Holy cow, I can't possibly be old enough to be having a 20th high school reunion... more has now happened since high school than happened before/during high school!
After graduation I went on to Caltech (studying electrical and mechanical engineering) and lived the "Real Genius" lifestyle... 4 of the hardest and most remarkable years of my life... (that is until the first baby arrived in 2003!) Kept up with the technical theater stuff in college, much to the detriment of my grades...
Grad school at UCSB followed-- after 4 years at Tech I needed some time on the beach! Left UCSB in '93 with a Master's degree to join a theme park engineering company in Camarillo, but stayed on living in the SB paradise and commuting south until '98, when I moved to Moorpark, followed 2 years later by Thousand Oaks, then Newbury Park, and now I'm in Camarillo.
The theme park biz was great fun-- got to work on Terminator 2 3D @ Universal Studios, Lance Burton's Magic show and Treasure Island in Las Vegas and a few other Vegas shows, some Disney stuff, etc. etc. In my (almost nonexistent) free time I mountain biked, hiked and rock climbed. Also started playing guitar at the UCSB student Catholic church.
The theme park biz is fun (where else can an engineer have their work applauded by cheering crowds, and get to work with fun, crazy artist types all the time! And I love show biz from my theater days.), but the hours and pay stunk, and the finances for a small company in the biz are always shakey... the company ran out of money (went bankrupt) in 2000, I consulted for a year (with even worse hours!), and finally went to work for a small cutting edge engineering company founded by one of my UCSB profs. (www.launchpnt.com if you are interested-- doing all kinds of crazy stuff from implantable heart pumps, maglev transportation, magnetic launch systems, energy storage, blah blah blah-- much cooler engineering, but much less fun to talk about to non-nerds than the theme park stuff!)
I met my wife Margaret in 2000 -- friend of a friend of a friend deal... She's a protein chemist at Amgen and was also working weekends as a church organist when I met her. We got married in 2002 and lived in Newbury Park until a year ago we moved to Camarillo. Spent our weekends playing in a church band at the local Lutheran church where she was organist. She's an amazing instrumentalist. I'm still not much of a guitar player (after all these years... don't have much natural talent), but it was a small church so they couldn't complain! We did a lot of backpacking, biking, camping, swing dancing, and skiing while dating and first married year.
A scant 10 months after getting married our first boy arrived (Luke), and while we were still in a sleepless daze from that, Quinn arrived 16 months later! We hit our first wedding anniversary with a 2 month old, and our 4th anniversary with 2 kids! Not the recommended procedure, I will tell you, but hey, the kids are really close to each other and (now) play really well together!
Having moved out from the east coast for her Amgen job, Margaret wasn't ready to quit when Luke arrived, so I reduced my work day down to 2 days a week in the office (small, flexible companies are awesome!) and a lot of working from home in the evenings to become a most-time stay-at-home dad. First two years with 2 kids was the hardest thing I've ever done-- made Tech and 110 hour weeks in the Theme Park biz look easy. Now Luke and Quinn are almost 4 and 2-1/2 and we're having a lot of fun-- swim lessons, gymnastics classes, play dates and so on.
The kids have been the death of most of our outside activities. I did take up kiteboarding just before Luke was born, and managed to get decent at it before Quinn arrived. Since then the occasional bike ride is all the exercise I get, and we've given up church music and dancing for the time being. We're hoping to get back to the camping soon (potty training is almost done!) and we *have* managed some ski trips every year.
It's really cool to see what everyone has been up to! And a lot easier to type once than repeat 50 times at the reunion! Keep posting your blogs!
Mike Ricci
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2 comments:
Thanks for the update, Mike! Aaron and I used to swing dance before we had kids too. The Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association even has a Swing Dance Camp on Catalina that we did a couple times. But since the kids have come, we've gotten terribly rusty. We talk about taking the kids to a class now that Moira is old enough to join in and Soren could enjoy the music. Maybe some day soon!
Amy
Mike! What's your email address; I'd love to chat with ya!
roblef at gmail dot com
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