YOUTUBE -BA07Ohzhks Barbara McHugh
I taught at Whatcom for 25 years, it was called dev ed, which was the jumpstart into the, you know, the degrees, the degree track basically. Yeah, I enjoyed it. Cause before that I taught special ed quite a bit. So, uh, he was kind of the same kind of thing, you know, take them from where they're at put misses, where you've got to go. I'm 81 going to be 82 pretty quick. And uh, I'm Barbara McHugh. What else do you want to know where I live up on Henry street? Um, bright blue house, right blue, not the Navy type blue next door, but the bright blue that my husband and I loved it was a mistake wire kind of got in the house actually, but it was a beautiful mistake. It's wonderful. Um, we've always my husband and I always had other people living with us. Just people that needed you just needed time or space or whatever for. We're not, we're not in the business. We just let them stay here. We have a pretty big house, so they just come and park for awhile. My father was a chemical engineer, so he was, uh, basically started out in the pulp and paper industry up there. But, uh, he was really originally from the Maritimes. And when you're from the Maritimes in case. It's really, really, he don't leave the Maritimes. That's, you know, you kind of, people don't really want to talk to you anymore or visit you anymore cause you left God's country. Okay. So, so anyway, so we spent time in the Maritimes too, but uh, basically we moved, we kept moving across Canada a lot, any family that I had back east, there is kind of, that's what they do. You know, their grandparents did it, the parents before that, did it, um, And that's just kind of what you were, and it kind of helped identify as a person in that, in that particular thing. Whereas here we tend to be much more open to ideas. Um, and really, I think people have to extend themselves when they're in an independent situation like that, you know? And I think I noticed that here in Bellingham, I think it's amazing. I love this community just wonderful. Good point about aging. To me, you have to keep, if you don't have questions to ask every day that you really want to learn the answers to, I don't know, you sort of, you know, your mind starts to get crusty. My kids say, I'm ADHD. I am ADHD. I'm doing this and that. I'm already thinking about that. Guy's a tarp on the back of his garage. There is starting to flap open. He's going to have rain coming through and I bet her after this is all through, I better contact somebody. I wonder if it's yeah. It's like craziness. It's crazy-making I've got a pretty well-worn body. I got to say, I have to say the last time. Um, was a very, it was a really talenting. I used a lot of Medicare on that one. Um, and you know, I, I, it was just like, to me, it was an opportunity to say, thank you so many times because the people that worked on me and the things that they did, I mean, and they said, one person said to me, well, we really learned a lot from your operation. I said, awesome. That is great. See, so in the process, Of my feeling grateful for what they did. They learned something and they thanked me. They said, this was, this was good. This was a good experience here. You know, we did. So, um, yeah, a lot of, lot of health challenges really, but they've all, as I look back on them that time they were like anybody. Right. All of our health challenges have been tough for all of us, no matter what they were. So, uh, yeah, that's, uh, again, this. That's what we signed up for. Right. Thinking about letting go of somethings and that's a loss in your life. Yeah, I think that I can to kind of hold on to trying to make myself. My notebooks they're are good. That's one of the places they really play a part is that I keep a lot of letters from people. I've got boxes of them, which is just silly. Um, because I'm the only one that's going to enjoy it. I need to keep reading them. Right. So now I'm putting a lot of them into my notebooks, inserting them highlighting what I really loved about what that letter said. Okay. When my husband passed, he'd been, he was challenged with Alzheimer's for 10 years. And fortunately, I was able to keep him home until the last month, before he passed away. And there was a lot that went on there. It was just wonderful. It was a different relationship. And I had to think about it that way, because it was a very, very hard, very hard illness for him, for me too. But I mean, it was a very hard illness and it was like, they, they I've said they've said it over and over again is like the long goodbye. So I had a chance to. You know, it wasn't like a sudden break. It was just a very long, um, at the time I didn't think it was learning. It was trying to get through. Cause there's so many pieces that had to be balanced at that point, but there were, there were things there that I would never have experienced in any other way. There's no really way to prepare. I think, um, I don't know. I don't think I did. I just kept trying to work with it every day. And I think the goodbye is in our life. We have to kind of it's, it's like everything we enjoy right now, if we can, you know, inquire about it, learn about it. So our life today is unwritten. We shouldn't write it down or we don't record it in pen is all in pencil,