I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and graduated from Lincoln Northeast in 1974 at the age of 17 in the top quarter of my graduating class with a 1.3 grade average.  I had many jobs the first 9 years out of high school, sort of a "jack of all trades", and master of none.  I've run car parts, welded on catwalks and ladders for silos, worked on lathes and construction running rebar and shoveling concrete with a 13 man crew, driven taxi cab and dump truck along with an office job where I was never able to be my own boss.  I used to find myself driving around town just to be able to listen to the music and "relax".  Most people would watch TV or play a game to relax.  I found driving relaxing to me, and when I began driving a semi, it just felt like I was meant to be out there.

In 1997 a semi wreck just north of Houston, Texas took me off the road for good.  I now was forced to find something else to do because I had lost my career and lifestyle.  I turned to the internet because I had heard so much about it, and that's where I began an entirely new life!

The name "bjscloset" actually came to me as I was trying to figure out a screen name for the internet when I purchased a WebTV unit shortly after my wreck.  I don't know why it stuck, maybe it was because I truly "felt" as if I WAS bjscloset.  The story behind the name was simply my initials, and the "closet" was where I felt I had been placed since the wreck.  Alone, scared, and in the dark.  I wasn't sure how I got there, but I was bound and determined to find my way out!

Although bjscloset began as a screen name, it soon turned into a small web page growing day by day.  With strange sleep habits since the brain injury I sustained from my semi wreck, I would stay up days at a time until I was so exhausted that I had to sleep.  When I did sleep it wasn't very long, and I'd be up doing search engines and reading and writing again.  Remember with vision problems and dyslexia caused by the brain injury, this wasn't an easy task and seemed to take longer to make sure things looked right.

The lack of information about brain injury from my doctors drove me to wanting and needing to find out more.  That pushed me even harder to build a web page where others could come and find information in one place without having to search high and low for days and weeks just to find they're right back where they started and can't remember where they'd been!

With a brain injury, many find that they not only have focus problems, but vision problems and memory problems too.  A brain injury can cause lack of understanding and focus thus making reading more like a chore than anything else because most of what we just read doesn't sink in and we forget it almost as soon as it's been read.  And with those problems comes "overload" where the brain just gets too much information that it can't process it all and basically shuts down.  Your body begins to feel as if you'd just run a marathon and you start to yawn or stare and zone out, and then you just have to stop what you're doing and go nap.  It's not an easy life, but it's the way I've had to live since BI.

Since I wasn't able to drive my semi and do what I had been doing for the last 14 years, I began learning about the internet and just what I could and couldn't do with WebTV.  I eventually bought a computer, but not until after I had built my first web site so large I had to build more and more pages to link to because there was too much information for WebTV to hold or pull up all at once.  I eventually uploaded it to a host server and continue to build on it along with other web sites.  The web site you come to now (bjscloset.org) is the end result of years of work, struggle and changes.

Watching me on a computer for the first time must have been a real riot because I barely knew how to turn it on, let alone remember where everything was!  It took almost 6 months before I realized that I was using my CDRW to play my CD's instead of the CD rom that I got with my computer!  It's not that big of a deal normally, but things weren't set up to play as well on the CDRW, so they didn't sound as good.  I can still picture the look on my face when the computer tech at Gateway asked me about my CD rom then actually had to tell me where it was on the tower!  Yes, I might have been brain injured, but I wasn't brain dead!  I put a purple ring reinforcement sticker on the CD rom so I would remember!  Heh, it worked!  I haven't forgotten since!  (and the sticker is still there.....course, I've figured it out by now, but just failed to remove it......just wanted to let you know in case you were wondering)!

Building web pages was the next step to sanity since I no longer could do what I had grown to love.  Driving isn't just a job, it's a career and a lifestyle, that had been taken away from me in the blink of an eye and now I had to find something that I could do that would peak my imagination and interest, and I was beginning to see that building web pages was it!

Remember, I also had acquired ADD/ADHD and Dyslexia (and a host of other problems) along with this brain injury, so doing things the "conventional" way was NOT going to work!  I could read until I was blue in the face and nothing would make any sense.  So, I began buying books and reading and actually doing things right there on the internet switching back and forth reading and doing, doing and reading until things began to make sense.  It was a wild way to learn, and I took notes so I wouldn't forget what I had done the day before.  Oh, the therapy began!  There are writers, artists and musicians in my family, and I've been blessed to possess a little bit of them all.  They have become a God send to me through the years and a refuge from the storms of every day life.  A life that not many people can understand, or reach, but a life I've grown to know none the less.

I've learned that at the ripe age of 41 I can still survive in this world basically intact, and that I haven't lost my intelligence.  Some of it's been "misplaced" I'll have to admit, but it's been an interesting life, that's for sure!  I'm so glad that I never lost my hard headedness because that's what's gotten me to this point in my life.  That and God's grace!  A life that most people aren't given a second chance at, and one that I've grown to see can be a totally different place.

bjscloset is my legacy to life.  My business of making Web Pages and designing new "chapters" to my life or someone else's.  It's a chance to give to the world instead of taking, and a chance to create when so many are tearing things down.

Using the talents that God gave me, I've found that I can still have a place in this world, even after a brain injury.  It's funny how life looks if you change a few things.  That's why I call it......"Life through "NEW" eyes."

~ barbara jean ~ 

Mom & me - about '61

My second Freightliner with Jim & Deb  (the rides kept getting better) & my caddy which was almost as long as my truck!

I can't remember how old I was in this picture, but I couldn't have been older than 7 or 8!  This was one of my nephews and he was glaring at my old teddy bear!  He only had 1 eye left, so Mom removed it so he wouldn't swallow it and my 'slightly used' teddy bear got a chance to get squeezed by another baby!  What a lucky teddy bear!