User:Chazdonaldson

I was born February 27, 1967.

Specifically, at Ft. Lewis up in Tacoma, and I was there for about two weeks when my Dad shipped out to Vietnam and my mother and I went to live with her parents during that deployment in San Rafael, CA. Dad returned in 1969 and we spent a couple of years at Hamilton AFB and then Monterey for a year.

In 1972 we moved to Bangkok, Thailand, and I started school at International School of Bangkok, attending 1st and 2nd grades. In 1974 we returned stateside briefly for a year and a half, living in Colorado Springs, and then Fort Carson, Colorado. In late 1975, we moved to Weisbaden, Germany, where I attended the rest of 3rd grade, and all of 4th and 5th. The following year, we moved to Mannheim, Germany.

We left Germany in 1978, moving to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. I attended 7th grade here, and also attended my first rock concert (KISS and Judas Priest) in Kansas City. The following year we moved again, to Ft. Lee, Virginia. I started 8th grade here, and got my first taste of attending a public school (did not like it). We left in the middle of my 8th grade year for Italy, thank goodness.

I finished 8th grade, and did all 4 years of High School in Vicenza, Italy. We lived and interacted among the Italian teens and spent all of our spare time travelling the country by train, as well as seeing all of the rest of Europe (except behind the Iron Curtain, remember the Iron Curtain?). I loved Italy, and would love to move back there (my Italian is rusty, but still good), even with the knowledge that their government is even more messed up than ours (if that's possible).

I moved back to the states upon graduation in 1985, and moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado for the summer. I spent that whole summer learning what American kids did, as I had no clue at that point (I had never even seen MTV!). That fall I left for Logan, Utah, and attended Utah State University for the next eight (yes 8) years. I studied Business Administration, Graphic Design, Environmental Science, and finally settled on Forestry. I left Logan in 1991 to briefly attempt a career in Memphis, Tennessee, but that did not work out as planned, and I was back on the west coast a year later, moved to a strange little town called Portland.

Except for a 1 year return to Utah in 1994, I have been in Portland since 1992. I love it here. I worked as an Arborist, and then a scenery builder and painter for a prop company, and finally took my lifelong interest in computers to work in 1999 as an intern for Multnomah County, and was hired in 2000 as a permanent employee. I got married at age 40 at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. No kids, one bossy cat. My current obsession is triathlon, and I am spending long hours training and working out towards that hobby