Ernest Twiss:  

I'll try not to exhibit my love for written dysentery, but I may fail! After graduation from Helix in 1964, I attended Willamette University and promptly flunked out in one year. I was much more interested in sex, drugs and rock and roll (and also the SDS and the Weathermen) than I was in studying. From there Uncle Sam tried to draft me into the US Amy in 1966. Since I had no interest in coming home in a body bag, I finagled an enlistment instead of being drafted. I attended Officer Candidate School and almost made it through before being injured (knee) and being washed out. From there I went to Ranger School and graduated. Then it was off to Ft. Holabird in Baltimore for some "interesting" training and an "interesting" evaluation and selection for "Black Ops" work. From there I went to the Defense Language School and I took a 13 week total immersion course in Japanese and I was then assigned to a Hawk Missile Battalion Headquarters in Okinawa. Sorry, but the rest of this part of my life cannot be told. After three years in the employ of the US Army, I returned to La Mesa and proceeded to try to adjust to real life again for a few years. I finally got serious about getting an education and picked up enough credits at various institutions to finally have enough of the right ones and I spent a senior year at the University of Chicago and graduated with a BS in Applied Mathematics. I returned to La Mesa and after a couple of years, I realized that I was not cut out to be a scientist, and I would rather work with people. I gave a lot of thought to what profession I should pursue, and I decided to pursue a profession in Procurement. I went to work at Stromberg Datagraphics in El Cajon on the end of an assembly line and after a year, I had made it to the purchasing department as an expeditor. Since one of the Buyers would have had to quit, die or find a better job for me to be promoted to a Buying position, The Director of Procurement found me a position as a buyer at Doric Scientific and up, up and away my career in Procurement went. It was during this period that I married my first wife. Let's just say that it didn't work out I finally made it into the Electronics Division of General Dynamics, and I became a Cost Analyst (a specialty within the Purchasing Department) and I finally found a job that I really loved and I actually looked forward to going to work every Monday morning. The highlight of my career was being chosen to spend 6 months in Copenhagen, Denmark training the Cost Analysis Department for the F-16 jet fighter NATO co-production and 6 months in Tel Aviv, Israel doing the same training for the IAI (Israeli Air Force) F-16 co-production. During this time, I taught Cost Analysis and Negotiations at UCSD in a professional certificate program, as well as many professional classes at several divisions of General Dynamics. Several years later, the Defense contracting industry started it's death spiral, so I left General Dynamics and started a very successful business as a consultant in senior level procurement issues. It was during this time that I met Evelyn Churchill, who was from first sight the absolute love of my life. We lived together as "husband and wife" without the marriage certificate for 4.5 years. Then one May, I took my nephew to Europe for the entire month. The day after we returned, Evie had a doctor appointment to get the results of some tests to diagnose some lingering back issues. Her doctor sat us down and proceeded to tell us that Evie had terminal cancer and he was putting her into Kaiser's Hospice program as she had less than 6 months to live. BIG SHOCK!! We got two more opinions and they were the same. Early on Evie decided that she was never going to spend any time in a hospital, and she threatened to castrate me with a dull rusty pair of pinking shears if I should ever take her to a hospital. We promised each other that she would die in our bed, in our home, cuddled up in my arms and without pain or suffering. Evie proposed to me and we were married 6 weeks before she died. It was a wonderful and beautiful time of our lives together. We then proceeded to live life to the fullest until the night she died in mid November, just as we had promised each other. Caring for her those six months were both the emotionally hardest thing that I have ever done and also the best thing that I have ever done. The next five years were a very dark period of my life with many bad things happening in my life, but I came out of them a better person. I finally met a lady (Jean Stockham) from rural Illinois online and I thought that I had found another gem. She was an elementary School Principal and she decided to leave the district that she had been in for six years after a year of marriage. We ended up in Beijing, China where she became the Principal of a small, but elite International school. We spent 3 years there in Beijing. After our second year in Beijing, we decided to adopt at our "advanced" ages (52 and 47 respectively). In China, adoption is a very complicated thing and the process can be likened to jumping through hoops while running in circles. We adopted an 18 month old toddler from Hefei that we named Abigail Julia Twiss. We left China about 6 weeks after she was adopted at the end of Jean's contract and returned to rural Illinois. Abby is now 16.5 years old and a sophomore in high school. She is the "All American Girl" (possibly because she got her first McDonalds Happy Meal before the day she got her visa to come to the US). She is considered by the school district to be "Gifted and Talented" and it has been five years since she has had a "B" on a marking period grade. She is very musical and plays the violin, piano and clarinet. She is also an athlete. She was in a competitive club tumbling program and six years ago was the bronze medalist in the National AAU Junior Olympics. Abby and I have been working since September of last year to have her apply and admitted to one of the top college prep boarding schools in the US. Friday the 10th of March is the day when the 17 schools that she has applied to publish their admission decisions and we are eagerly awaiting the decisions. In 2011, I was diagnosed with a stage 4 Squamous cancer. The presentation was a small tumor in the right lymph gland of the neck. After 13 biopsies, the primary site could not be found. I was treated extremely aggressively at the Veterans Hospital in Iowa City and the University of Iowa Medical Center. I received both Chemo and Radiation concurrently and it was really not a pleasant experience. Both my oncologist and radiologist respectively told me that there was a 30% chance that would not survive the treatment, but if I did, I would be cured. They were correct! I am now cancer free and living life happy and healthy. In 2013, Jean and I had a very acrimonious and bitter divorce. Being rural Illinois, she of course got custody and I got minimal visitation. After much thought and consideration, I chose to become an "expat" once more. Since I had been in every continent except South America (I didn't think that Antarctica was a viable option) I carefully vetted all the countries south of the US. all the way to Patagonia. After all was said and done, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador were on the short list. I visited Panama City and I discovered that it was way to "tropical" for me. Since I like the "big city" atmosphere and amenities, the less tropical areas, meaning rural were not of any interest to me. Colombia just had to many issues with taxation and bringing money into the country that I did not want to deal with. That left Ecuador on my radar. I became...Expand for more