God Laughs while we're making plans.

Hard work, strong values and a strict upbringing, at least until my early teens, taught me to take care of myself, my responsibilities, and do my best and aim high.

These are guidelines laid down by my parents and I must say, have made a road map for my life. It didn’t take long for me to realize after my parents were divorced, that the only one watching out for me, was me. This after getting bounced around between six high schools in 2 1/2 years.

So I left California in my junior year, to join the “boy across the street” who had joined the army, in Kentucky, where he was finishing up his training. This during the worst snowstorm in Kentucky, in a hundred years.

Within six months we were married and I had passed my GED test at Pikes Peak College in Colorado Springs where he was stationed. Three years later, we returned to California and eight rocky years later, we were divorced with a four year old son and a one year old daughter.

When I married my new husband in 1993, I had had no intention of remarrying and was otherwise employed. He too had had no intention of getting married again and had just graduated from Art Center in Pasadena at a time when the economy would not accommodate a newly minted environmental designer from Art Center. So we turned our attention to the work he had done before going back to school, architectural rendering and together with four children in our newly blended family until we added the daughter of one of his cousin at six years old, we happily moved forward in our quest to succeed.

Having worked for a “Big Six” accounting firm since shortly after my divorce, I now had an opportunity to help my new husband grow his architectural rendering business. So while doing the accounting for and making an effort to market the business, as I “temped” to make ends meet, we grew something that started in our garage to something that has sustained our family for decades now and continues to support us and those who work with us as we move through life.

This beautiful life we live with our children and grandchildren, extended family and dogs, or “puppies” as we like to call them, is more than I could ever have imagined.

We are proof again, that God laughs, while we are making plans. Never would I have believed that the young man downstairs, would be my husband for the rest of my life, as we approach our thirtieth wedding anniversary.

I am grateful and happy. Greeting each new day with a sense of excitement and joyous anticipation. I can’t say that every moment of every day is filled with “rainbows and unicorns” but lately there are a few double rainbows, a love I don’t take for granted and an appreciation that can never be measured. So bring on the unicorns!