Last updated September 30, 1997
Wow, I hadn't realized how long it'd been since I updated this thing! Someone asked me if I'd noticed Summer had finally happened.. haha.. I had a reference to Springtime here yet. Down toward the bottom third of this page, I've also started adding links to some of my neighboring little businesses in the South James Street area in Ludington. If it was a big city, it'd be Old Town. I've also added links to the homepages of a couple friends of mine from our local BBS.
I hope this page is still a fairly fast-loading one for you, because I know how much I DON'T like to go to a web page and then have to wait till the coffee gets cold before I can see what it's all about. Half of the fun of the Web is finding pages that don't make you wait forever! I'm in a good position to judge that, since I'm still using a 14.4 modem.... I bought a new hot one, but haven't quite gotten it to work yet. (And as of today, still can't.. man, whoever came up with MWAV modem/sound card combos should be taken out and.. well, you get the idea. I was just dumb enough to buy it, and not smart enough to return it right away.
Since I wrote that paragraph above, my birthday came and went, and on that fateful day, lo and behold, when I left work to go home, guess what was laying on the windshield of my car, obstructing my view? A shiny fresh 33.6 modem, new in the box! Wow... I guess I did someone right! I put that in Frankenputer, the 686 screamer at home. Now, if I could only trip over some spare change, and get one like it for my shop too!

As you can see...  I know enough about computers to run one,

but they still seem to get the jump on me now and then... (Grinning).

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!"   --  Hunter S. Thompson
I'm still selling off some of my various collections. I started with guns and things like that, If you're interested in firearms from basic hunting to rare collectibles, click here. 
Once I figure out how to digitize some pictures from my Vidcam into GIF or JPG format, I'll start in on some of the other stuff, like antiques and other collectibles. I really went overboard on some of my collections over the years, and right now I'd rather have a few dollars in my pocket than quite as many nice objects. Want a laugh? I borrowed a digital camera from my friend Flipper last weekend, spent some time getting images of various stuff.. and it turns out for one reason or another, it won't download anything to this computer or the one at the shop. Man.. I just don't seem to have much luck with this stuff. Someday, I'll have some pics for you, honest... just not right away, I guess.
(Update notice! I spent the evening of September 29 shooting digital pics of my stuff, by tonight or tomorrow I'll be starting to upload them!)
Hey, does anyone have any interest in older chemical laboratory glassware? I have everything from test tubes to hand-blown glass distillation units, a few nifty retorts, pipettes, graduated columns, and a lot of other stuff in between. (Like a really OLD centrifuge, the two-test-tube type... needs to be worked on, runs fine but if you leave it running, begins to make a rather nasty odor!) Again, I've been collecting this sorta stuff for years, and have a ton of it. Email me if you want to know more about it, ok?
I also have some brand new, in-the-box slot racing cars, from Strombecker's last gasp at making world-class stuff, from the sixties, and a few other slot racing devices and miscellaneous. Again, email me if you want to know more about it.

Anyway, howdy! 
Some of you may know me, but I'm sure most of you don't. My full name is Leland Erhardt Edmund Peters, but most people just call me Lee. That's a lot less work, isn't it?
I've been a member of Luma, the Mason County Library BBS, for a little over a year. Check it out!

Oh, by the way, here's a couple people I know from LUMA who are online a lot, my friend Unicorn and my buddy Asrai, who happens to be a faery.

I've seen it grow in that short time from 3 or 4 local lines to the streamlined, many-modem'ed, net-connected beauty it has become. Bob Dickson, our County Librarian and LUMA's Sysop, deserves a lot of praise for all the hours he's spent building this system! To quote some of our younger users here, It Rocks! IMHO, it's far superior to any BBS I've ever visited.  If you have time, go there using the link above, and if you have 3 megs of HD space, download the WorldGroup client/server software it runs best on.. then drop in and enjoy!  You can also telnet in, if you have a telnet program in your computer.

I've made a number of friends here, and learned a lot I may never have learned anywhere else. 
I think a BBS is probably the best place to learn how to get around in the Virtual World. Those who buy a computer, then immediately jump into the Internet, seem to have a lot less fun than the ones that made a slow start, like I did. 
Me? Did someone say they actually wanted to hear about me? You can click here to get a little idea of my current world...
I was raised in a rather unusual household. Click here to get an idea of the different sort of household I was raised in...
I was the youngest of three brothers. 
Because our parents spent evenings reading to us, and showing us how the English language worked, all of us were able to read little kids' books before we ever set foot in kindergarten, and to this day, we all seem to be more wrapped up in learning new things than in repeating something we've done before. Truly, it didn't help our money-making abilities, but I don't think any of us has ever been bored in our lives.
We always had something to do, whether it was reading, building, doing, making, or discovering. 
While the neighbor kids were playing with plastic swords, we were making our own real ones, hammering away at the red-hot steel in the forge. A different sort of upbringing. 

Bicycles have been my life. 
I was working in a bicycle shop in 1965, when I was 14, and opened my own shop about 1972.  It's an interesting occupation, and I've learned about a lot more than bicycles since I've been involved in it. It's been my only real occupation since then, and although I've never gotten rich, I've done things I never thought I ever could. I've only started to set up links to neat bicycle places on the net, but here are a couple of the more interesting ones. Check them out!
I have my shop in the older part of downtown, on South James Street. Most of the buildings down this way are older, and it's an interesting neighborhood. Lots of little businesses locate down this way, mostly because the rent for a storefront is a little less expensive than it is on the main street, but also because the area has a distinct personality that invites people with an idea to jump in and see if it works! One of the latest businesses to locate here is my friend Jeff Battice, with his Fire Trail Native American Art shop. Check him out!
Piszczek's Paint and Glass is another place I'll recommend, for a lot more than just what the name implies.

I only started using computers of the modern variety in fall of 1992, although I studied computer science in Chicago in 1969-70.
That was a rather different sort of a beast, however...
I was professionally trained at great expense to be a slave to a roomful of noisy machinery that needed a hundred pounds of punchcards fed to it just to input about as much data as one floppy disk of today holds. That just wasn't quite as glamorous as I'd hoped, and I walked away from the whole thing quite early. Fortunately, times have changed quite a bit since then!
I got into modern computers a few years ago because of the bicycle shop. Since I claimed a few paragraphs ago that I didn't like slow-loading web pages, though, I'm going to stick most of the story on another page. But for the rather interesting (or comical, depending on how you look at it) story of how I got into computers, click here.

Did you ever get my impression?

That at times our dear lil' PC's would just rather get it over with?


If you must tell me what a crude, amateurish piece of wasted time and effort this pathetic little page is, or if you want to compliment me on what an absolute genius I am (yes, slightly tongue in cheek, I admit), or if you just want to say Hi, or want to give me some constructive ideas about things you think I should be doing but am too ignorant to know about, feel free to email me and let me know. The red thingie down below, eating letters, is also known as a mailbox, just click on it...