About Me

About Me in Real Life

My name is Gary Sonnenberg. I live in Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA, which is located about 15 miles west of Milwaukee and about 120 miles south of Green Bay. I grew up mostly in Appleton, Wisconsin, and a little bit – 2 years – in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

My college years were spent at (Dr.) Martin Luther College, located in New Ulm, Minnesota, where I earned a degree in elementary education. I taught students in grades 2 through 8 for 15 years before becoming a COBOL programmer with a local financial transaction processing company where I worked from 1998 to 2014.

I am married, the father of one daughter and two sons, and the grandfather of 2 grandchildren. I enjoy American football, science fiction and fantasy books, and movies of the same genre.

About Me Online

I started Proof & Design in June of 2004 when I saw a need for proofreading on various Web sites that had obviously been written in another language and then translated into English. I have made some extra spending money by proofreading, but I haven’t tried to turn it into a full-time endeavor.

In September of 2005, I volunteered to be an “expert”; simply meaning, one who answers questions, at Simply Explained. I like helping people and the idea of keeping things simple. I think I’m still one of the top question-answerers (in terms of volume) at the site, even though I don’t visit there anymore.

In May of 2006, I began a blog called The Wonderful Truth. It contains my wonderings about things not explained in detail in the Bible. If you visit that site, you’ll notice I haven’t posted there either in quite a while. I think that means I got all the wondering out of my system.

Me and Fun Board Games

In 2006, I was introduced to The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. I was bitten by the Eurogame bug – that’s a good thing. I started a board gaming group, the Jovial Board Gamers Society, in November of that year which has since become defunct on purpose.

My fun board game collection, which are not all Euro board games, has grown to about 150 games. And the best thing about that is that I get to play one of them virtually every day!

And obviously I started FunBoardGames.org a several years ago.

More Sites by Me

More recently, I’ve started a personal blog that I add to whenever the spirit moves me, which isn’t very often these days. I also started one about U.S. postage stamps that have been an interest of mine since my youth. And then there’s my site about Fisher Price called GeoTrax, an extremely durable toy train system that was discontinued in 2011 – the toys, not the site. If you’re interested in the basics of quadcopter flying, check out The Complete Quadcopter, a site I started in 2015.