David,

Indirectly, I was invited to send you the following:

I worked at VSDL 10/92 to 4/95.

When my wife's tour of duty at the UN IAEA expired, we returned to our home near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she resumed working for the contractor that managed the national laboratory, and I found work as a contract technical editor. A year later, everything changed. Both our 22-year-old son and our 25-year-old daughter got married. Neither of us was happy in our work, so Nancy took an offer from a library automation firm in a college town southwest Virginia, we sold our house and moved, and I soon became an editor/writer for an environmental consulting firm. She now works for a different library automation firm and splits her time between a home office and traveling to deliver training. In addition to editing, I teach a prep course for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Our daughter delivered our first grandchild last August, and our son and his wife will become parents any day. We lead comfortable, uneventful lives, looking forward to doting on grandchildren and, like the rest of our generation, hoping the stock market will make retirement possible. I remain ever grateful to Rick Klopp for letting me get my foot in the door at VSDL...the money I socked away there became the beginning of our nest egg.

Though we haven't yet been back to Vienna, we remember our stay and travels in Europe fondly and keep in touch with a few people. Brant Evans and I trade e-mail, and John Hurley paid me a visit on his recent stateside tour. Through Brant, I occasionally get news about some of the IBM people I knew. My best to Mike Blake, Sam, and Gerhards Nagl and Shafer especially.