Wow, 40 years?!?! Wasn’t the ten year reunion just a few summers ago??

When I first heard about the reunion my initial thought was “No way”. Then between Ed and Elaine I gravitated from ‘No way” to “It depends” (with a strong slant to “I’d like to go, this sounds like fun!”). Unfortunately, the “it depends” ended up being “I won’t be able to attend” because I can’t be two places at once. My younger daughter has a part in a summer theater performance and the reunion weekend is the opening weekend. Though I can’t be at the reunion in July I did promise Ed I would submit an update to the AHS Bio section (sorry Ed, still no Facebook).

A lot has changed since I attended my last reunion (the ten-year reunion). Shortly after the 10th reunion my wife at the time decided she’d rather be married to one of her co-workers and in order to accommodate her desire we had to be divorced. That was the trigger for me to move from San Diego to Minneapolis and I’ve been in the Minneapolis/St Paul area ever since.

While working in finance related jobs in the twin cities area I went back to college at the Univ of St Thomas and got my MBA. Shortly thereafter I was working for a company that upgraded their computer system to the SAP software and have been working with the SAP software and implementations over 17 years at a number of companies around the Mpls/St Paul area (and wahoo, no more finance!). Currently I’m working at Cargill where I’m part of the global implementation team to implement SAP across Cargill’s many business units.

During the time I was working on my MBA I met and married my wife Cathy (our 22nd anniversary is also the weekend of the reunion) and we have two wonderful daughters Sarah (19) and Katie (16). Sarah is entering her sophomore year in college this Fall and Katie will be a junior in high school. Both girls have gone through the typical series of events, dance classes, softball, braces, school plays (gee, I wonder where they got their acting gene from?), driver’s licenses (and higher insurance rates), proms and so on…and I’ve gained gray hairs through each event. To round out the household we have a three-legged yellow Labrador (he had four legs but got cancer because he wouldn’t stop smoking and we had to amputate one leg) and a black Labrador.

It would have been fun to make the trip back to Ames and see everyone. We used to make quarterly trips to Ames to visit my mother who lived in the same house I grew up in on North 2nd Street until she passed away six years ago so a trip back would have been fun. And for those who remember, I still own the 1955 Triumph convertible that I had when I was a senior at AHS, unfortunately it ran better back then than is does now (time and money never seem to align at the same time to fully restore it). At least there’s one thing in my life that’s older than I am!

I hate to miss the reunion; it would have been great to catch up. Ed, you need to have the next reunion in five years so I don’t have to wait another ten years to make good on my promise to attend the next reunion!