Janet has progressed through several "retirements" since we moved to Coos Bay. First, she retired from her full-time teaching career, only to begin teaching part time at the local community college in ESL and GED. Her students loved her, but working nights really limited involvement in her first love, theater.
So, she retired again and jumped into the local community theater groups. Coos Bay is pretty incredible. For a small city, there are 3 distinct theater groups operating on a regular basis. Janet has been involved with all three - having had a role in a play on each stage. First, she was Mrs. Cliveden-Banks in "Outward Bound", then had a small part as a midwife in "Grapes of Wrath." She stole the show as the Fairy Godmother in the On Broadway Theater's production of "Cinderella." Her most recent role was as Sister Hubert in "Nuncrackers". She did a super job as did everyone in the show.
In September 2002 Janet directed a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All nerves were on edge when they playwright arrived a couple of days before the play opened to see it staged. His name is Joe Edkin and he stayed with us while he was here. The actors got a bit tongue tied at his first appearance, but the opening went well, Joe was a delight and the play was very successful.
Janet returned to Southwestern in 2002-2003 to teach second year Spanish. She taught one hour, four days a week and enjoyed it a great deal. They didn't need her for 2003-2004 as the Spanish enrollment went down. But, she got a call in late summer of 2004 to inquire about whether she would be interested in teaching conversational Spanish one night a week. She said yes and has been having more fun doing that this year than she has had during most of her teaching career. She really had a ball during fall term with a nice sized class that was really interested in learning. I have to think it would be almost impossible to learn to speak Spanish with only one class a week, even if it does meet for four hours.
She continued with Conversational Spanish for 2005-2006 and then in late summer 2006, just a few weeks before school started, she found out they had her down for two sections of that plus Spanish 2! It seemed as if she has gone back to work full time. That proved to be too much and she cut back to only Spanish 2 for spring term. Her intention is to take next year (2007-2008) off and then see if she has any interest in going back. Right now, she says she doubts it, but with Janet, one never knows for sure. She loves teaching and is very good at it.
In her spare time, Janet continues to be very interested in genealogy. She made a trip to the Mormon library in Salt Lake City in May 2004 and found a great deal of information as well as learning how to make better use of resources she had already found. She has actually located a cousin in England whom we visited in the summer of 2006 (see our England pages). She continues to investigate her family and takes an occasional poke at mine. I guess genealogy is truly a life long mission once one starts on it.
