Time to put on our bloggles and go on a deep sea adventure and I, Neil Walker, will be your guide.  But first I need to tell you a little about myself, just in case there may be a few of you out there that don't have any clue as to who I am.  I'm ok with that. I’ve never blogged before so it might be a bumpy ride.
       My name is Neil Scott Walker.  I was born in Madison, Wisconsin on June 25th 1976 to Robert and Barbara Walker.  Yes that's right, 1976, thirty-one years ago and counting.  I've been swimming for 23 years, that's over 74.2 percent of my life.  Needless to say that water is a big part of my life, as it should be. Humans are made up of 60 percent water, right?  Actually it depends on what part of the body you are looking at.  The body as a whole is more than 60 percent water, but our blood is 92 percent water (the exact percentage of water in a watermelon).  The brain and muscles are 75 percent water and bones are about 22 percent.
       Sorry about that.  I get off track quite a bit.  I’m not full of useless information, but I know where to find it.  
       I grew up in a little town called Verona, like Verona Italy.  Well, not really like Italy.  The only Italian food you could find was in the hot lunch line at school on Fridays.  My parents bought a defunct farm and sixty acres of land forty some years ago.  I say defunct because it looked like a farm, and smelled like a farm, but it really wasn’t a farm anymore.  We had a barn filled with hay, an empty silo, an old spooky abandoned farm house and a lot of barbed wire fence around.  Instead of planting corn on the property, like the people before, they planted pine trees.  Red pine, white pine, and spruce trees.  I saw pictures of my parents, grandparents, and uncles planting the saplings, barely a foot tall.  Now the trees are forty to sixty feet tall.  
       There was an ice storm the year I was born.  Ice covered everything, making whatever it covered bow under its weight.  Some of the pine trees were broken and twisted after the ice thawed, but still grew.  Today, these trees look normal, except for a curve in the trunk that looks like a shepard’s hook.  That’s a reminder of the Year of Neil. 
       I had a very cool place to play.  Climbing trees, playing in the hay barn, chasing and being chased by my older brothers Gregg and Brent, were just a few of the adolescent activities I participated in.  The other one was swimming.  I guess I’ll talk about that next time we put our bloggles on.