The Young Adult Years

Of course, being a teenager, with somewhat of a rebellious streak, I just had to see more of the world when I grew up and knew all the ways of the world. So I attended college for one year at Mat-Su Community College, and then hit the road for Southern California. I went to college in California - Rancho Santiago Community College and Long Beach City College. I never did a degree, just took a million classes. I wanted to be an attorney. I got a job with a law firm soon after arriving in California, starting as a legal secretary and eventually being promoted to Paralegal. Working for attorneys, and not being an attorney, was definitely my calling. I worked for an attorney who handled a class action lawsuit against asbestos manufacturers for primarily those who worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.

Eventually I met a man and got married, and got pregnant soon after. Long story short, I had a beautiful daughter, who is now 15, and we moved to Phoenix, Arizona. I worked for a law firm there that had been set up to handle a class action lawsuit against Motorola for dumping chemicals into the ground water of certain parts of Phoenix. After a year or so I decided that my daughter and I needed to return to Alaska, which we did.

We moved back to Wasilla in 1994, I got divorced shortly thereafter. I went to work for a couple of attorneys in Anchorage. We mostly handled corporate matters and some real estate. They retired and I went to work as a process server for a company out of Anchorage. A process server is a person who "serves" or delivers court documents to someone who is being summoned to court for whatever reason. It's interesting for sure! After a few years of this and some personal challenges with my ex-husband, I decided we needed a change so in October of 1997 my daughter and I loaded up our car and hit the road.

I thought we would move to Kansas City, Missouri as I have family there, but along the way we went to visit some places we might not have a chance to see any other time. We went all the way to Buffalo, New York, then down to Kansas City. After a few weeks in KCMO I had a job offer in Buffalo, and decided to head back there. I met Ryan Murphy, a Canadian, and eventually we got married. We stayed in Ontario/Buffalo for 5 years, where Ryan adopted my daughter. There I worked as a paralegal for the largest law firm in Buffalo in the corporate and real estate departments. For the real estate attorney I reviewed title reports and prepared summaries of them. The corporate and securities department had me working on large mergers of corporations and filing reports for publicly traded companies.

After a particularly huge snowstorm and a bout with homesickness over the Christmas holidays, my husband and I decided it was time to move back to Alaska.