My name is Marty Walsh. I was born and raised in New York City, but please don't hold that against me.  I'm a product of the 'sex, drugs and rock-n-roll' era of the sixties and seventies. Living through that period in New York City was certainly interesting, at least the parts I remember.  At 17, I enlisted in the Air Force, to both avoid the draft and to better my chances of survival by escaping the streets of New York. I had hoped to see the world while in the Air Force, but they had other plans for me.  I got to see San Antonio Texas, Biloxi Mississippi, and finally Rapid City South Dakota.  With a specialty in ground radio communications, they decided I was best serving them on Minute Man II missile sites, repairing the equipment at the remote missile silos.  Honorably discharged, I began working as a laborer, installing car stereos systems and alarms.  Realizing that this was taking me nowhere, I decided to go to college and make something of myself.

Availing myself of the 'real' G.I. Bill they offered back then, and working full-time in a lumber yard, I attended the City College of New York School of Engineering.  I was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (cum laude, none-the-less!).  On my way to my Masters degree, I was enlisted by the college to help teach courses in micro-computers, which I did for a while.  I was then offered a position with the main computer center for the university system, working on the network that connected the 13 colleges throughout the city.  I stayed with the university computer center until I was offered a position with a software vendor that sold software to the universities.  Accepting this position, I moved from New York to Northern Virginia, where the vendor's nearest office was located.  Quickly realizing I didn't care for the area, I moved to Scottsdale Arizona and tele-commuted for the same software company.  (This was well before tele-commuting was the recognized practice it is today.)  I was briefly married during this period, but we won't get into that here.  Suffice it to say that I was no longer married by the next paragraph.

I was working from home, on call for over-seas clients on a 24/7 basis.  I needed a hobby, so I purchased a Shopsmith Model 510 combination tool and decided to get serious about wood-working, something I had only dabbled in before.  It wasn't long before I realized I had found something I had a true passion for.  After a few years of learning, I hooked up with a local businessman who built, sold and maintained large-scale aquariums.  I not only built the custom cabinetry for his clients, I also built all the cabinetry and counters for his storefront operation.  I was spending as much time doing wood-working as I was on my full-time software career.

My tele-commuting career came to an abrupt halt when my company told me that they were offering me a corporate relocation to (of all places) Northern Virginia.  If I didn't accept their offer, I was going to be let go.  Well, I had ten years with the company and didn't really want to start over with a new company, so I took the relocation and moved back to Northern Virginia.  In less than a year, I realized I hated the new position they had offered me so I quit and went to work for one of their competitors, one of the largest software companies in the world.

My new position required a lot of traveling which prevented me from setting my woodworking shop back up, at least to the point where I could take on any serious work.  Eventually my traveling decreased and I met a wonderful woman named Denise, who inspired me to get my shop going again.  With her help, I set up the shop you can see in the Work Shop section of this site.  In fact, you can even see Denise using my dedicated mortising machine in one of the pictures.  It's so nice to have a woman who's not only supportive of my passion, but also shares it.  I'm a lucky man indeed!

In April of 2005, I was faced with being re-invented by the large software corporation I was working for.  Denise and I were pretty disgusted with the urban 'sprawl and crawl' that is so pervasive in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area, so I decided to "retire", we both decided to sell our homes and we moved to Southern Georgia and bought a beautiful home on almost ten acres.  Now all we need is for me to complete the work shop that you can watch evolve on this site. I hope to be back to purveying my wooden creations shortly.

Thanks for visiting.  If you've read this far, you should come back occasionally to see how we're doing.

- Marty n Denise -