The last twenty years, in brief

5 Comments / tmi

I’m unable to attend my 20th high school reunion. For those who venture over this way, here’s the last twenty years, in brief.

Didn’t enjoy chemistry classes after all. Talked my way into managing a computer network. Moved off-campus. Learned to cook. Met my (to be) wife. Graduation #1. Got married. Started a Ph.D. Had my wisdom teeth removed. Stopped working on my Ph.D. Moved to Seattle. Graduation #2. Joined the rat race in California. Didn’t like rats, moved to Austin. Startup #1. Bought a house. Learned to fly. Startup #2. Added a floatplane rating. Burnt out of doing startups. Moved back to Seattle. First child born. Finished commercial pilot certificate. Got bored, went to startup #3, which sank into the swamp. Second child born. Startup #4 burnt down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. Pursued an MBA to make sense of startups… with the obvious conclusion.  Reacquainted with the rat race.  Flew myself to Chicago and back. Graduation #3.  Sold my plane.  Worked at the world’s largest online retailer. Biked to Vancouver, BC. Had jet lag from working on “internet time.” Biked to Portland and Vancouver, BC. Currently at a small, non-startup manufacturing CFD visualization software. Next month, I’m biking around the Washington peninsula. Life is okay!

Please write.

5 thoughts on “The last twenty years, in brief”

  1. Eric Gunnerson

    You were lucky to have a swamp. We had to live by the side of the road in a cardboard box…

  2. John

    Cardboard box?

    You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank.

  3. Karen

    Gee, there was plenty of room under the rock where I was living… y’all shoulda called…

  5. woodstock

    You could probably fit that all on one page of a hipster PDA (http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Hipster_PDA), and not a bad plan if you were going to go to the reunion. I went to my 10th, mostly because I’d lost a ton of weight since graduating from high school (and damn didn’t I look good). Depending on when and where it is, I may go to my 20th simply because 1) I’ve kept *most* of that weight off (nothing like a stable relationship to pack on 15 extra pounds around the middle, eh), and 2) 10 years ago the good-looking “popular” crowd was already showing their years in various stages of bad. There’s just some latent roadside accident gawker gene in me that wants to see how many botched plastic surgeries there have been.

    Oh, yes, and mine wasn’t a swamp: it was a heating grate in front of a federal building 😉

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