Hi from Oregon, long time, no see!

Ed Hendrickson inspired me to write a post and I hope to be at the reunion. After AHS, I went to UNI, edited the literary magazine, got bored with school and then worked graphic arts jobs of several kinds for a few years, and I was living at the old Mandalay mansion in CF the night it burned down. I then married my wonderful husband Joe, and we moved to Oregon. I worked miscellaneous jobs, including my worst job ever, which was pulling 40,000 plastic parts a day out of an injection molding machine; this motivated me to go back to school, all the way to licensing as a pharmacist. It was Floyd Sturdevant's chemistry class at AHS that convinced me I could do that. I have worked in long term care, outpatient pharmacy and in physicians' offices.

Along the way, I wrote, from volunteer organization newsletters to interviewing candidates for governor for the college paper, to writing pharmacist's continuing education. We lived in a small house for years, with many kids nearby and helped look after the kids in one family in particular. We moved into a '70's barf-o-rama decorated house in 1995 and re-did the whole thing, learning to do virtually every job ourselves, I earned an MBA, ate "rubber chicken" with other pharmacists at meetings several nights a week and signed up for a comedy improv course twice, to deal with the stress. Little did I know...that the fun was about to begin.

During the last ten years, it's been up, down and sideways for our careers, we moved to another Oregon city and back within a year (not the right town for us) and several friends have been wiped out financially and had health crises and even passed away, in these rough economic times. While cleaning out closets, I found my old Milton's Marauders t-shirt from band, which was my favorite thing from AHS, and I saw Guys and Dolls locally here, too.

It's been 40 years, unbelievable, and it seems like I'm just getting started. Hope to make it to the reunion and see many of you. I can still do a 3/4 turn, band members, can you?

Sue Bliss