Birthday Greetings

Happy Birthday,
MONICA!

[I'll try and call you tomorrow...]

Hey All!

Hey All!

It was weird to come home one evening to find a message from Robin. It flashed backed many years of memories in about 30 seconds. I had to call to see what she wanted. This is a great idea to have a place to keep in touch and to see how everyone is doing, and where everybody now lives. (Thanks Schmer!) It was great to read over all the blogs you guys posted. I do not know where to start. Well, I guess I will let everyone know what has been going on with me.

First, I have been married to my lovely wife Kristin that I met in college for 9 years this past September 16th. We lived in Wheaton, Illinois where I worked in Oakbrook as a Financial Analyst for about 3 years. The cost of living and the crowds got to us, so we decided to pick up and move somewhere else. What drove me nuts was that I only worked 6 and half miles from work, but some days it would take me as long as 30 to 45 minutes to get home because of traffic. Eventually I had enough, so we picked up and moved to Louisville, Kentucky. Everyone is probably asking themselves why Louisville? We wanted to stay within 4 to 5 hours from our families. So we said we would look at some of the cities around. We went to Louisville first and fell in love with it as soon as we visited and said let’s move here. I sent out resumes and landed an awesome job. I always wanted to get into commodity futures and options trading. I then started working for Eastern Livestock Co. where I was the Risk Manager there trading futures and options hedging the company’s cattle inventory. I traded cattle and grain futures for the company through the Mercantile Exchange and helped the company manage their overall financial risk there for 6 years.

During those six years we started a wonderful family. We are in a great neighborhood here in Louisville called The Highlands. We have 2 great kids. Emrick will be 5 this February and Carley will be 2 in December. As soon as I get a chance to get a picture of them online I will upload it to the blog. I would love if everyone else would post pictures of themselves and their families. Pictures are fun to look at. (I really do not know why I had a tie on in the picture of the gang dinner??) The kids are awesome, I love being a father, and it is one of the greatest blessings in the world. Kristin worked when we first moved down here but after we had kids she now stays home with the kids and is really enjoying being a mom, and she does a great job at it too. We are currently looking at schools for Emrick to start kindergarten next year.

I just moved from my job at Eastern about 6 months ago. I am now employed at Summit Energy Services Inc. as a Risk Manager. Summit is an energy management firm. I now am taking my futures and options experience over the last 6 years as a Risk Manager at Eastern and am now helping Fortune 500 companies put risk strategies together to help them in their energy purchases. The energy markets have been insane lately, and these companies really look to us to help them save money. It is a challenging job, and I love it. The markets are in my blood.

The rest of my family is doing well. My parents are still in the log cabin in LaPorte that they moved to when I was in college. They live really close to John and Robin. My sister Kristy and my brother-in-law Rick are living in Hobart and have two kids Tyler, 12 and Amber, 10.

With most of my time working, being a dad, and a husband, I try to find time to do other things. I am really involved at a church (Southeast Christian) we started attending 5 years ago. I have learned so much over the years, it’s been amazing. My life has changed so much for the good. I am taking Discipleship classes on Tuesday mornings to learn more about the Scriptures, because for about the last year and a half on Thursday nights I have taught at a local prison as a volunteer running a bible study. It is awesome and I am enjoying it a lot. The inmates love for us to come in and help them learn and to listen and help with their problems. Hopefully, they find Christ in their life and become a better person so when they do get back out in society they do not return to prison.

Well, it looks like a lot of you do not get on the blog too often, but I hope to hear from you all soon. Let me know of when the get together is going to happen and I will try my best to get there to see everyone. We need to try to find Lemley, and Schmitty. Has anyone heard from Bencie yet? I look forward to hearing from everyone.

Everybody take care, and if anyone wants to contact me my email address is kbswan1@yahoo.com or bswan@summitenergy.com

Brian

Howdy

Well, it's been a bit silent here as of late. I definitely feel responsible and derelict in my duties.

I certainly apologize for not being around much, but I was in the middle of a grueling, emotionally taxing, job search and it really ended up getting me down. You'd think that this city would be breaking down my door to hire me as a Kindergarten teacher, but that isn't quite the case. I finally, after a few miserable weeks of being a day-to-day sub at various schools around the city, ran into a teacher from my substitute teaching school a couple of weeks ago at breakfast. She asked if I had found a job, I said that I hadn't, and she mentioned that because the school had recently been designated as "low performing", they were able to hire, and still in need of, a site support sub. I signed the paperwork today. I don't have a classroom of my own, but I'm at this one school [3 blocks from my apartment] everyday supporting all of the other teachers, and the school as a whole, in whatever way they need me to.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I got a new poll going over to the right. Only one person voted to have the reunion before Christmas day. Therefore, it looks like we're having it after, and the choices are the first few days after Christmas Day. What with my now having a job to go to every day, it looks like coming back to Chesterton for Christmas is in my cards. In fact, I'm hoping to come back for 10 or 11 days [school isn't in session the week before and the week after Christmas]. Things got SO desperate recently that there was a good amount of time where I seriously considered moving back to Chesterton to live with my parents for 6 months or so. I thought it would be a good way to save money and try to reconnect with the family. It was also suggested by a friend that I move down to Indianapolis and live with my little brother and sister-in-law and be their live-in nanny [they are expecting their first child at the beginning of March] - which I would SO do. But, this new job came through, and it looks like I'm going to try to make here in San Francisco for a little while longer. If you feel like, for whatever reason, you need more info on what I've been doing the last couple of months, be sure to visit my personal blog - the link is on the sidebar over to the right. Yeah, I've still been updating that one periodically.

I certainly hope that everyone checks in here soon and we can get this thing in motion again. I really do think it's a great, easy, free way for us to reconnect and stay in touch. I may not have felt like posting anything recently, but I've still be coming here every few days to see if anyone else has put anything up. I'm still dedicated, and I hope that you all are as well.

Diana, any luck getting in touch with Snearly's family?

Oh, and I realized that I selfishly never gave any kind of update about what I've been doing since CHS. Here it is:

I went down to IU and intended to get my teaching license [elementary school] by graduating from the School of Education. I went through the program, did a semester of student teaching in a 2/3 grade classroom at a cute, rural elementary school. I still had a couple of "elective" units to fill, and, never filled them. In essence, I dropped out of school to work at various places that I had always wanted to work. I worked at an "arthouse" movie theatre for a few months, worked at a coffee shop/bread shop for awhile, worked at Ben & Jerry's [ice cream is still my favorite food ever] for a couple of years, and then worked in MUSIC STORES for a bunch of years. I was in Bloomington for 8 years and finally decided that I needed a change so I moved out here to San Francisco in 1997 with a friend who was coming out here for school. I worked for a couple of years in a music store here, and then started temping, hoping to find "my passion". While working in boring office after boring office, I finally realized that I needed to go back to school and get my teaching credential. I finished up my B.A. in 2002, and then did a 2 year teaching program, at San Francisco State.

I'm still voraciously into music, with a CD collection that has crested 1000 [and, now that I have a steady, well-paying job, I hope to keep that number on the rise]. I still love the Cure [saw them live a month ago], I'm still a diehard Tears for Fears fan [I'm going to see them at the end of November - Curt AND Roland are back together with a new album!], and my life still has a constant soundtrack. I'm still a TV addict. Current favorite shows: Arrested Development, 24, Alias, AMAZING RACE [!!!], the Apprentice, Scrubs, Six Feet Under, Starting Over [daytime reality show...], and Lost. Favorite show of ALL TIME: Felicity.

Oh, and, roundabout 1991, I realized that I'm gay. I imagine that it probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone - in fact, I'm guessing that I was the last to know. You just can't fathom how much coming to that realization turns your world on it's head. I mean, it just sends you into a total tailspin and makes you question everything you ever thought you knew about yourself and the world around you. In many senses, coming out was a great relief. Certainly, for a long time I knew that there was something about myself that I wasn't 100% conscious of, and so finally figuring it out was a HUGE breath of fresh air. But, there are lots of other questions and hardships that come along with it. So, I've been with the same guy, Brian, for 8 years now [we met at IU], and we have 2 cats - Macon and Sam.

Ok, that's enough. Hopefully I've made up for a bit of lost time...