I am a quintessential Baby Boomer: my parents started dating after coming back to college on the GI Bill (both of them - Mom was in the Navy; Dad in the Army Engineers). [My husband Morris is not a Baby Boomer: his parents got married before WWII, and he was actually born a week before Pearl Harbor.]

I grew up in the 50's and 60's just ahead of the waves of Civil Rights and Anti-Nam activism.  My graduating class (1965) at Robert E. Lee High School was the largest ever likely to graduate from there, and the last segregated one.  The next year the school board  closed the G.W. Carver group of schools and opened Ross Sterling High, thus providing Baytown, Texas with its very own Mason-Dixon line.

I met Morris while at Valparaiso University.  He was an instructor in Psychology, and needed a student-assistant secretary who was not in any of his classes. He got me.

I was majoring in Theater, and just missing a second major in Geography. Between scenery design and cartography I discovered Mechanical Drawing, which was not a subject normally recommended to females in the first half of the 60's, when I was still in High School. It has been a reliably marketable skill: 18 years as-of the end of March 2005 with the Ark. Highway Department and another ten years before that with assorted industries and civil engineering companies.  While with the CE's, I drew a lot of municipal plumbing (endured it) and land survey plats (adored that: if I'd been a bit more of an outdoor person and a bit less of a brand-new parent when I was working for those people, I might have opted to apprentice as a Land Surveyor.)  I've been drafting on CADD for the last several years, and love it: it comes in handy when I want to sketch out a quilt.

With AHTD I have for the past several years been drawing mazes (aka construction zones). The powers that be finally twigged that there is more of this going on than just one designer can handle, and right after I got my 15-year pin the decree came down that the various design squads had to learn to do their own Maintenance of Traffic. I have been returned to the 6th floor, where I will be convenient for them to pick my brain, and I am getting back into designing piles of dirt and holes in the ground. (Think about it: any road work you see, they are either stacking up dirt and paving the top of it, or scooping out a trench and paving the bottom of it.)  

At the end of March 2007 I got my 20-year pin. I'll be 60 at the end of January 2008.  How much longer I keep working after that point will depend largely on the balance between the health of Morris's parents, and how un-bored I am by whatever I'm working on.

Morris is a retired psychologist, currently spending about half of his time in Mississippi helping to take care of his elderly and ailing parents. There's a lot of that going around in our generation..  HIS major hobby is electronics: computers and ham radio.

We have one daughter, Sharon Amanda, born 1984.  She is a pretty sweet kid, for being a fannish bright brat (easy on brat, heavy on bright).   Alas, she does not share my enthusiasm for sewing (though she appreciates the results -- she's just not interested in the process). She gradauted from good old Valpo in May of 2006. My brag sheet on her is here (in case you missed the first reference).

updated 5/4/2007