Nick Artim:  

As I look at the photos that each of you have posted I realize that we all still look good. My brief story is that after high school I went to engineering school in Maryland and then after graduation started my first job with the federal government. Through mutual friends I met Diane who is originally from St. Louis and was working on her graduate degree. After a couple of years dating we married and as soon as she finished her degree we moved to Boston where Diane had a post graduate opportunity. We very much liked Boston but after five years and the birth of our first child we knew that we were not city people and moved to Middlebury, Vermont. We have now lived here for 23 years and in Vermont, and by extension the Adirondacks, we have the hiking, skiing, kayaking and many other outdoor activities that we value. This is home. We raised two children, Dave who is now 24 and an aircraft engineer with Cirrus Aircraft and Christine who at 21 is in her senior year as a Chemical Engineering major at RPI. We enjoyed watching and being a part of their growth and in spite of not always knowing what I was doing as a parent, they both turned out well and we are close. We moved to Boston for Diane's job and when we arrived I had to figure out what I was going to do. Unexpectedly I received a telephone call from the facilities director at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa who said that they needed a fire protection engineer and was familiar with my experience with the U.S. government. It was not the perfect time to move and so he offered me a consulting engineer role to help them which ended up starting my own company. It was an accidental start and I never thought that I would be a business owner, but it shows that s...Expand for more