About Madeleine
My name is Madeleine Kolb, and I’m writing this blog because as I get older I can’t help but notice that a lot of the grim and depressing things we hear about aging don’t seem to be true. The stereotypes about people at sixtyplus just don’t fit me or most of the people I know.
Mark Twain once observed that, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” And much (or maybe most) of what we know for sure about life at sixtyplus just ain’t so.
So I started to get serious about getting old. I read everything I could about some of the things that matter most at sixtyplus, such as health, work, and relationships. I gave speeches about my own experiences, and I became a human guinea pig, trying things not usually associated with oldness, such as competing in a humorous speech contest.
In my younger days, I earned degrees in zoology and genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle. I then moved to Boston where I worked for over 20 years in the environmental field in both the public and the private sectors. Then it was back to Seattle where I got a Certificate in Technical Writing from the UW and a job as a technical writer in a federal agency. Nine years ago, I joined Toastmasters and learned to love public speaking. Currently, I’m an Advanced Toastmaster Gold.