About

For someone in my line of work I’ve resisted blogging for longer than is probably sensible. Part of my problem is the word itself – blogging – to which I have an aversion, like muesli, which sounds too much like mucus to be a good name for a breakfast cereal, or hinal, the opposite of frontal and not really even a word.

However, within the past year, I have co-founded a company, completed* a major house remodel and gave forth new life. If I’m not interesting enough to blog now, I never will be.

It’s the About page, so…

I was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and grew up in the northern part of the province, in an off-the-grid house my parents built many kilometers (metric, see? Canadian!) from the nearest settlement. This means I have witnessed the point where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet (it’s nippy). I have lots of atypical childhood stories like the time we had to evacuate by helicopter because a forest fire was threatening our peninsula. Or the day my mom had to shoo away the family eagle, Sam, because he was eying me, as an infant, like a snack.

After moving around repeatedly (which is JUST THE THING when you’re 9 through 13), my mom, sister and I settled in Portland where I attended Lincoln High School. For college, I found a spot that’s more or less the exact opposite of Portland: Clemson, South Carolina. I majored rather half-heartedly in architecture but thoroughly enjoyed the program’s semester abroad in Italy. I was a DG and quite possibly responsible for the demise of our chapter. And no, sorority life isn’t all pillow fights and mixers. We also chanted.

I’ve been back in Portland for eight years now. I worked for seven of those years at a start-up that managed to survive the .com bust, no mean feat. I met Kes, my husband, at work. He started two weeks after I did. The office was running out of room so they put him in the server room (OK, closet). Part of my job was to run the web logs on our clients’ sites, a manual task which involved repeated trips to the server room. Our love blossomed over web logs and later, during late nights in the office spent converting PowerPoint presentations to pdfs. With parents like us, our daughter has no hope at all of being popular in high school.

Kes and I got married in June 2005 in Greece on the island of Kea at my Greek Godmother’s family’s vacation house. Getting married in Greece turned out to be an epic adventure in bureaucracy involving governmental agencies, consulates and embassies in Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Salem, Los Angeles, San Fransisco and of course Greece. I couldn’t've have asked for a more perfect wedding in the end; small and casual with 25 of our closest family and friends, breath-taking scenery and fantastic food.

So here I sit on our back deck engaged in one of my favorite hobbies, Drinking Outside. Kea is sleeping, spread-eagled, in a bassinet to my right. Saks sleeps in much the same position in the chair to my left, doing his best to coat the cushion in a thick layer of his black fur. Nordstrom, the more adventurous of the two, is ineffectually stalking song birds.

*It isn’t actually complete. It is asymptotically approaching the state of Done.