This blog came about as a result of losing my special feline friend Skipper the Boat Cat. I had written stories about Skipper over a several year period while my husband and I lived part-time on our sailboat with Skipper. Following a brief illness, Skipper died and as a way to manage my sadness I began compiling all of the blogs I had written about him and wanted to find a way to share them. This is that way.
I am a retired counseling professor and former marriage and family therapist. Prior to retiring, I became involved with the Kettering Foundation and began teaching, facilitating, and training people to use deliberative dialogue to help address divisive issues in communities. This work reflected my long time commitment to community building, having been a founding member of a housing co-op that is still going strong after 40 years, and of an ongoing Mother’s support group that helped spawn 10 other such groups more than 30 years ago.
My writing is typically self reflective musings tinged with humor about things I care about. Following our retirement from teaching, my husband Stan Irvin and I moved from Austin Texas to the small coastal town of Rockport Texas where we opened his Stan Irvin Unique Clay Works pottery studio and gallery in downtown Rockport.