Welcome

Let me start by telling you how I ended up where I am in life.

I have wanted to write ever since I could write, starting when I was in third grade. I took an entire notebook and wrote a title on every page, such as "My favorite animal" or "What would I do with a million dollars." I intended to go back and write a story under every title until my mom found out. She went wild and made me erase everything. "What were you thinking, wasting an entire notebook like that!"

That may be where this fear of broadcasting my writing came from. In any event, when I graduated from high school, I dutifully went off to college. I officially declared my major as undecided for the first two years and then boldly announced I would major in mass communications. My dream was still to write, but mass communications made it sound like I planned on getting a day job to support myself. As it turned out, I dropped out after three and a half years when I ran out of money and didn't feel secure enough to take out a student loan.

I moved home, got a job in the deli at the local grocery store, and eventually rented a mobile home with my friend Brenda. She was working the late shift at Hardee's, and one night at one am, she came home and woke me up.

"We have got to get out of Tomahawk. Let's just up and move somewhere."

So I dragged myself out of bed and pulled out the atlas. We made a list of places we thought would be cool to live in and mailed letters to their chambers of commerce asking for information. It was 1984, way before the internet was in everybody's home.

The place that came out the winner was Castle Rock, Colorado.

We packed up Brenda's car at the end of August and drove 1200 miles to a place we had never been. We arrived around one o'clock on a Friday afternoon, checked into a hotel, and each had a job by noon the next day—Brenda at the McDonald's, me at Daylight Donuts.

That night, we went to Pizza Hut to celebrate. Being ever the klutz, I dropped a piece of pizza in my lap. We started giggling, but just then, the waiter came over and asked how we liked our pizza. We controlled our laughter and managed to tell him that it was fine. He promptly replied, "Does that include the pizza in your lap?"

I thought to myself, "There goes your tip." But as soon as he walked away, our giggles turned into guffaws. 

And how I ended up back in Tomahawk, working in the medical field for thirty-plus years, will take more than one blog post. But I'm glad you read this far and hope that you come back. 

(Not Pizza Hut pizza. We had this in Cambodia last fall and I updated this blog post to add this picture. When I first started writing my blog, I didn't know how to add pictures yet.)