Christine Shirey:
CLASS OF 1967
High Point High SchoolClass of 1967
Beltsville, MD
Christine's Story
The 45th reunion was great fun! Thanks to the organizers--Nancy, Cheryll, Betty Jo, Janice, Bill, Dick, Ric (who have I forgotten?). I was told (repeatedly!) at the party that my hair is no longer red, which comes as a surprise to me. I don't know why I hadn't noticed. Mostly likely I was just gradually redefining "red" as what I was seeing in the mirror all these years. :~)
Speaking of years, I have lived (two times each) in Colorado, California, and New York, and I finally landed in Massachusetts in 1988. That made for a lot of cross-country moves, and leaves me with only one more US state to visit (Alaska). I've also gone "across the pond" every chance I got (not that many times), with the most recent two trips being singing vacations with the Berkshire Choral Festival (we sang in Canterbury Cathedral in 2001 and in Salzburg Cathedral in 2008). We sang with that organization in Vancouver, BC, in 2007, and we hope to join them in Edinburgh, Scotland, next summer (2011).
Berkshire Choral Festival is also where I met my husband, Bill Dowdall, in 1993, at the Festival's home base in the Berkshires. We've been back 15 times, and highly recommend it to anybody who likes choral singing.
Prior to that I was married for 20+ years and raised two cherished kids-turned-friends-for-life, who are now in their late 30s but are keeping me in suspense waiting for grandchildren. The kids are as peripatetic as their parents--Andy went to school in Houston and is now a software engineer living in San Francisco; Katy migrated through the south and midwest, went to school in Colorado, and drifted east again to live in nearby So...Expand for more
merville. She's a nurse practitioner at a teaching hospital in Boston. Bill's two kids live in Denver and Eugene, OR (including my three step-grandchildren!).
I left two teaching jobs and one graduate program when my first husband's job changes occasioned all those cross-country moves, and worked part-time after the kids were born until the move to Massachusetts. There I
joined the software industry as a CBT (computer-based training) developer, based on my scattered experience with my kids' computer club and teaching/training English and business/computer writing skills in public school, business (Kodak), and college (SUNY Brockport). That's called being in the right place at the right time!
I've been a software technical writer ever since (oops, one layoff lapse starting in 2008) with Dun & Bradstreet, Fidelity, Kurzweil, Dictaphone, Nuance, and most recently Pearson Education. I *love* what I do, and will probably never stop.
For fun, I've been leading walking tours on Beacon Hill for 16 years as a docent with Boston By Foot, serve as webmaster for my local chorus, tend our small vegetable garden and abundant perennial gardens, and follow Bill around the house cleaning up construction debris from his many DIY renovations on our 1893 Victorian (tin ceiling, pocket doors, decorative shingles, etc.). The kids' college tuitions pale in comparison to the bills this baby keeps handing us! We think of it as a stewardship kind of thing. In that same vein, we maintain four water barrels and two composters, air-dry all our laundry, and rely on public transportation. Maybe for the 50th reunion I will have sprouted leaves!
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