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About Me

I’m Karen. That is my real name; it’s easier for me to remember that way. Since Karens abound, especially in my age group, I’m also known as Karen D. (or KarenD or TheKarenD).

I’m in my mid-50s and just starting to consider that I might be properly called middle-aged. I plan to live to be 107 at least. I think I have a pretty good chance of succeeding; my maternal grandmother reached her mid-nineties.

I’ve lived in the United States my whole life. I grew up near Chicago, Illinois, moving to Michigan for college in the early 1980s (Go Spartans!). I stayed on after graduating and spent most of my adult life (so far) in the Detroit metro area, in a subdivision in a suburb with my husband, Mr. Karen (not his real name), whom I met in high school and have been married to since 1986. We’ve recently relocated to northern Idaho to ski and hike and experience life in a different part of the country.

I retired at the end of June, 2015. Prior to that, I worked for a small but growing software company, Purple Systems (not its real name), writing software for manufacturing companies and later managing developers but not writing much code myself anymore. In my pre-programming professional life, I was various flavors of accountant: CPA, auditor, corporate general ledger worker bee, consultant.

I’ve yet to establish a retirement routine that lets me pursue my hobbies as much as I’d like, which both confuses and frustrates me. Life maintenance tasks like laundry and grocery shopping and doing projects around the house and sorting through decades of accumulated possessions have sucked up most of my time in recent months, curtailing my ability to indulge my love of color by making quilts and knitting and painting my nails. I have managed to do some travel, so that’s good, and I have skied quite a lot more now that I’m retired, so we shall see how it all works out once I get out of this transitional mode.

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