Ballif, Blake

It's hard to believe that 20 years have come and gone. It has been great to read your blogs and to get a glimpse into what so many of you have been up to. I wish there were other opportunities to catch up more frequently than every 20 years or so. Here is a brief run down of my life. After high school, I attended BYU for a year before serving as an LDS missionary in Geneva, Swtizerland. When I returned, I completed my undergraduate and masters degrees in Molecular Biology at BYU. In the middle of that time, I was set up on a blind date by my good friends Mark and Marilee Durrant (they were not married yet) to one of Marilee's Orem High friends, Kara Streuling. To make a long story short, we were married in 1996 after Kara returned from her mission in Lithuania. We moved to Houston, Texas in 1998 to begin a PhD program at Baylor College of Medicine in Molecular and Human Genetics which we finished in 2003. After a brief stint in intellectual property law, we left the heat and humidity of Houston and moved to beautiful Spokane, Washington where I have worked for the past 5 years as the Director of Product Development and Research for a genetic testing company called Signature Genomics. We have 5 wonderful children: Cameron (10), Cade (8), Caleb (6), Paige (2), and Porter (3 months) that keep us really busy but we enjoy it. We love Washington and plan to stay here as long as we can. Life is good. I look forward to seeing all of you at the reunion. Thanks to all of those who have helped put this reunion together.