Hi, I’m Bob.
Bob Blum, that is. I’m a devoted husband to my wife, Margaret. (Many of my stories reference my first wife, Annette (Merlene) who went to her rest from complications related to dementia after about 50 years of us being married.) I’m a Dad to 3 wonderful children, and Grandpa to 8 grandkids.
My favorite pastime is probably treasure hunting… I love taking my metal detector outside and finding treasures. I love digging into God’s Word and finding treasures. I also love handwriting analysis – it’s like finding treasures in others.
My Story
I may not look 37, but I am… sort of… down deep inside, where my brain lives. But over the years my body got things all screwed up… and turned around. But I will have to let my body deal with that. I prefer my brain age better.
For many years I wondered why I spent five years going to college. I just couldn’t figure out what one thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life. After changing majors several times in a desperate attempt to “focus” and “get serious”, I finally accumulated enough credits to “graduate”. They said my major was Biology and minor was religion, with one course short of a double minor (chemistry). Why all this knowledge?
The biology helped me land my first good job as a bacteriologist at United Medical Labs in Sandy, Oregon (though I never took bacteriology). That opened the way to get a job in a hospital lab to support myself at Andrews University, where I decided to become a minister. But that didn’t happen (providentially—another story later, sometime… maybe). I wound up finally getting married and supporting the two of us as an entrepreneur, making picture frame moldings (I took a one-credit class my senior year in college called “Woodworking”), and I never took a class or course in business management. No, I don’t know how we made it either, except by the grace of God. But we sure had fun.
Eight years after getting married we finally figured out how to make babies. So we did. Three of them. As the kids outgrew their cribs we found ourselves moving around a lot, too. (I think one time during a Thanksgiving, when the three visited us and rehashed “old times,” we counted over 40 houses we lived in, and I forget how many states.) During that growing up period, I was supporting the family as a handyman, doing whatever (fit my personality more, I guess, than an austere lab tech sitting on a stool all day looking through a microscope). At least we all seemed happy, and got to see many places. Oh, I homeschooled the kids for a while, too. Teaching was one of my many interests in college.
Finally, after the kids became grownups and started giving us grandkids (they figured out the baby thing a lot faster than we did), things slowed down enough for me to use my creative juices to feed a growing passion: COUNTERPART STUDIES. This led me into writing, and that led me into reviewing my old college books: nature, anatomy, Bible, and how to update that knowledge with new information. Things started coming together. Maybe college was part of the plan after all, and the different types of jobs. I had to keep my brain constantly active to figure out all the different things I got into.
We have an awesome God, who looks out for us, even when we don’t have enough sense to look out for ourselves.
This website is a compilation of discoveries encountered as a frontiersman in search of gold. Counterpart Studies. Hope you get a taste of the riches I found there and do some searching yourself.
True Tales
I was probably in the 8th grade (14 maybe). My dad had some white gas and I wondered if it burned like regular gas. So I took the metal can over to the center of our garage (it had a concrete floor), poured some gas in the lid, and then (carefully) took the open can over to the far side of the garage, and set it on my dad’s workbench. It was about 12-15 feet away, so I felt pretty smart being so careful. I bent over the capful of gas and lit it. Flames started jumping out of the cap and following the little trail of drips I didn’t account for, then jumped up to where the can was! I ran into the house where my mother was drinking a glass of water and yelled, “The garage is on fire!” She ran into the garage still holding her little glass of water, like she was going to use it to put the fire out. When she hastened back to the house to call the fire department my two older brothers quickly got the garden hose and put the fire out before the firetruck got there. No major damage.
When my mom and dad divorced I was sent to live with my grandparents. I was three at the time and lived with them till I was five (when my parents remarried each other again). Sometime during those two years I remember experiencing my first snow. My grandmother took me outside and we had a fun snowball fight. But the time came for my nap so we went back inside. I had so much fun, and I wanted to remember this time forever, so I brought a snowball in with me to keep. Well, Grandma knew I couldn’t take it to bed with me, so she suggested I put it in the dog’s dish. (She was a very fussy housekeeper.) When I woke up I immediately went to the dog’s dish and my snowball was gone! (Or so I thought.) It had melted, but I was sure the dog ate it. Now this next part of the story I don’t remember. My older brothers told me that after that Grandma found me trying to flush her Pomeranian down the toilet and another time I was found digging a hole in the back yard to bury her in. Poor dog! But she survived all that.
We were living in New York. We had a picture molding manufacturing company in our back yard, in a 200 year-old barn, which I remodeled and made all the equipment for. At one point I realized we needed to do some expansion and went about taking all my measurements, checking on suppliers, and carefully drawing out the plans. It took me a couple days to gather all this information. I checked things over very carefully before presenting the bottom line (cost) to my wife. Finally I went into the house where she was busy about some little domestic duty–dishes, probably. So I told her what I had been doing and had the plans in my hand to show her. “How much is it going to cost?” she asked (without looking up). I proudly told her $800. “I checked around for the best prices, and…” She cut me off, “There’s no way! That would cost you at least three times that!” never even missing a beat with her chore. I tried to interest her in the plans and how I carefully came to $800, but she knew I was really missing the boat and she wouldn’t even look. We had been married about 9 years and had worked well together, but this really threw me for a loop… until I tallied all the expenses after completing the project. $2000! From then on I learned to ask her opinion on things before getting into projects like that. Her intuition could save me a lot of trouble!