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I generally don't do well with trips down memory lane. My long term memory is in a brutally poor state, but lets give it a shot.
After high school, I entered the workforce pretty quickly. I moved to Austin, Texas
-- a quick seque about Austin. This is a great place to live. Its so not Texas. Austin has a very strong sense of free thought and arts, especially music, that its very atypical of Texas. We're a small blue county in a big red state --
For some reason I don't remember, I moved to Houston for a year and ended up working for Apple Computer as a contractor. After my contract expired, I worked at an education dealership in Austin and ended up at Apple again around 1992, only this time as a full time employee. Working many many different and interesting support roles, I ended up as an instructional designer writing new product training for AppleCare (the support side of the business). I did that for right around 9 years picking up a number of professional certifications.
Life wise, I was married for 9 years, but in the end the relationship just didn't work out. However right when I was not interested in any kind of relationship, I was picked up by my current wife, Anna, who was working for Apple in Cork, Ireland.
She invited me to visit her and I figured 'why the hell not'. So in 2004,I went there under the auspices of a business trip, fell hopelessly in love, and then made numerous visits since then (I got my Irish residency last year, no more visas). We got married in Helsinki (she's Finnish) in 2006.
I was laid off from Apple a little later that year and decided that I would move from Austin to Cork. Life in ireland was great, lots of things to see and a true international community with all of the technology companies having offices and call centers there.
As live is really a series of interesting vertices of events, while waiting on work authorization in Ireland last year, I got a job offer from Apple to work for an old friend, and am now back in Austin working as a Education Systems Engineer. I get to partner with K-12 schools in the SouthEast US to plan and implement technology in schools (pro media labs, san storage, AD integration, and more really cool stuff). Lots of IT mixed in with providing solutions for our customers. Some of the most rewarding work I've done so far.
Anna still lives in Ireland, we've been waiting now nearly a year for Anna's immigration paperwork to be finished so she can move to the US. Can you believe our govt won't let a married immigrant spouse enter the country and the paperwork takes right around a year? (Oh wait, if i had a dollar every time I started a sentence with "Can you believe our govt"). Oh well thats a discussion for the pubs. We're hoping everything is completed by the time the reunion happens, she would have a blast.
Anyway, I'm real enjoying reading folk's profiles here, I like seeing where everyone has gone and where they have ended up. I've been lucky enough to find the perfect person for me, travel to a ton of places around the world, and don't plan on stopping in the near future.
I look forward to the reunion and toasting to everyone's health and success, saluting those we have lost along the way, and reconnecting with folks.
Sláinte!
