Linda Montgomery:  

Life My husband Eric and I own a house not far from Blackford where we live with our three cats. It was handy for getting to my parents' house in a hurry when needed during their final years. With the economy the way it is, I was laid off from my programming job of 14+ years in Oct 2003 and couldn't find another job. My skills had expired. These days, applications programming is mostly done in other countries. At the advice of a career counselor at De Anza, I've switched career paths to one that can't be exported. I spent two fun years working as an IT intern at NASA/Ames while I carried a full load of classes at Foothill College. All that hard work paid off! I was employed as a IT Technician with Microsoft and Cisco certificates from Foothill under my belt. That lasted until a double concussion from an auto accident affected my memory and I lost some skills. After 18 months of attempting to recover, the company was upgrading all department staff and I was let go along with another employee with less than optimal skills. Update: a temp job I got in October 2014 turned out to be the perfect job for me. They desperately needed my special skill set of easy-to-follow documentation (a coping method for my damaged memory) and the skills I had already relearned. They added a new position for me and I've been working as a Help Desk Tech ever since! The City of Sunnyvale is the best place I've ever worked. I plan to retire from here when I turn 67. You may not know I'm an amateur artist. I create a Christmas card depicting my hubby and me with our current pets every year. My latest art is a design my high school slumber party friends (plus a few) and I wore on t-shirts for our getaway to the woods in Corralitos in September 2007. Twelve "Boomer Babes" made the trip to celebrate a group birthday. Two years ago, 10 of us went to Disneyland to celebrate turning 50 along with it. What a blast! You can see the designs on my webpage. I'm proud of them. We don't have kids of our own, but I absolutely adore my nephews and I'm very proud of the fine young men they've become. I contributed a lot of silliness to their childhoods and it shows! Every kid needs an adoring auntie to take them fun places, spoil them and teach them to sing in munchkin voices. I've also contributed to the lives of my cousin Judy's orphaned sons as much as possible. Eric and I consider Brandon and Jonathan to be "our boys". I'm proud of all our young men! Both are married now. I got to be mother of the groom for Brandon. What a blessing these young men are to us! I'm a great-aunt! My two nephews have three little boys between them and a baby girl born on Labor Day 2016. Yay! More little ones to spoil! I took classes in voice-over at a school in Sausalito for years. I had so much fun with it! If you visit Musee Mechanique on Pier 45 in SF, listen to "The History Of Amusements" near the carousel display. I'm several of the voices making comments over the photos. The voice-over quest is on hold for now. Eric and I spend our vacations going on tours of air & space museums and show caves around the US and visiting his family in Kansas. Love the history of the planes! Love those cave formations! Love the in-laws, too. Life is so much slower there, it's refreshing. Our visit in July 2007 got Eric in the local paper for a restaurant review. We had lunch next to a bunch of young Amish families (yes, Amish in Kansas) in a new cafe that offered jalapeno burgers. Eric loves jalapenos and was delighted. Opening lines: Local boy moves to California and develops a taste for jalapenos. In prior visits he had to put his taste for spicy on hold..." lol One place we've visited and enjoyed so much that we will visit again when possible is The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas where they've collected an incredible amount of space artifacts from the US and around the world including rocket engines, V1 and V2 bombs (disarmed, of course) lunar landing backup units and a backup Sputnik. There's so much there we have to go back to see it all. The other place that awed us was the National Museum of the US Air Force near Dayton, Ohio. Eric loves warplanes. Our visit hooked me on them, too. We went two different days and still haven't seen it all. In September 2009, we explored as much of Arizona as we could in 8 days after seeing the Blue Man Group in Las Vegas. Great show! We were amazed by the beauty in AZ. We were awed by Meteor Crater and Grand Canyon. Being a rock hound most of my life, my personal favorite was the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. It was hard to leave the pretty stones there but I managed. Kartchner Caverns was the cave tour for the trip. We highly recommend it. Pima Air Museum was one of Eric's favorites. Both Kartchner and the air museum are in the south-eastern corner of AZ, not far from Tombstone. We finished up our trip by traveling on Route 66 back to Nevada for the flight home. The Road Kill Cafe in Seligman is a great place to eat. March 2012 we celebrated ou...Expand for more