About Me

I'm Kit — Christian Applegate if you're being formal about it. I spent 20 years in the Coast Guard as a Marine Science Technician, which is a fancy way of saying I dealt with hazmat for a living. I worked as a foreign vessel inspector, a facility inspector, and a federal on-scene coordinator representative, which meant showing up when something had already gone wrong and helping sort out the mess.

Four of those twenty years I spent as an instructor at Training Center Yorktown, teaching the MST A-school. That might be the part of my career I'm proudest of — watching people walk in knowing nothing and walk out with enough to actually start their career. Turns out I like teaching almost as much as I like the work itself.

Now I'm retired from that life and starting a new one in IT — network engineering, specifically, working toward my CCNA, with a serious side interest in AI. I want to understand the whole stack, not just use the tools. It's a huge switch, career-wise, and if I'm honest it's exactly the kind of questionable decision this blog is named after.Kit Bashing is where I'm cataloging that whole mess: the certs, the home lab I'm building from scratch, the AI projects I can't stop starting, and whatever breaks along the way.