My husband is a high school chemistry teacher, which means he's second only to algebra teachers on the list of teachers everyone hates. He loves teaching (masochist), and he is in possession of the most amazing ability to understand any topic so well that he can explain it at least twenty different ways...which comes in handy in a classroom of twenty kids where no two kids understand the same thing at the same time in the same way.
Our oldest son is in the Navy - he's learned how to make those nuclear reactors work so those new ships they're building actually move and he's been assigned to a submarine based in Hawaii. He's very excited, and I'm very nervous!
Our youngest son is a brilliant young man who has made sure that no moment of our lives since his early arrival has been dull. His diagnosis with ADHD was a no-brainer (forgetting he had to pee on the way to the bathroom because a lady bug caught his attention was a pretty good clue), his diagnosis with Asperger's was a little more difficult. He's got a unique perspective on his world, and sometimes his world even intersects with ours!
I used to work for a very small publishing company - we published poems and short stories written by students (k-12). I loved my job, most days. The only thing that was missing is bulk quantities of brain bleach to wash away some of the things we read. Teenagers and poetry - it's a volatile combination.
I worked for a time as a machinist - taking chunks of metal and turn it into useful stuff. Or stuff that can be used to make other useful stuff. Steel, aluminum, manganese bronze...it all bows before my mighty machine! OK, maybe it doesn't bow, but it does eventually submit, often with a great deal of noise and stink.
I'm back to substitute teaching, and teenagers! Being a substitute (or as I like to call it: a moving target), is challenging to say the least, but it offers a certain flexibility that working a traditional Monday through Friday job doesn't. As a bonus, I spend most of my days gathering characters. High schools are treasure troves of unique characters!
I've been telling myself stories for as long as I can remember, and occasionally writing them down. Everyone I meet and everyone I see provides fodder for a story sooner or later, but I've never actually put a person I know in what I've written. Of course, that's subject to change, if the person is interesting enough!
If you want to know why I write, and why I read as obsessively as I do, this post explains it pretty well, I think:
Why I Write - The Simple Version