Hello, Steemit. It's me, Jacob.

Well... hello, Steemit.
I made this account some time ago and and just never got around to posting anything. I'm a 30-something electrical engineer, married, and father of two kids (almost 5-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son) with my wife of eight years. We're also a 'foster family', caring for kids who are, for one reason or another, not currently with their parents. I was born and raised in Iowa, but dragged my wife out of the train wreck of a state that is Illinois (we met at Bradley University in Peoria, IL in 2005).

Here's me with our daughter nearly five years ago:

As a side business I raise honey bees. I sell both honey and mated queen bees seasonally. It started as a hobby, but has grown to a full blown part-time commitment. But I very much enjoy it. I've been at it for four years. My dad and grandfather kept bees from 1978 until sometime in the 1990s when a pesky little mite called varroa destructor made it particularly difficult to keep bees alive over the winter.

Here's some of my honey:

Some queens:

I took up queen rearing in my second year of beekeeping, but didn't really give it a strong go until the third year. I raised something like 50 queen that year, which was enough to fit my queen needs and sell a few excess queens locally. This year I ramped it up and probably reared somewhere between 150-175 queens. Seasonally, I have between 50 and 60 colonies going, many of those are mating colonies (small colonies who have the sole purpose of getting a queen mated, laying, and ready for sale). I just finished combining down for winter and will go into it with roughly 35 colonies. I'm sure I'll write more about bees at some point here, but for now that's more than enough.

In addition to work/family/bees, I also deer hunt. Primarily with a bow. I've been bow hunting for 20+ years now. I also fish (bass and walleye mostly), but that's really taken a backseat to my family and other hobbies at this point.

I play around with cryptocurrencies, but I am an absolute novice. I'm becoming gifted at slowly growing some Bitcoin trading on altcoin markets and then giving about half of it back in one bad trade. Opps.

Anyway, that about rounds me out. I don't sleep too much, going to bed before midnight is rare. I try to read books daily, usually a mix between fiction and non-fiction. Some of my favorite fiction titles are George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones) and Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Recently finished non-fiction include Reza Aslan's ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Most recently, I've started slogging my way through the Bible. Reading the Bible as an adult has been, to say the least, eye opening. More on that in another post at a later date, I'm sure.

Thanks for checking out my post, hope you have a wonderful day!

Jacob