Born and brought up in a small town in Illinois, I went to University of Illinois in Urbana. There I met and married a Korean war vet who had discovered that there were warmer places than Illinois....view moreBorn and brought up in a small town in Illinois, I went to University of Illinois in Urbana. There I met and married a Korean war vet who had discovered that there were warmer places than Illinois. He got his PhD in engineering, I got my MA and gave birth to five children, and we started looking for those warm places.
We went to the following places: Texas, Louisiana, Fiji, Queensland, Northern Territory, Samoa, Hawaii, Mexico, and Florida. The kids grew up and scattered.
For fifteen years, my husband and I lived on a sailboat in marinas in South Florida. We spent a lot of time outdoors, and another lot in libraries and bookstores. Finally, the balky diesel engine became too much of a drag, so we sold the boat and moved to Gainesville.
I’ve been a waitress; clerk-typist; worked in a library; college English instructor; interviewer for an economic survey; English teacher (high school and community college); very briefly, a substitute teacher (where I learned that teachers with ratbag classes get sick a lot more than other teachers); temp; word-processor operator; secretary; data entry person; general dogsbody to a MacFreak programmer / software developer / inventor; assistant to a bankruptcy trustee; and mailroom employee in a mailing service.view less