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About Us
We met when our respective best friends decided to mary each other. I was a groomsman, Elizabeth was the maid of honor. Elizabeth broke the ice by picking at my skin that was flaking off my arm from a sunburn as she sat in the pugh behind me while we were waiting for our instructions at the wedding rehearsal. The first words she spoke to me were "eewww, you're peeling". How could a guy resist a come-on like that?
Around 4 years later, I finally proposed to Elizabeth on the skydeck of the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago. We were married in April of 2006 in San Antonio, Texas, and currently reside in Wisconsin.
About Chris
A short personal History
...in the dreaded "first person"
I was born amidst the Watergate hearings in a hospital near the banks of the
Ohio River and spent my first months within earshot of the gunnery ranges
of Ft. Knox. My early memories began after my family moved to a community in the far flung reaches
of Indianapolis suburbia, where I uneventfully made my way through the public school system. I subsequently
attended Purdue University where I obtained both my Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering and my commission as a Second Lieutenant in the "Regular"
component of the Army.
After few happy months spent along the shores of the Chesapeake at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and a brief detour through Fort Benning where I took off in large Air Force transports 5 more times than I landed in them, I was off to my first "permanent party" station with the 1st Armored Division in Germany. When I arrived, however, I was quickly put on a bus and shipped down to Bosnia to catch up with my unit who had deployed to the region 3 months prior. Eight months of sightseeing around the Balkans later, I returned to garrison life in Germany where I worked hard 5 days a week and played harder the other two days. It's amazing how many options you have within a 6 hour drive when living near Frankfurt.
You might not have known this, but a military service contract is a lot like some cell phone contracts. If you let it expire without telling them what you are going to do, they'll automatically renew it for another term. So one of the big reasons so many people stay in is for the same reason you haven't switch from that cell carrier you don't like: it's just easier to keep what you got.
Since the Army had given me a job that I hadn't asked for, and I had determined that 16 more years of the same probably wouldn't lead to bliss, I chose to end my military service and head out for new adventures after my 4 years was up. I figured I aught to give a shot at using that fancy degree of mine, and acquired a job using all those long forgotten skills like "orbital mechanics" and "computer programming". So, I found a job in Colorado Springs where my wishes would come true as I worked on scientific computer software that would help various government agencies keep their nonexistant satellites from hitting satellites that actually did exist. It sounded cool on paper, or explaining it to a girl at a bar, but it was a lot like being back in school and doing homework all day. But, the industry of extracting money from the Department of Defense being what it is, my company lost the contract to one of the of all-powerful big-boys (you have a 50% chance of guessing which one). Being a little unhappy with a job where my expertise in Power Point learned as an Army officer was being put to use more than I really cared for, I used the imminent termination of my job as a good excuse for switching seats again.
This was the year 2000, where someone with 6 weeks of web page design experience could make more money than your highly educated aerospace engineer, so I decided to venture into the unknown-to-me world of business software and web development. That put me into the empire of Bernie Ebbers working as a consultant doing Java-based software development. Of course, you can only pretend to make money for so long, so the empire started to collapse just a few short months into my new field.
I was lucky, though, as this was just as the shiney sharp needle was first making contact with the .com bubble. Within several weeks I was able to secure 3 or 4 job offers, so it was time for my next bad decision. As it was becoming increasingly clear that something very bad was about to happen as people started realizing that public IPOs, new internet domain names, and outfitting your office with $700 chairs doesn't actually make a profit in and of itself, I decided to take the "safe bet" and become an employee of a large, well established financial instution on the northwest edge of the Chicago suburbs. Suffice it to say that this company was also having its share of problems, it was just harder to tell, though, because it was a privately held firm. Knowing a sinking ship when I was on one (that whole "fool me once..." thing), I sought employment elsewhere and moved on after only 14 months. History proved me right, though, as that company's only job now is running off all remaining business.
The third time's a charm, right?
My next (and last, so far) move was made under more desirable circumstances in that it was under my terms, so I had the time to put into finding something right. I was lucky enough to get a return call from a cold cover letter and resume I had sent to a small consulting company in Madison, Wisconsin that I had learned about from a local business magazine naming them as one of the 10 fastest growing companies in the town. It seemed like the perfect fit: a small private company that would pimp, err, contract me out to large clients. So, my newly acquired girlfriend and I packet up the U-Haul and headed north. Three years later my initial hunches have proved to be more-or-less accurate. I'm getting the best of both worlds by working for a small company with relatively small problems, but consulting for a large company with interesting and challenging work. The nice thing is that I get to leave the big-company problems at the big company's door on my way home every night. Having said that, the client is a good place to work for and consistantly ranks very highly in the list of best places to work in IT. Many of the employees can't understand that, but most of them don't really know just how bad it can be.
What does the future hold? Well, the aforementioned "newly acquired girlfriend" is now the "newly acquired fiancè" and the
-- Chris
About Elizabeth
Coming soon...