air Intel/1.6 GHz (2 GB of Memory), it was Jane's until she got the Macbook Pro Intel/2.16 GHz (2GB of Memory), I got the Macbook Pro when she got the new Macbook Air. Now I have a new Macbook Pro i7 Quad Core/2.2 GHz (16GB of Memory!!!). Now that the Mac OS and Windows are operating on the same hardware (Intel Processors) it is even easier to demonstrate how superior the Mac OS is to Windows!
I managed to kill my original Apple IIGS in Jan of 98 and started playing Apple II games through emulators on my Macitosh. In Aug of 2006 I went retro by picking an Apple IIe system (128K) for $5 at an estate auction, which I eventually sold. Since then I've bought an Apple IIGS ROM 01(which now has 14MB of memory, thanks to buying an accelerator for it called the AppleSqueezer GS). Have an Apple IIe(128K) system again, along with a ROM 03 GS(8MB) that I got for free, in Sep of 22, from a gentleman in Ohio who was downsizing due to moving. Also had a //c system (128K) and through a little experimentation I have a 5" Playstation LCD display hooked up as a monitor, making it truly more portable than ever before, here are some picture of the //c hooked up to the LCD. I eventually replaced the original //c with a Apple //c+ (128k) that the Playstation LCD monitor can be hooked up to. Right now have it hooked up to a Dell monitor via an HDMI adapter. Playing Apple II games, either on an emulator on my MacBook Pro or the real hardware (the GS or the //c+) just seems a lot more fun than any Windows or Mac games.
When it comes to consoles I started back in the Dark Ages there as well. In 1979 I bought a Sears Video Arcade (the Sears version of the Atari VCS/2600) and a few games. Over the next year I bought several more games for it. Not long after I bought the Apple II+ I started comparing the look, playability and cost of games on the computer and the console. Since the price for games was pretty much the same I chose to give away the Sears Video Arcade and all the games I had for it, since the games on the II+ were so much better. So I managed to miss the 'video game crash' of 1983. For the next ten years I never even thought about video game consoles. After I got stationed at Nellis AFB, in Las Vegas, NV, in 1993, my older brother gave me a Sega Genesis console and a couple controllers. (Of course he got me hooked on video game consoles again with that system, I guess it was his way of paying me back for hooking him on them with the Sears video game console). The console needed to be fixed but it was easy to find a place to get it done. So then I started looking around for new or used games for it. When we were in living Bozeman I saw a used Nintendo 64 system for sale at a Hastings bookstore. Jane asked me if I wanted it and we eventually bought it. After a few months she got frustrated with the trouble I was having finding games for it so she asked if I wanted to get a new system.
I said yes and began checking out the specs on the Playstation 2, the XBox and Game Cube. I decided against the Game Cube right away because you couldn't use it to play DVD movies and I wanted a console that could. It came down to XBox and PlayStation 2. We bought the PS2 for two reasons 1) at the time (2002) only the PS2 would allow you to play DVD movies right out of the box, using the game controllers. Yes they had a DVD remote for it, that you had to buy, but that just added functionality. The XBox required you to spend additional money on the remote to 'unlock' the ability to watch DVD movies. 2) I really can't stand Microsnot. In Jan 2008 I picked up a PS3 through eBay, an original 60GB model (which let me play all my PS2 and PS1 games that I bought over the years). Since then I've gotten a PS3 that has 110MB hard drive (but lacks the ability to play PS2 games) and gave away the 60 GB model, I wasn't playing the PS2 games very often anymore anyway. About 3 years ago I bought a used PS4 Pro (Star Wars edition), which has a 1TB internal drive and will play 4K movies and games, had a 4TB drive hooked up to it. Picked up a brand new PS5, which I switched the 4TB drive over to, about 2 years ago. I've gone retro with an Atari Flashback 9 and a Legend Flashback, both of which have been modded to play other console system games. About two years ago also bought a used Sears Video Arcade (THE 2600 clone) and a cartridge for it called the Harmony Encore, that lets me play all the origian 2600 games plus new homebrew games.
From Jan 3rd of 1977 to Feb 1st of 1997 (just coincidentally Jane's birthday) I served in the U.S. Air Force (I was sworn into the inactive reserve in July of 76, right after graduating from high school. I was on a delayed enlistment waiting for a school date to become an air traffic controller). During my 20 year career I spent two tours of duty overseas in West Germany, a year in Florida, three years in California, five years in S. Illinois, a year in Alaska and four years in Nevada. I enjoyed my time in the Air Force, but it's nice to be a civilian again.
I'm also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and have been since November of 1985 when I attended a demo at Spangdahlem Air Base, West Germany. The group doing the demo was the Shire of Drachensheim. My SCA interests are Archery, Brewing, Vintning, and Dancing, not necessarily in that order. I received my Award of Arms (AOA) in July, A.S. XXV (1990) while residing in the Barony of Shattered Crystal (Belleville, IL.), in the MidRealm. In Nov, A.S. XXVI (1991) I received the MidRealm's Award of the Purple Fret for service performed for the Barony. In Dec, A.S. XXVII (1992) I received the MidRealm's Award of the Dragon's Barb for my work supporting, promoting, and marshaling archery. My persona in the Society is Magnus of Falkirk.
I have two daughters, Jennifer and Pat. Jennifer was born in 1985 in West Germany at the base hospital at Bitburg, AB. She spent some time in N. Calif, as part of the California Conservation Corp., working on different projects that she enjoyed. She's was in S. Calif, Apple Valley specifically, and got married Nov of 2009 to Donald Stegmann. In Apr of 2019 they moved from S. Calif to Ohio. Donald came through first, in Mar, and dropped off a dog we named Rosie (they had named her Victoria). Jennifer came through in Apr and I helped her drive the rest of the way to Ohio. She dropped me off at the airport in Colombus and I flew home. My daughter Pat (actually Christine Patience, but I call her Pat after my mother, whom her middle name comes from) was born at Scott AFB in Il in 1990. She is still living with her mother in Phoenix, Az. When I have the chance there will be a link here to pics of both of them.
