Hi Cathy,
Your blog is wonderful! Since I wasn’t able to attend our reunion, I’ve enjoyed and appreciated all the photos and postings by our classmates. Thank you for putting the blog together for all of us. And thank you to all of our classmates who responded with photos and life stories.
You are probably wondering what I have been up to the last 40 years. Life has been interesting and wonderful at the same time. I feel very blessed to have lived the life I have with the family and friends who have been with us along the way. I have a wonderful daughter Cember, who is 27 year’s old, husband Jack, and a 115# chocolate lab named Koa. We still live on San Juan Island in Washington.
After graduation from high school we moved to Seattle and I proceeded to go to school for business and merchandising which led me to work for Nordstrom as an assistant buyer and then Jay Jacobs’s Washington and Alaska as a cosmetic and hosiery buyer.
By 1972, I wanted to travel and joined Continental Airlines as a flight attendant. In 1973 I married my husband Jack. In 1976, we moved to Laguna Beach to get out of the cold weather, Jack opened a deli and I flew Hawaii trips. Then we moved to Guam where I worked for Continental Air Micronesia flying to Japan, Honolulu, and the Micronesian Islands. Small world, Michael Lewis worked there also.
In 1980, after returning to Seattle, I gave birth to our daughter Cember. We are so proud of her. She is now 27 and graduated from law school in San Francisco in May, took the bar exam in July, and then started her new job in Sacramento at an environment law firm on September 10th. She is very passionate about making the world a better place to live. After the bar exam, she flew to Sardinia for three weeks (she speaks Italian) and then I met her in London for a mother daughter trip to Portugal for ten days. What fun we had! From there she traveled to Copenhagen for a week and I went to Vegas to be with my mother who was going to have breast cancer surgery and treatment. I’m happy to say mom is doing very well.
In 1983 I went to work for Evans Furs of Chicago. Evans owned/leased all the fur salons in the Nordstrom stores and I was the assistant buyer in the Seattle store. I was promoted to the buyer for the San Diego Nordstrom store. Nine months later we moved to Long Beach and I was promoted to the Los Angeles store of Robinson’s as a Division Merchandise Manager for 22 stores. It was a wonderful job and very challenging. Jack had his own successful seafood brokerage business in Long Beach.
July 1985 we quit our jobs and set sail for Hawaii on our custom wood boat sloop rig, “By the Wind.” We left a bit late and ran into hurricane season so we ended up going to San Diego and then to Mexico for the winter. This was the experience of a life time. Cember was five and a great traveler but when she said “it's margarita time”, we decided we had to go back to our old life and get her in school. In April of 1986 we had our boat shipped back to Seattle and purchased our first home. We began buying and selling real estate and working as realtors in Seattle.
In 1989, we purchased a beautiful 82 acre property surrounded by three lakes with a campground located on San Juan Island. It was a great life. For years we had horses but sold them when Cember went into high school since sports took over her life. We became contractors building six deluxe two bedroom two bath log cottages on the lake where the riding arena and paddock had been and converted the stable into a check-in office. Then we were in the lodging business.
In 1997 we built a house for ourselves and then in 2001 a guest lodge on the lake with ten guest rooms with a large great room and dining room. We created far more work for ourselves than we had intended but it was a great success and nice addition to the island. You can check it out at www.Lakedale.com
In 2005 we sold our home, our business, our property and started a new life. Last summer we took our Pacific Trawler to Alaska up the Inside Passage for three months. It was a trip to remember, especially for Koa. We are currently in the vacation rental business and our web site is www.vagabondo-llc.com. This summer we also completed construction on a house we built for resale.
While we haven’t slowed down and still have been buying and selling real estate, I’m ready for the simple life. We love to play tennis and contemplate being somewhere warm in the winters with our dog Koa. We aren’t sure where that will be but look forward to the next adventure in our lives.
So, that’s what we have been doing with our life. It’s never dull and my only complaints are that life seems to be going by too fast and I don’t feel nearly as old as I am. Does anyone else feel this way? I wish I could have been at the reunion with all of our friends and would love to hear from anyone who would like to drop me a line at sl.picconi@gmail.com.
See you all next time!
Stephanie (Castelletti) Piccon
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