Penny Brown:  

SEE UPDATE AT THE END--IT'S WORTH IT :) I was married for 22+ years to an intelligent, funny man who died in Jan 2006 of a rare blood disorder. I have a daughter Erin who is 26. She got her MA in Counseling at SSU in May 2012. My mom is still living and living independently with an electric wheelchair. My brother Tom (8 years younger than me) is a major computer geek, lives in Hawaii and works for Gemini Observatory. My father died of a brain tumor (same type as Ted Kennedy's) 3 months before my husband died. I worked for Sonoma County in the Human Services Dept as a social worker in Child Welfare for almost 25 years before retiring in Jan 2011. My work was hard and unrelentingly stressful. Thanks to Sra. Baumgartner most of my clients were Spanish-speaking. I am also a licensed marriage and family therapist, but I don't like the running the business part of a private practice. I worked with runaway teens in Sacramento and Contra Costa Counties for almost a decade before I returned to Sonoma County in 1985 and started in Child Welfare. I was been a little bit of an outsider because I had spent so much time trying to keep kids out of the system, and I remained resistant to much of the bureaucratic BS. I truly believed in protecting children and was willing to make the hard decisions, but I never forgot that I am not God and that compassion for some really unlikeable, nasty, usually frightened people was not only right but necessary. I liked college, UCDavis, as it got me out of the house. I was pretty much totally on scholarships and felt that I had committed myself to being a psych major. I had said that I wanted to be a psychologist when I grew up in the essay I had to write for the Georgia Pacific scholarship. Luckily, I really do like people, so it turned out OK, but I didn't explore as much as I might have otherwise. I applied to a number of large university graduate programs for a PhD in psych, but got turned down, equally lucky. I realized belatedly that I didn't want to do another 4 or 5 years of academics just to intern in a veteran's hospital. I liked normal people with everyday problems. As it turned out CSUSacto had a good master's degree program in just that. After a lot of delays I became licensed and have always worked in agencies or the government. We were always a camping family. Our daughter went camping for the first time when she was 1...Expand for more