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Rather than provide you with a boring little treatise otherwise known as a Curriculum Vitae (CV for short, and basically a laundry list of professional accomplishments), I've decided to simply give you the skinny on a life that is becoming obese with tales of bravado and derring-do. I'll post the CV later for anyone who might be interested.

A native Chicagoan, I was born in 1959 exactly one day after The Day The Music Died. That's the day that Buddy Holly and his entourage had an unfortunate encounter with Planet Earth near Clear Lake, Iowa, one wintry night. To this day, I still claim Don McLean's American Pie as one of my favorite tunes.

To summarize all those years in The Great White North:

I was a southsider, meaning I was a White Sox fan. Cubs fans were unemployed bleacher bums. Da Bears are cool when they're winning. The best pizza in the world is found in Chicago. Try Gino's, Uno's, or Giordano's for an experience that redefines pizza. Man, is it ever cold up there.

No way, no how, am I going back. Ever felt -26° before? And that wasn't even close to the wind chill. As a kid I biked all over the south suburbs. Some things never change; I'm still biking like mad. Marriott's Great America was a lot of fun (that's long before Six Flags bought it). ChicagoFest was a blast. Listening to Styx before the rest of the world knew about them was very cool.

The ethnic neighborhoods were a lot of fun, and even educational. The beach over at the Indiana Dunes was a reasonable substitute for the real thing. Chicago's skyline is breathtaking, especially as seen from the planetarium. Man, is it ever cold up there.

I drove a delivery van for Dugan's Office Supply in my hometown Lansing. The "Terror of the South Side," I hustled tablets, White Out, and typewriter ribbons all over the place, keeping businesses functioning. Mom and Dad took my brother and me on a vacation every year to some point of interest, like Mount Rushmore, the Wisconsin Dells, and Lookout Mountain. You can't get much more American than that.

Man, is it ever cold up there.

And then I left home.

That was 1977. I went off to school at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. A church-based school, I had a great four years chasing majors in Marketing, Economics, and Religious Studies. I was Editor of the school paper my senior year , and a Statistics tutor.

But that was only the beginning. I headed off to Indiana University in 1981 to pursue my MBA. Once again, I focused on Marketing. The fabled case method of instruction was used heavily at IU, and so we spent most of our time analyzing case studies and doing role-playing exercises. It was at IU that I really packed on the weight. All those 3am "run for the border" trips to Taco Bell didn't help any.

And I would be remiss to not mention basketball. Going to the home games meant being able to see and hear Bobby Knight at his finest. I had the pleasure of teaching a lot of IU's star basketball players back in the 80s.

Never one to be satisfied with anything less than best and most, I decided to stick it out for the PhD. It's funny how academia works. They save the hardest stuff for last, whereas the military makes you hustle through boot camp at the beginning. While the BA and MBA were easy, the PhD was tough. Very tough. Suddenly I had to work.

It was during the PhD program that I met my future wife, Becky. I had gotten into bicycling once again, this time to lose weight. I was quickly hooked on the sport, and found out about a group of students from Anderson University who went to Florida each Spring Break to ride about 400 miles. I begged onto the group, and the rest is history (both marriage and cycling).

That was 1984. We were married in 1986, and for our honeymoon rode our bikes from Los Angeles to Boston. After 3,730 miles and 22 states, we packed things up and came back to Indiana for school. We count our honeymoon trip as one of our greatest accomplishments. It was the ultimate statement of both freedom and independence. We'll never forget it.

As I toiled on my dissertation at IU, I was hired as Lecturer of Marketing. Whereas before I had been simply an Associate Instructor since 1983, I was now in charge of the huge undergraduate Principles of Marketing course and curriculum. The pay was pretty decent for a graduate student, so we "lived large" as far as students go (i.e., we didn't have to eat mac and cheese for every meal).

During this time, Becky and I became heavily involved in ultramarathon bicycle racing. We traveled around the country riding in 200- to 600-mile events that tested or mettle like nothing else we had encountered before. This set the stage for even more extreme cycling in the 1990s.

In 1988 I decided it was time to move on. The dissertation was coming along nicely, and it was time to get a "real" job. I had decided I did not want to live in the north, so I concentrated on schools in the south. My former Department Head at WT, Dr. Winston Stahlecker, answered my letter. One thing led to another, and we met in San Francisco at a Marketing conference. I then visited WT and got a job offer. Becky and I made a couple of trips out to Canyon, and decided this would be our new home. I started teaching at WT in Fall 1989.

We quickly settled in to the Panhandle, bought a house in the country, amassed an impressive collection of dogs, and continued racing bikes. In 1993 Becky and I raced a tandem bicycle in the Race Across AMerica (RAAM), a 2910-mile nonstop journey from LA to Savannah GA. After 11 days and 9 hours, we made it across the US, averaging two hours of sleep per night.

It was an enormous test of stamina and resolve, not to mention our marriage. But we survived and now laugh about the challenges we encountered along the way.

As the 1990s unfolded, I was awarded tenure at WT and given a promotion. We also decided that it was time to start a family. Rather than have biological children, we decided to adopt from China. After what seemed like an eternity, we got Becca in September 1998, and our lives have not been the same since. She has blessed us in ways we never imagined possible.

In February 2002, we traveled to Changsha, Hunan Province, China, to adopt Bailee. Although Becca and Bailee are technically unrelated, they are sisters in our international family.

Do kids ruin your life? Not at all. Everyone warned us that we wouldn't be able to do anything once we had kids. They were wrong. We just bring Becca and Bailee along. We still do all the things we once did. We still travel a lot. I still bike a lot, and now have over 295,000 miles since 1984 (Becky had "retired" from competition long before Becca arrived). And we still have fun.

My wife and I are both very active in our church, where we play in the band at our very "alternative" Project 707 gathering on Friday nights. I also teach a Sunday morning class and a Sunday night small group.