Kevin Ortegel:  

Life I think I pretty much covered a lot of the details regarding the last ten or so years after graduating from high school in my other bio categories, so maybe we can keep this life bio to a minimum... I met my wife Meri while I attended grad school at Illinois State University, and have been married since June 3,2000. We have three great boys: Mason (4), Elias (2) and Wyatt (5 months). We live in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I commute fifty miles each way to my job at NASA in Washington, D.C. (hopefully not forever!). I have been at NASA as long as I have been married, as we moved out here the same week that I graduated and got married. With that said, I was in fact here when our country was attacked on September 11, and a lot of friends and family were concerned that day because I had been working in a joint NASA/DoD office in Crystal City that did a lot of meetings in the same wing of the Pentagon that got struck. Unbeknownst to my friends and family however, I had transferred back to NASA Headquarters downtown three months prior, but would have likely been there that day had I still worked there. It's worth mentioning that during that day the phones were out, my high school bud Tony Kroll emailed me to ask if I was okay. Realizing that Tony could communicate with my wife from Illinois although I could not, I replied to his email and asked him to call my wife to tell her I was okay (at the time she was pregnant with Mason) and Tony became a conduit for us that day to arrange a rendezvous once I was able to evacuate the city. He did us a solid that day that we'll never ever forget. It was the only time since living here that a four-hour one-way commute trying to evacuate didn't seem like that big of a deal. Three months to the day prior to this event, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior for the first time in my life although I had been raised Catholic and attended Catholic school through eighth grade. I consider myself a born-again Christian and am more in tune with my faith than ever before. My first priority as a father is to make Jesus a very familiar person in my children's lives so that they can get to know him earlier in their lives than I did. Speaking of fatherhood, I enjoy it very much and focus most of my free time to being very involved in their lives. For me it's very exciting to be involved and just observe them as they experience new things and activities. The greatest time of day is when I come home from work all three are eagerly waiting at the door for me to pull in the driveway, and they greet me with a superstar's welcome complete with shouting and yelling about how daddy is home. I know it's too much to ask for, but I hope to continue developing a strong relationship with my kids so that they're as excited to see me when I get home when they're fourteen as they are now when they are four. I am so blessed to have a great wife, a great job, and great kids to come home to every day. Outside of that, I like to do online trading, play fantasy football (Go Giants!), partake in a good wine (red only!), and now that I've been living here for seven years I have started to appreciate and enjoy NASCAR. Kyle Busch rules and Hendrick drools! College Upon release from the military, I spent two semesters at UIC, commuting to my parents' home in Mokena where I stayed for a while. By Spring 1994, I transferred to Columbia College to pursue a degree in film and writing. In doing so, I picked up my required classes at Joliet Junior College and Harold Washington College. Yes, that made me a busy boy, but I wasn't paying $1000 a class at Columbia to take "Physics for Complete Idiots!" By 1995, I was living, working, and going to school in Chicago with my high school bud, Jon Trainer. We lived on the Northwest side for two years...I don't remember the first neighborhood of the top of my head, but they may as well have called it "B.F.E."...it was on Leavitt somewhere...a real dead zone for nightlife...probably not now though. Our second apartment was a dinky joint in Wrigleyville, but closer to civilization. Jon and I were both in film school trying to develop the chops to make the next indy masterpiece, but it never materialized. Our "highlight reel" if you will, was working on a disaster film directed by none other than Nick Celozzi (You know his dad from the Celozzi-Edelson Chevrolet ads). When I say disaster film, I don't mean a movie like "Twister"...I'm saying that the FILM was a total disaster because to call it a "film" would be a very loose sense of the word...I remember Jon and I laughing when we first read the script, thinking that it was just a draft. We weren't laughing when we got to the set the first day and found out that what we read was the final version. And what did I get out of it? A scar on my left hand from mishandling a boxcutter one day on the set (Jon and I worked on the set construction) that I still have today. The royalties we were promised didn't exactly ever make it our way...I think you have to SELL the film to someone before that actually happens, which this film was WAY, WAY, WAY far from happening...ever. Anyway, I digress... So what I was trying to say was that by the time I graduated from Columbia, I had pretty much soured on the whole Hollywood idea, so I took a year off and in 1998 I went back to my "roots" by going to Illinois State for a Masters' in Political Science. I interned at a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. (what is with me and these work-for-free gigs?!?) in the summer of 1999. No shinola...I BORROWED money via student loan to work for free in D.C. for a summer! Needless to say, I never felt poorer. To make it by, I initially stayed at the Hostel for like ten bucks a night and would buy my food as the meals occurred because the idea of a "community kitchen" didn't thrill me, and the few times I did put food in there, it usually got stolen. One time my roomies and I (four of us) discovered some tourist punk sampling the goods in the kitchen one day, so we made him a batch of Ex-Lax brownies and put it in plain view for him to take. He took the bait and we had a good laugh while to jerk spent the entire night going back and forth between his room and the john. I would later receive ...Expand for more