How to intro for English 372

After a 28-year hiatus, I find myself this week, back in the throes of English academia and so very extremely happy about it. I didn't mean to leave college unfinished, 22 credits short of my English degree, but I did. I didn't plan on re-attending school to finish, but I am here and plan to embrace my time in school.
I am a lifelong bookworm, fascinated with words, language, books. I wrote my first short story in third grade about my mentor grandmother, "The Tales of Poor Pitiful Pearl." I was the first woman editor of my Eastern Oregon University "Oregon East" magazine back in the early '80s and have faithfully been writing in one or more forms all my adult life.
Professionally, it's been a joyful adventure for the past several decades, meandering my way through government service--which took me from Walla Walla to Albuquerque to Washington DC and back home again. I also spent time as a Managing Editor of two small weekly newspapers; wrote a column in my hometown paper about single parenting for a decade; have grant writing certification and much more. Anything to keep writing!
I was unexpectedly downsized in September last year from Hanford and when the "return to school plan" was offered, I jumped!
My plan this minute is to complete my English BA and get some teaching credentials. I will be 55 when done and that alone feels funny on the tongue, but time flies and I must not waste a second.
Personally....I am a wife and partner to a very grand James, mother to five excellent Kids and grandma to 7 exquisite Grands. I don't know how life, bumps, warts and all, gets any better than this.
I am a patriotic US Army veteran and a polio survivor: I received a swine flu shot while in the army in 1976, which caused me to contract a very serious case of Guillen Barre polio. It's old news now, but from that experience, I became a devout believer of the power of the human spirit; I am stridently patriotic and a proud veteran.
I might be the gray-haired lady fumbling with trifocals. struggling for now, with required technology, but inside, I am the 18-year-old freckled-faced girl wearing fashionable orange cat glasses and jumping up and down waiting to receive new information and do something with it.