I am a genuine Florida Cracker having been born in the little community of Alturas in Polk County the second of five children. I graduated from Ft. Meade High School and attended Jones Business College in Orlando and earned an Executive Secretarial Degree. My first real job was in the Polk County Courthouse for the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. This is where I was working when Tim and I met and married. Soon after we married I had the offer of a job with the Florida Probation and Parole Commission and after a year of typing pre-sentence investigations was offered a job with the Clerk of the Criminal Court of Polk County where I recorded dispositions of Criminal Court cases.

Tim graduated from Florida Southern College in 1964 and accepted a job as Assistant County Agriculture Agent for Marion County and we moved to Ocala, and on to Weirsdale in 1967. We have a son, Gregory, a confirmed bachelor who lives close by, and a daughter, Tracey, who is married, lives in Orlando, and is the mother of our three absolutely beautiful and wonderful grandchildren. During the years that our children were growing up I was a stay-at-home mom. In the early 70’s I took an adult education class in cake decorating which developed into a good home based business for me doing primarily wedding cakes.

To combat the empty nest syndrome in 1993 we bought our first real computer, a Performa 550, as a joint Christmas present. Soon after getting our computer we joined OMUG, and then Lake Mug and VMUG. We know that the User Groups are vitally important to Mac users because we’re a select group that has to band together and learn from each other because use of the Mac is not generally taught in public education. We’ve made some very good friends through the user groups.

I have kept the books for our cut decorative greens business for the past 40 years and to this day can’t believe what a difference QuickBooks makes. I’ll confess that I had the program and resisted using it for about a year because I didn’t know where to start. I would spend 2-3 days doing statements that QuickBooks will do in 15 minutes. One day in 1995 I was determined that my computer and QuickBooks was going to work for me and the determination paid off that very day! Tim now does the invoices from the fernery and transfers to my desktop computer every few days. This gives us a good backup and the use of the Oki laser printer. At about the same time I also started using Quicken and soon learned it did a much better job than I did keeping up with banking business. I learned to reconcile my statements and even print checks with the click of a mouse. Once you have these programs working for you all the information is there to make filing your taxes with TurboTax almost fun. My main word processing program started with ClarisWorks, then AppleWorks and now I need to learn Pages. Having experienced the loss of six months of payroll information while trying to switch between two systems and having to reconstruct I decided to attempt putting the payroll into an Appleworks Spreadsheet and learned enough about using the formulas to make it work for our situation. I’m almost to the point of kissing 9.2 goodbye.

About seven years ago, thanks to our affiliation with the Lake Mug group and particularly Mary Ramirez, I was able to gain some valuable work experience with Madaba Digital Publishing in Eustis. I worked on a part-time basis for about three years and Mary taught me the basics of using Adobe PageMaker, the premier page layout program. With OS X came PageMaker’s replacement Adobe InDesign which I now use to do our church bulletins every week. I also use Nova Development’s Print Explosion for fun projects like making cards and various crafty items.

My last outside employment was for the Sugar Plum Shoppe in Ocala where I’ve always bought my cake decorating supplies. Jan called me one Saturday and asked if I would come work with them. Jan does printing of all types of invitations on specialty papers that sometime require an added touch which was part of my job. She uses a PC so I was not able to do much toward the actual layout and printing. I thoroughly enjoyed this work experience especially all the interesting people I met. The 50 mile round-trip was hard and with the price of gas we decided last fall that I should give up this part-time job. At the same time our son-in-law had started to travel with his job and I needed to be available if my grandmothering skills were needed. Our almost 8 year old grandson, Nathan, is autistic and in a special school in Orlando and I’ve enjoyed being able to do some volunteer work there.

Only L’Oreal knows how I’ve managed to do so many jobs and still have red hair!