Our Move to Golden Valley, Arizona

We were both happy members of the rat race when the 1990's started - Benney as a production supervisor in an electronics factory and Linda as an RN in a local hospital. We were making payments on a nice 4 bedroom house in NW Austin, Texas, driving newer automobiles and putting aside money in retirement accounts. As I said, satisified rats. Then things changed. Benney's job went away, thanks to new management where he worked, and Linda hurt her back which forced her to give up active Labor & Delivery nursing. By the end of 1996 we had made some life changing decisions...

Foremost among those decisions was to move away from Austin - move out of the city, live in the country and convert the equity we had in our Austin home to a paid-for dwelling... somewhere. We accomplished that by moving to Golden Valley, Arizona. We sold our home in Austin, bought some raw land in Golden Valley and set up a used double-wide mobile home on the property. So our primary goal was accomplished.

We were not old enough to draw social security, so we needed some source of income to get us through. Since Golden Valley is in a fairly poor section of a fairly poor state, there wasn't much available - locally - in the way of employment. And we didn't want to work for anyone else, anyway: our goal was to be self-employed. The most likely way to achieve that was through selling on eBay... we thought. We bought some thing on eBay (mostly pamphlets/e-books about eBay), and did more research on selling on eBay. We decided our first step should be to learn HTML - the best way to write effective ads for eBay. To that end we both went through Joe Barta's basic HTML tutorial, bought some books on HTML and started a project to put into practice our newfound knowledge.

Our Move to Golden Valley was that first HTML project.

It was written in early 1999 and we were rank beginners, so the HTML coding is pretty dated now. But as a project, it has held up surprisingly well. It tells the story we wanted to tell and it still works on all browsers, for now, so we're going to leave it as-is until that's no longer true. We've updated some links after moving it here, but the majority of what you see is the original.