From Geeks to glass ~ the beginning of Bill and Rae’s hot glass journey ~ Rae’s version.

[rae]

In the late 80’s and early 90’s I lived in Kirkland Washington.

This is a picture of me working as a Process Engineer.

I was riding the electronics boom working for a printed circuit company who would send me into companies such as Microsoft (yup Microsoft needed printed circuit boards ~ remember the mouse you had to add a card to your mother board in order for it to work ~ I didn’t design that but I did tell the engineer who did he should not have to use an eraser to clean gold fingers on the circuit board ~ gold is inert to the environment and if there is tarnish on the fingers ~ its not gold). Other companies included Nintendo, Boeing and several avionics companies. One of the companies I worked with was Rocket Research. I was a consultant on a circuit board “design for manufacturability” issue and worked with the Engineers in the Engineering lab. Little did I know down the hall in the rocket fuel test lab worked a hansom rocket scientist named Bill Grout.

This is Bill working for Rocket Research at Kennedy Space Center he is the cute one on the right :-)

We must have crossed paths in the company and could have even made friendly gestures like ships passing in the night. Later on in life I found we could have crossed paths in several places working, living and playing in the Seattle area. The angels that look down on us as we journey through our lives must get a kick out of these types of coincidences. But it wasn’t in a high tech company or a cultural event where I met the love of my life and the man that would transform me from an ordinary Geek into a Glass Geek ~ making me abandon the corporate world and adjusting my left brain thinking to right brain thinking ~ and eventually thinking from my heart and not my brain. I met Bill on a cyber dirt road in the backcountry of Montana after we had both had the crap kicked out of us ~ bruised and battered from being pulled through life’s ruthless and wicked marital knotholes. When the dust settled on that dirt cyber road we ordered ring sets from the Lord of the Rings collection

and eloped.