About Us
Family History
Writing
Photographs
Odds and Ends
This is a personal web site for Carl C. Fields.
It contains (or is planned to someday contain) information about Carl and some of his interests, including results of family history (or genealogy) research. It also contains (or is planned to someday contain) photos taken over many years. The intent of the photos is to share them (and, in some cases, stories associated with them) with friends and family. Most of the photos are associated with personal memories. They are not intended to be "artistic" (and, with a few possible exceptions, they are not).
Strictly speaking, the name XenonSheepdog does not mean anything. It's just something picked that (hopefully) will be easy for users of this site to remember. Carl felt self-conscious about naming the site after himself (although he does "own" the domain carlcfields.org, and it is linked to this site -- as this is written in April 2010).
Carl worked as a engineer associated with nuclear (fission) power reactors for a good fraction of my career. An isotope of xenon (Xe-135) is a fission product that tends to prevent holding steady power levels for a several-hour time period following large power level changes. The reactor must be designed with the capability to withstand adverse effects of xenon-135.
The "sheepdog" portion of the name comes from a much-loved (and now much-missed) pet Old English Sheepdog named Christian (1974-1988, his formal name was London Fog's Lord Christian).
The XenonSheepdog.org name was also inspired to some extent by a country music saloon named "Neon Armadillo," which was in operation in Pleasure Island at Walt Disney World when Carl visited there in November 1988.
A few weeks after selecting the name for this site (and obtaining the domain name) Carl heard the term "calico squirrel." That might also have been a cool name for the site (although creating a logo image for that might would have challenged my abilities with computer paint programs).
Tests in April 2011 indicate any of the following urls will bring users to this site (at least when using the Internet Explorer 8 browser): www.xenonsheepdog.org, xenonsheepdog.org, www.XenonSheepdog.org, or XenonSheepdog.org.
XenonSheepdog.org Web Site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.