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Carolyn Coats (Medendorp)
Nobody tagged me but I'll add my 25 things anyhow.
1. My husband, Tom, and I just celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary.
2. We have 2 wonderful kids who presented us with 5 terrific grandchildren. For two weeks in October the grands will all be teenagers. The oldest three will be in college next fall (two sophomores and a freshman), the next is in high school and the yougest starts middle school in the fall.
3. Tom and I like to build houses but we're open to remodeling if there's nothing to build. We moved more times than I cam remember but always in the Greater Grand Rapids area until this newest house which is in Cadillac.
4. We own a small house in The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida. That's on the lazy Atlantic coast with none of the Gulf coat traffic unless you go far south. We like Florida from mid-October through mid-May. Then we head back to Michigan.
5. We used to be boaters and have wonderful memories of cruising the Inland Waterways of Canadian Lake Huron. Truly a beautiful place.
6. In 1993 I crushed three vertebrae while boating so we switched to motorhomes. It's wonderful to see the national parks and feel free to travel wherever we want. (This summer the motorhome is our home until the house is done.)
7. I have osteoporosis, diabetes, high things that should be low, low things that should be high and I took the familiar trek through breast cancer. Aside from back pain, I feel pretty good anyhow.
8. I started coloring my hair in my late 20s and always hated it. It was like I was ashamed of myself. In my 50s I said, "Enough" and now have a silvery hair color that I love love love.
9. I've gained so much weight that I don't even recognize myself in photographs. I personally think it's because I just eat too much but the doctors tell me it's also from the gym bag full of medicine that I take.
10. Over the last 20 years we had 7 boxers, usually two at a time. The first one was a pup but after that we adopted older dogs. I love rescue dogs. Our boxers usually weighed between 60 and 70 pounds and 120 to 140 pounds of dogs got to be too much for me to walk.
11. We just adopted a 13-pound 6-year-old Boston terrier. We've only had him about a week but he seems like a miniature little pistol like the boxers.
12. I love recorded classes from The Great Courses. I've been studying the history of early Christianity and the development of the Bible for many years. It's totally fascinating to me. I drove from Grand Rapids to Saginaw every week while my mother was declining with Alzheimer's disease. The courses made the drive a lot more bearable.
13. I worked as a freelance writer for much of my adulthood. I wrote for weekly papers and the Grand Rapids Press and Grand Rapids Magazine. I also taught journalism at Grand Rapids Community College.
13. I loved volunteerism and seemed to always have some kind of projects in the works. With our move to Cadillac I don't have any volunteer projects lined up so I'm currently making luminaria bags for the 2016 Relay for Life in Lowell, Michigan.
14. I met Tom at The University of Michigan and we married after my freshman year. I took college classes on and off until I finally got my BA (cum laude no less) from Aquinas College in 1988, the same year our youngest child graduated from high school. It never did me any good career-wise but it felt wonderful to have achieved that goal.
15. My father had researched my family genealogy so I researched my husband Tom's. I worked on it for maybe five years and had a great time doing it. I made friends with a family in the Netherlands (Tom is 100% Dutch) and they came to see us in the USA for three weeks in 1999 and we went to visit them in the Netherlands for a month in 2001. It was wonderful to have a native show us around.
16. I wonder where I was when so many of you were having such wonderful fun while at Arthur Hill. I thought I had a great time but when I read what lots of you did, I realize I was majorly out of it all. I'm still that way.
17. I love, love, love Facebook. I keep up with my brother and his children and my cousins and their children. I feel as if I know them even though we rarely see one another. Getting to know so many Hillites has been fun too. I really enjoy folks I didn't even know while in high school!
18. I used to quilt a lot but it started to feel tedious. I have projects almost done that I sat down 20 years ago and never picked up again. I love to learn how to do things but once I know how the spark goes out of it.
19. I won doll dressing contests and even served as a judge. I made awesome Halloween costumes. I sewed lots of fun things. I haven't touched my sewing machine in a long, long time.
20. As part of a Relay for Life team I spearheaded our team's participation in four huge Christmas craft sales. I made Christmas floral arrangements and decorated miniature Christmas trees and made ornaments of all kinds . It was almost a full-time job.
21. I'm a big fan of Bernie Sanders although I'll support Hillary if she ends up with the nomination. I figure we'll have a Democratic president in 2016 since the Republican possibilities are all nut cases. I suggest we don't discuss politics at the reunion.
22. Fifty years is a long time to remember! My life has been lived in wonderful waves. When one passed another presented itself. I'm positive I'm forgetting lots of interesting things but that was then and this is now.
I CHALLENGE SUE TRIER HANSON, JIM HANSON, JACQUE BERLIN, CONNIE SPARKS CLARK AND VAN ABBOTT AND AT LEAST THREE UNNAMED PERSONS.
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