I probably don’t need to remind any of my fellow refugees that this month makes a year since the layoffs and buy-outs that changed many of our lives.

I personally feel ten years younger, (and I’m a way better cook), but I’m sure the pressures of unemployment and a sour ecomony have taken their toll on many of the fine journalists who either left or were forced out as the Tributanic began to list.  Ex-Courant folks are a resilient lot, though, and those I’ve encountered seem to be in pretty good spirits despite the industry’s woes.

In any event, most of us, I think, have a soft spot in our otherwise hardened hearts for the great collection of talented people The Courant managed to assemble during our time there.

So maybe this would be fun. Send me a little email about where you are now, what you are doing, and anything else you’d like to say to the alumni, but write it in the third person. (It’s more therapeutic that way.) I’ll post them as they arrive and perhaps collect them all up on a standing page. (I’ll accept photos, too.)

I’ll start:

Since taking a buyout, former iTowns editor Paul Stern has been enrolled as a culinary arts student at Manchester Community College and has only cut himself once. (On a can, not a knife.) He is currently serving an internship as a volunteer cook at The Hole In The Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, where he learned how to crack 400 eggs in under an hour. In his time off he paddles his kayak, mows his lawn and continues his long tradition of being a smart-ass by writing this blog.