Wendell Hartlauer:  

Life 7/11/07: I moved out of Eugene (and Churchill) when I was 16 years old. I have been on my own since. I went to Salt Lake where I went to Granite HS while working as a sign crafter. I finished HS at the age of 17 (I had enough credits to graduate a year early). Then I moved to Las Vegas where I was making the big neon/electric signs for the Strip (like Excalaber, The Flamingo, The Freemont, and The Mirage). I then started hanging around the wrong croud, then moved to Minneapolis for a year (a long cold winter). Then at the age of 19 I joined the US Army and was a helicopter crew cheif for 6 years. I left in 1996 as a non-commissioned officer to attend UCLA full-time. I finished a BA in International Economics in 1998. I met my wife Sally at UCLA. She is a wonderful woman who grew-up in the Philippines and had been working in the U.S. as a nurse for about seven years at the time. We moved to Seattle in 1999. I worked as a materials project coordinator for a large semi-truck manufacter. We bought a big dream house just north of Seattle. All of a sudden one day, things fell apart with us. She moved to Houston to be close to friends there, and I moved to China to pursue international business in Shanghai (and to practice my Chinese). After the 9/11 trajedy, I decided to come back home to the States. We got back together as I decided to leave the West coast and move out to Texas with her. We did a lot of worldly traveling during that time, bought a house in Houston and got a golden retriever puppy, Tumbles. In the process, something happened -- our son, Tyler, was born on October 19, 2002. Frustrated with business, I returned to school in Texas and became a RN. After the Hurricane Rita evacuation in Houston in 2005, we decided to sell our house and move to Arizona. We lived in Gilbert for one year were I worked at the Mayo Clinic in telemetry. That winter, we skied in Colorado often. That spring and summer, we took trips to the Mexico beach ...Expand for more