DOUGLAS P HARWOOD Harwood

All our kids were adopted out of foster care, which my wife and I did for 34 years.

Navy right after H.S. then I worked a variety of minimum wage jobs while attending Ventura Co. Community College on the GI bill. I then started doing foster care, first as a county maintained home then I did what's called in CA a Small Family Home. That offers more services to the kids such as an independent living program that shows the kids how to live on their own after they age out of placement.
As time went on more and more kids came to us with drug/alcohol issues and there was nothing in the county that addressed that issue so I started a non-profit corp. called Children's Alcohol, Rehabilitation & Education, Inc. (CARE) I ran that for about five years. As the owner/CEO of that I was required to deal with lots of outside agencies. I wasn't all that much of a politically correct person. My strengths lay with dealing with the kids so I stepped down, opened another Small Family Home and just dealt with kids. As my time doing that wound down I joined a Foster Family Agency. No more paperwork for me. :) I was also working for another non-profit agency called Interface in the Camarillo, CA area where I answered the phones on a 2-1-1 line. My wife and I decided to retire about 2010 and started looking for places to retire. We picked AZ and a small town northwest of Phoenix called Surprise. Low crime, good medical & transportation. Lots of other retired folks including what's called snow birds who show up in the winter and leave in the spring.
I got bored staying home, there's only so many online games I could play anyway, so I started working as a courtesy driver for a Nissan dealership. Nice hours, not too many, nice people to work with and drive around.
That's about it in a nutshell.
I also enjoy reading the postings on here.