Doug Dahlby

After high school, I made that California trip to UC Davis, as did several others like Steve Rojas, Karen Cummings, Michelle Whetten, and Keith Goldman (and Sumi Hong?). I only bumped into Los Alamos alums infrequently, but had a great time in college. The first year, I finally grew from 5'8" to 6'2", and bulked out from Twiggy-skinny to just regular skinny, so pick-up games of basketball and volleyball became a lot more practical than they had been. Plus, I already had a mean hook shot, since that was the only shot I could make against Keith when he and I played basketball in high school, and he had a 6 inch height advantage. I kept in close touch with Allen Hopkins all through college, and we hung out in Los Alamos a lot during vacations.

After graduating from UCD (Aeronautical Engineering) in '91, I didn't feel ready for the responsibility of a real job, so I headed off to the SF Bay Area for grad school at Stanford. I stayed there for 4 1/2 years for my Masters and PhD (in aeronautics and computer science). I just missed overlapping with Mike Han, who graduated just before I started grad school. I did see Suruchi Bhatia and Priscilla Hsue briefly, when they were doing their medical school residency(?) at UCSF.

I got a job at the start of 1996 doing computer programming at a small wireless communications company (ArrayComm) in San Jose straight out of grad school. Eleven years later, I'm still at the same job, and still enjoying it pretty well, though now I'm telecommuting across the country from North Carolina.

I got married in May 1996 to Jaclyn Kim, whom I had met at the church we attended in Palo Alto. We were both conscripted to help teach the children's Sunday School classes at church, and got to know each other when we spent a year as co-teachers. Allen Hopkins flew out to be one of my groomsmen. Jaclyn and I spent the first 5 years of marriage living with her parents in Fremont, CA, since we couldn't afford our own house. While living in Fremont, I noticed that Christy Lundberg was a docter at the local hospital. Both of our children, Ethan and Anna (now 6 and 4) were born in Fremont. We finally bought our own house in Fremont in 2001, but only stayed 3 years before deciding that we couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area, save for our kid's college funds, and save for our retirement at the same time. California was a great experience and lots of fun. In particular, I treasure lots of good memories of college friends, and of hiking in the coastal redwood forests, and in Yosemite and the Sierras. (Hiked up Mt. Whitney a couple times, White Mountain once, and went halfway up Split Mountain and Mt. Shasta.) So, in 2004, we left the Bay Area for the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. We briefly considered moving to Northern Virginia, across the river from Washington D.C., which would have put us in the same neighborhood as Steve Rojas after he moved from LANL to the Pentagon. However, we found that Northern Virginia was darn near as expensive as California. We've enjoyed North Carolina pretty well since we arrived in November 2004. Though we miss the real mountains of out west, being within driving distance of both the beach and the Smoky Mountains here is fairly nice. However, after living in the Southwest and West, we're still trying to adjust to the summer's humid heat.

My family still lives in Los Alamos, so we try to return to visit every year or so. I've been able to visit Allen during these visits, and have also kept loosely in touch with Jon Engleman, and have seen Michael Fu a couple times. I've also stopped by to see Steve Chavez's parents a few times, who still live next door to the house I grew up in. I met up with Chris Knight in San Jose several years back, on one of his business trips to the area.

I haven't had much time for hobbies since the kids came along, but still enjoy running, hiking, and backpacking in the mountains, when I have the chance. I'm very much looking forward to the 20 year reunion, as another excuse to visit Los Alamos again, but in particular to see some old familiar faces and hear what people have been up to since the high school days.

Doug
doug.dahlby@gmail.com