Al Magnus
 
I'm not usually too much into talking about myself, but Doug asked me to introduce myself.
About Me
Not much to say about me.

I have lived most of my life, ouside of a couple of years in my youth, in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I like most modellers my age got into the hobby when quite young, but then dropped from the hobby as girls, getting a higher education, marriage and raising a family came to put things on the back burner.
(If you haven't guessed it by now, that's me to the left relaxing on the couch, wasting my time watching TV instead of building!)

I graduated from the University of Regina in 1979 with a B.Sc. in Computer Science. Back then computers were quite the thing but nowhere near as prevalent or as powerful as what we have today. The WWW had yet to be born.

I was lucky to be hired by a Provincial Crown Corporation straight out of Univerity and spent my years working for various area in the IT division. I held numerous positions over the years: COBOL programmer, Database Admin, Solaris Admin and finally came to my current position as a web server admin. After 29 years I'm retiring at the end of February 2009.
Family
As for my family I was most fortunate to find and marry Janice - my "life mate". Corny as that sounds it is true. For all of the idiosyncrasies I have exhibited over the years, she still remains true to me and is my best friend. We have two great children, a daughter & a son.

I enjoy sports, which is probably the biggest drain on my modelling outside of family matters. I love the Canadian Football League and am a big Saskatchewan Roughriders fan. During my modelling hiatus I played soccer and became a Liverpoool fan. I have returned to 5-pin bowling (a uniquely Canadian sport) and still love to golf.

But funny as it seems, me being Canadian and all, I'm not a real big fan of ice hockey. I know that it is the Canadian passtime, but hey, I guess I march to a different drummer. I do watch the odd game here and there - especially when the Canadian Juniors are playing and I like to watch the Spengler Cup in Switzerland - but that's about it for me and hockey.
Modeling
My modeling started in my pre-teens when I lived in Ontario. I loved reading history books on WW1 aviators. At this time I was in youth bowling and I discovered that the father of one of my bowling buddies built WW1 aircraft models. In their basement was a great model railroad setup, but my attention was drawn immediately to the model biplanes. They were beautiful! I was hooked then and there and wanted deperately to build models like his. Soon I was nagging my parents to drive me to the nearest souce of model kits at a pharmacy in the next town so I could spend most of my allowance on 1/72 scale aircraft. I loved those Revell kits: Fokkers, Nieuports, SPADs, Camels, Triplanes and so forth and was blown away by the Renwall Aeroskin kits when they showed up on the scene.

I continued my modeling into my early teens, but over time my focus had changed to Luftwaffe aircraft and finally to small scale AFVs. I even ventured into scratch building some armour. My first attempt was converting an Airfix Panther into a Jagdpanther. University basically killed my modeling, but to be honest I was about ready to give up the hobby anyway. My patience with kit building was waning and I found it harder and harder to complete a build.

My modeling interest was rekindled again some thiry years later as I approched my mid-forties and the dreaded mid-life crisis. Most mid-life guys opt for something like a sports car or some other expensive toy(s). Not me. I returned to the things I enjoyed in my younger years - modeling, bowling and golf. I discovered the local modeling club (Regina Scale Modellers), and after screwing up my courage, attended a meeting. Now I'm involved quite heavily in the club, participating in and helping organize the local contests, created and continue to maintain the web site, as well as trying to write articles as much as possible for the club newsletter.

My building is all to 1/72 scale, the scale I did in my youth, and the scale I still love in my later years. My return to modeling was primarily aircraft, which I still do on occassion, but I'm pretty much focused on "Braille Scale" armour right now - especially wheeled vehicles. My only wish is that there were more injected plastic wheeled vehicles for the World War One and for the Between World War years.

So there you have it. My life (as it concerns modeling anyway) in a brief bio. I look forward to many more years of building and being involved with "On the Way" and the friendly bunch of guys who keep it running.
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