Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Reunion Night at George's Place

Thanks to EVERYONE who was able to come to the party, and those of you who were not, but were able to send in your information. The night was a HUGE success, tons of fun and full of excitement and energy. It was AMAZING to see us all together again. I probably think that the most, since I have been MIA this whole time, but still! I have only positive and glowing memories of the whole event, hopefully you do as well. We were well taken care of by Pete and his crew at George's Place and there were drinks and hugs all the way around. Can't wait for next year!!!

PS - If any one has any other photos from the evening that they would like to post, please feel free to send them to me.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Brian McLaren




I enjoy long walks on the beach and picnics in the park…...........okay….graduated from UW, met the woman of my dreams, Tiffany, getting jiggy at the Tropix, finally married 7 years later on a beach in Jamaica, 2 kids - Mason Curtis is 3 and Gavin James is 1, moved all the way to Bothell, got into the mortgage biz 5 years ago – oops, own a few properties – oops again, but am actually starting a new career as an independent financial advisor this week. I’m sporting a 25 handicap and .540 batting average for the Kirkland Red Dogs rec softball team – you can come check us out at the Peter Kirk baseball field, where I spent the majority of my junior high days riding my Tony Hawk skateboard and drinking the booze I stole from my parents.

Kimberlee Waltz Farvour



So here is a photo of me and my children, Henry (10 mo.) and Katelyn (4). Then one of my hubby and kids on fathers day. I am working as a full time mom after 9 yrs with Ann Taylor traveling and opening stores and training staff. Hung up my retail bunny ears and went to work at the Bon/Macy's as a buyer. Then went on to work as inside sales and accounting at Architectural Details mfr of custom lighting and that was awesome. Worked there until I had my 2nd child Henry and am now figuring out what I want to do next when I grow up. A friend and I want to launch a jewelry and child's accessory line at some local Queen Anne boutiques, but we will see. Not much time between chasing the kids and running around.
Married my husband Steve Farvour in 2000. He is a project mgr at a structural engineering company in Seattle.
We just love to hang out with our kids and travel a bit and cook.
So neat to see and read about all of these neat kangs endeavors, thanks everyone for sharing! Who would of thought? :)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Tamara Hull Robinson



I live in Bellevue with my husband and four children. Jordan is 12, Aidan is 10, Alexander is 8 1/2 and Elena is almost 4. I work at Evergreen Hospital as a childbirth and lactation educator. I'm currently waiting on a waitlist to get into nursing school at BCC. I never finished my degree when I graduated, so I do still think in...when I grow up I want to be a nurse. I've even thought about getting my masters in midwifery. I could probably set some records for the oldest starting midwife.
I love to play with my children, work in my garden, read, and dance. I working on how to do them all at the same time. Can't wait to see everyone.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ronda Wickstrom Moulton




Hi All,
I live in Bellevue, with my husband Tyler Moulton (Hadley's younger brother) my step son Tyrell, who is 14, and our two kitties. We have been married for almost 4 years, and life is good. I have my own interior design business working out of a studio in my home. We love spending time with family and friends; keeping a busy social calender. Some of our favorite things to do are travel, hike, snow shoe, camping, planning fun thins to do.... I enjoy sketching, painting and photography. My husband likes to ride his motorcycle and is so handy around the house - really a priceless quality. Tyrell is our little pro football player in the making, who is very kind and compassionate. He is going to be going to Belleuve High School next year! - crazy...

I have so enjoyed reading about everyone, what special people you all are!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Sarah Hubbard


Sarah's daughter, Libby



Claire Zick





I won't be able to make it to the reunion but it sure looks like fun. I live in a small house in Connecticut now with my husband Sean Cocco. No kids, no pets, but lots of work and travel. After I graduated from college I lived in Seattle, worked as a Microsoft permatemp for a while and then for a 90's boom Web service company. I also kept up the flute as my professional hobby and played with the Bellevue Philharmonic, Pacific NW Ballet and whoever else would hire me. In 2000, Sean and I moved to Italy for a year while he had a Fulbright scholarship and I studied flute in Rome on a Rotary scholarship, which basically turned into an amazing year of vacation for me while he had to work hard to finish his research. Sean is Italian so we go back regularly to visit his family and friends. After Italy we were in Seattle for a few more years while Sean finished his PhD and then moved to Hartford, CT in 2005 when he got a job teaching at Trinity College. I've been working as a product manager for a start-up software company that was purchased two years ago by a non-profit called OCLC. After moving to CT I started working remotely from my home so I have to find activities to get out of the house, which usually end up be theatre related. I started doing improvisational theater several years ago and was part of Unexpected Productions at the Market Theatre until I moved to Hartford. Now I teach improv and perform in both improv and scripted shows at the local theatres here. That's me in the platinum blonde wig. I never get my own hair to look half as good. I'm back in Seattle 3 or 4 times a year for work and visiting family. I hope I can make the next reunion - everyone looks so good and happy. Hope you all have a blast and if you are ever on the east coast, you're welcome in Hartford.

Take care,
Claire
clairezick@hotmail.com

The attached pictures are:

Me and Sean in Italy last year
Cast photo from Lend Me a Tenor
Claire shoveling snow in a blizzard - never did that in Seattle!
The small house in CT - since I don't have kids you get a house picture instead.
________________________________________

Dan Robertson


Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Dan Engel

After graduating from college in 1995, I worked for a number of small community newspapers while also working as a freelance writer for online publications like USAToday.com. I left the newspaper business in 2000 and went to work for an online startup that promptly crashed and burned miserably. In 2001, I went to work for Washington Mutual and have been there ever since, holding a number of corporate communications positions. I’m still writing non-bank stuff and just launched a new Seattle sports blog: Assist by The Mitten.

I met my wife through mutual friends in 1999 and were married a year and half later. Our son Nicholas was born in May 2005. His sister, Lily, was born 14 months later on the Fourth of July. The four of us call Everett home along with our two King Charles Spaniels (Henry and Widget) and Jack the cat.

When I’m not with the family or at work, I spend my time solving theoretical physics problems, especially, phenomenology of particle physics. Not really, I mostly sit around in my office and watch baseball on TV. That would be awesome, though.


Read My Sports Blog: Assist by The Mitten
http://www.assistbythemitten.com/

Kirsten Williams Moreno






I've been married to Lance Moreno for 9 years, whom I met in Arizona when I was finishing my degree there. He is an amazing husband and father and I feel so blessed to have snatched him up! Currently, he works as a consultant at Microsoft for Vynamic Solutions NW. Like Caren, he is also a previous Wamu guy and the funny thing is that he worked with Caren, Dan Engel and Jeff Farris! Oh, and Brad Newcomer was just down the hall. How's that for a small world? His passions are mountain biking, training for triathlons, and most recently brewing his own beer. I work 1 1/2 days a week as a dental hygienist for Dr. Mecca in Bellevue. We have 2 beautiful girls, Ella-4 and Maiya-1. Oh, and can't forget our first "baby" Gretta, our 9 year old Vizsla! We moved back from Arizona in 1999 and now live up near Redmond High School on Education Hill. Thankfully, I married someone just as committed to vacations as I am. :) We took an amazing trip all over Europe (a.k.a. the "conception tour" haha) just before conceiving our first daughter and have pretty much stayed on this side of the Atlantic since then. Lance's favorite is anywhere in Mexico, mine is Kauai.
Hobbies I've taken up since high school are running, gardening and drinking coffee and wine. :) My latest is triathlons- I've sord of had a little hiatus since having Maiya but I'm getting back in to the training as she begins to sleep better at night. Jeff Jewett continues to be my #1 inspiration in that arena (love you Jeff! :).
Things I love these days are running, gardening, spending QT with my family and friends, and traveling!!! Something I've also learned about myself in my 30's is that I truly have a passion for serving. Whether it's bringing a meal to new parents or feeding the homeless or somewhere in between. I see my next "career path" being in some sort of global, charitable organization that aids those in need of basic giving support (i.e. food/shelter/etc.).
Well, that's me in a nutshell. I hope to see you all on 21st, we are juggling a couple engagements but hope to swing by!

Blast from the Past



Sarah Sturing Nicodemus








http://www.anacortesnics.blogspot.com/

Let's see...after graduating from LW, I became a non-college attending, semi-professional mover. I felt the need to experience every Seattle neighborhood. It's amazing how one girl can slide an armoire down a staircase so many times by herself. Rent raised...I'm out. Evicted...I'm out! Stupid twenties!!!

In '95 I started my schooling to become a massage therapist. Rub-a-dub-dub. I love taking care of people. I also love being silly, but on June 22nd, 2002 that got me into trouble. I took a not so graceful ballet leap after a Cowboy Junkies concert and crushed my left tibia bone upon landing and then promptly landed on my face. No bone left to screw into place, soooo...five months in a brace and on crutches, self employed massage therapist, no insurance! Ouch!

Luckily, I had several friends having babies, needing a nanny. (Karen Bell...I still have some pictures of Ethan I need to deliver to you.) I look forward to having a baby some day. I get my fair share of changing diapers, though. I was married three years ago, and for the last two years I have been the full-time caretaker for my mother-in-law. She's almost 89 and has dementia. She moved in with us on Mother's day 2006. It's a full time job. We now live in Anacortes and I love the Skagit Valley beauty.

Love Sarah Nic~

Samantha Vogel Jerome



Sam, Rhonda and Karen at Hadley's wedding

Karen Lynn Bell



I have been married to Eric for 10 ½ years, we have two kids Ethan 5, starting kindergarten in the fall and Kalena 3 who starts preschool in the fall @ Little Roos in Kirkland with Kristina Mangouras. I am a Dental Assistant but currently a stay @ home mom. I do work @ Newport Bay a few nights a week. My passion is dental missions and have been on 3 over the last 5 or so years, two to Nicaragua and one to Guatelmala
Eric & I bought the house I grew up in next to Grasslawn park. Eric is a forman @ Sellen Construction

Jeff Jewitt


Matt Durand, me, Lance Moreno (Kirsten Williams’ hubby) NYE 2007.

Josh Wright and me, Burbank, CA, 2007.

Me building the “El Jefe” while recovering from the collapsed lung, 2003



Me chilling at Half Dome, Yosemite, 2004

chilling with my nephew, Jackson, at his first Ms game, 2007
Scoop –

Went to WWU, dropped out after first year. Continued at BCC the next year part time and worked part time at an Italian cheese & pesto factory (CIBO). Oh yeah, and did a TON of skiing, 50 or more days each year for three years, until I finished my AA at BCC. Went back up to WWU and finished out my BA in business (decisional science) in 1997.

A week after being back in Seattle, I found out a friend's (who I graduated WWU with) mother inherited a home in Santa Rosa, CA and she wanted her son and a friend to go down to fix the place up so it could go on market. Sounded like my perfect broke-ass version of an after-college European vacation, so I jumped at the chance.

We came down October 1, 1997 and, when it was gloomy and raining buckets in Seattle, it was 75-80 degrees with beautiful sunshine (for the next two months, too!). It didn't hurt that it was wine country (located right next to Napa county), and the harvest / crush was happening - the sweet smell of grapes in the air!

Needless to say, I fell in love immediately. It took us two months to get the house up to speed and, in the meantime, I was doing some job interviewing. I went back up to Seattle for Christmas, then received a call I had scored a job. So I moved my ass down here permanently and started working.

I had been doing some mountain bike racing up in B'ham, and I wanted to continue. Amazingly, even though CA is the birthplace of mountain biking, there was not a race to be found. So I saw that there was a short little triathlon going on and I signed up for it. Again, immediate love affair. Over the next five years, I worked my way up in distance to the full Ironman. The first one I tried was over in Lake Placid, NY – the temperature and humidity were both in the high 90s and I was spent halfway through the marathon. Wanting to bite that dog, I signed up for another Ironman called the Vineman, which was a local CA race, and finally crossed the line (still had trouble exactly halfway through the marathon, though).

Also soon after moving to CA, I joined a professional trade group and became part of the board of directors. It is an international organization called APICS, mainly for manufacturing industries / decisional sciences. The board I worked on covered all of Northern CA, from SanFran to the OR border. After five years in different roles, I worked my way up to president, and just had a grand old time. It was quite an experience, and invaluable networking-wise, and I still keep up with these folks despite later changing careers.

So, basically just working away and doing triathlon. During my Christmas visit to Seattle in 2003, I went up to B'Ham to visit Matt and Jeneen (Toperosky) Durand and family and do some skiing up at Mt Baker. On our way up to the mountain, some lady just turned across our path (to try to get to a business) on Mt Baker Hwy in pretty snowy conditions. Serious angled head on collision ensued (we were going 45mph). Cars were TOTALLED, but it seemed like the airbags did their jobs and no serious injuries. Seemed! Turns out, I got a small tear in my lung in the accident (of course, I only found this out months after the accident). Probably would have healed on its own in a 2-3 weeks but, four days later, I jumped on the airplane home. It turns out that is not a very good idea and apparently an immediate life threatening situation. Of course, I had no idea, and just thought my rib must have got cracked and that carrying my bags through the airport must have aggravated it.

Wrong! I got home late on a Saturday night and just wanted to sleep forever. Yet, I couldn't find ONE comfortable position - it seriously felt like somebody was stabbing me in the back with a knife. So, after tossing and turning for a few hours, I drove myself to the ER the next morning at 5AM. They took some x-rays, then took some more - turns out they couldn't find one of my lungs! Longer story short, I have really long lungs and one of them was 100% collapsed - it was the size of a fist (normal size larger than 2L bottle) down at the bottom of the chest cavity and the x-ray wasn't big enough to see that on the first try.

Well, once they saw that, it was literally 4 minutes later that I had a tube sticking out of my chest. No local, no pain medication of any type, and they cut right through my pectoral into the chest cavity with a scalpel. Before the procedure, I remember one doctor asking, 'hey, shouldn't we be giving him some morphine?' and the head surgeon replied, 'this guy just flew with a fully collapsed lung, I think he can handle it.' Oh yeah, that's right - stripes from the doctor! It did hurt like a bitch, however, and the rush of oxygen to my brain (remember, I had only been operating on one lung) made me pass out. One more surgery (this time through the side - ouch, but at least used morphine), one month off work, three to six months of no serious strain, and back to normal!

The insurance settlement took a long time, and was confused by the fact it turns out I have an underlying lung disease. The doctor that was so sure at the time of care the collapsed lung was caused by the accident (and, thus, the whole reason I even pursued a settlement in the first place) changed his tune when the disease discovery came up. He then tended to think the collapse and accident were not linked, just coincidental. That pissed me off. From a 99.9% chance to at 10-20% chance. Without minimum 51% causation, no insurance company will settle. In fact, it now appeared that I would be responsible for the hospital bills (over $20K). Good times.

So I set off into some serious research (heck, all kinds of time from not being able to work out). Turns out there are very few materials available for exactly what happened to me because, well, no one flies at commercial airliner elevations with a collapsed lung (confirmed, my neighbor at the time was a helicopter medic and he says they fly just above the water along the coast when there is even a hint of a collapsed lung). So, I had pieced together some of the research, came up with my own theory, and took it to the doctor and the hospital's legal team. Three days later, the appropriate letter made it to my lawyer in Seattle, and the case settled just a day or two later.

After it was all said and done, my lawyer called me up to tell me he thought I could do well in the field. I was pretty shocked, I asked him what his basis for saying that was. He essentially said he thought I could have handled the case on my own, and well. I was surprised to find out what I had been doing was what lawyers do (and all this time I thought it was an intellectual profession!).

So, in 2005, I used the settlement funds as seed money for law school. I currently live in Sacramento, CA and attend the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. I will be graduating in December and then take the bar exam in February 2009. It probably comes as no surprise that I am foot loose and fancy free, i.e. single and no kids. Well, unless bikes count as kids, because I have five (and looking to grow).

Well, I guess that about sums it up. Sorry so long, but it is hard to put eighteen or so years into just a few sentences.

Best,
Jeff Jewett

PS – The last few years I have been throwing a kid- and family-friendly New Year’s Eve party at my parent’s house in Redmond, and anyone that has any interest in joining should contact me (916.833.2847 or trijeff@mindspring.com) so we can par-tay like it’s 1991.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Brad Newcomer

www.themadhouseproject.org

Scot Smith


Scot and Julie Westra at Nordstrom, Bellevue Square

Shawn Fernandez


I have a 5 year old son named Andreas. I got divorced about 2 years ago from my bitch ex wife. Sorry, still a little pissed. The counseling is going well. My therapist told me just a few more thousand and I’ll be able to let it go. Just kidding about all that - I’m fine. I have Andreas half the time and he is the love of my life. I live on the plateau, in Issaquah. I’ve worked for the same company for 16 years doing a lot of things for them but currently I’m Vice President of Sales and manage all of our business shipped from our Kirkland and Burbank California distribution warehouses.
If I don’t see you Saturday then our 20 year is right around the corner.

Shawn