Steve Schley

I've lived a number of lives since High School all leading to the exciting fun filled lifestyle I live today. With two ex-wives and a current one to support it's a good thing I'm easily excitable. I married my high school sweetheart, Debbie Johnson who was a junior at the time of our graduation. We had 10 great years together, sadly we were married 11.

After Divorce number one I went back to college and became a professional student. I believe I have more undergraduate units than just about anyone on the face of the earth. I had three BS degrees (Math, CIS and ART) along with an additional minor in Bus Admin and was working intently on another when sadly Lockheed offered me a job and drug me away from it all. The degree in Art was worked on just so I could mingle with some cute girls. Since I can’t draw to save my life, the classes centered around photography. I found quickly that one gets slapped less when telling ladies that you only want to take nude pictures of them for the sake of art.

One of my biggest passions is Travel. I’ve been to many of the great cities of the world, cities I had read about but never thought I’d ever visit. I telecommute so it has allowed me great flexibility. It has allowed us to spend an entire summer in London one year and in the Ukraine another. Since I’m also a history buff it gives me all the more pleasure.

One of my fondest travel memories was sitting in front of the Coliseum in Rome, drinking wine and having lunch with the wife. The wife is a total tea-totaler so the wine hit her pretty hard and she wound up running up and down the Coliseum stairs singing and dancing to my video taping,

Another of my interest is ancestry. Coming from peasant stock on both sides there wasn’t a lot of information on my ancestors. With a bit of work, I was able to plot my Portuguese family travels from Madeira to Hawaii and then to California. I also was able to go back past my grandparents and discover their past for two previous generations.

On my fathers side I had equal success and even found the city that my grandfather was born in. The city is only 30 miles from my wife’s city in the Ukraine, which is how I met her to begin with back in 93 ….. but that is another story. Married 15 years now so I set a new record for myself. Both cities were under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire but now find themselves in different countries.

Being raised into a Portuguese extended family and neighborhood (Silva Avenue – I even knew old man Silva), I attended All Saints and experienced the joy of having frustrated nuns teach me religion. Over the past 20 years or so, I have been trying to make sense out of it all. I’ve finally come up with a view of religion/god that I think must be correct since all of the major religions hate my thoughts. It’s comforting to know that I’m one of the few things that all religions can come together and agree with. Steve must be burned at the stake, head chopped off or at least drowned. Even the Buddhist want to throttle me. And no!!!…. I’m not agnostic or atheist.

In raising my herd of kids I found myself coaching both soccer and basketball, two sports that I stunk in during High School. I started coaching soccer in 1985 and just stopped in 2007 when my youngest pleaded with me to allow her to quit.

For myself, I’ve been playing soccer on an adult team for the past 20+ years and pride myself in the fact that I’ve never improved. I’m as bad today as when I started.

I pride myself in being a generalist. Not great at any particular thing but decent at a variety. When I was attending college, I found few pretty girls in the math and computer science classes so I decided to take classes that they seemed to frequent. That led to many photography and stained glass classes and to one of my degrees. I also had a ranch for some time and can tell you about raising just about any animal you could care to name. I was even a member of the American Dairy Goat Association. I worked at Real Estate, Groceries stores, Construction, and even had an antique store (my art professor really wanted to see my collection of Limoges ?)

For the past 20+ years I have worked in the same field for a number of large companies, currently IBM. Concurrently with this I have also developed some websites business (none of which made money) and done some wedding photography and video, nothing long standing, just something to entertain myself. I have converted all my family photographs to digital and have become quite adept at photo restoration.

If you have any of the interests above and want to share some thoughts, send me some email. Or even if you just want to drink some beverage and shoot the bull.

Steve