Farewell, Devery and Easton!

Devery and Easton are leaving tomorrow to go back to Provo and BYU, and we'll miss having them around our house. It was a great summer and we're glad both of them were able to work lots of hours, make good money, and save for school. We'll see them at Christmas, and I suspect we'll make one or two trips to Utah to see them before school ends in April, but it doesn't appear likely that we'll get them for another summer. I'm sure Devery will be glad not to have to get up at 5:30 am to ride into work with me, and I know she won't miss having to escort an uncleared individual around the limited area at Sandia Labs anymore (notwithstanding the fact that the individual in question was Sean Naegle, a nice LDS kid whose father, John, is a distant cousin of mine). However, Sandia has been very good to Devery and has done a lot to pay for her college, and she's understandably a little emotional and nostalgic about leaving after five summer internships. I hope they have a great year at BYU, and they're in excellent position to do just that.

At Sandia Crest, pre-Wedding

Following up on my last post, here is a photo showing what Dorine and I looked like at about the time we were married in 1984. It's scanned and cropped from what was one of a roll of photographs that Mike P______, my then-future brother-in-law, took of us at Sandia Crest for our wedding announcements (although we ended up sending out prints of a different pose with the actual announcements). I think back on what a leap of faith it was to get married at all, given (a) that I still had three-and-a-half years of school ahead of me (not to mention several unforeseen years of difficulty finding a long-term career), and (b) that I would be stepping into the role of stepfather to Dorine's daughters Kristy and Heidi (then six and three years old, respectively). It was a good thing that Mike was generous to Dorine, who kept books for his software company, and that the girls were getting social security benefits as the result of their father's death (which benefits, fortunately, didn't go away after I married their mother), all of which enabled us to get me through school with essentially no debt. As you can see, Dorine was still a babe when I married her, and I like to think I wasn't half bad-looking, either. (Man, I wish I could still wear contact lenses!)