About Me

I'm married and have one daughter. We have one indoor cat. He is strictly indoors, so he won't become coyote or owl food. We've somewhat adopted a stray cat as well, and somehow she's managed to survive at least two years here despite the predators. I say somewhat as we do feed her, and sometimes she allows pets, but she's mostly skittish, so often runs off when we open the door to our back yard. We had to trap and take her to the vet last winter (2022) after we noticed an open wound from a fight with another neighborhood cat. She got a shot of antibiotics and healed soon thereafter.

I've lived in Arizona for a while, but I wasn't born here. My parents moved the family out here the summer between my 5th and 6th grades, from Kansas. It was a pretty big transition, moving from a small town to a big city. My parents learned that the hard way not long after we moved, when they didn't lock the doors when we left for an outing one day. We came home to the front door wide open and a lot of our things gone. Welcome to Phoenix, right?

I'm self-taught in HTML and CSS, and am working on learning Javascript and jQuery. I've been building websites for myself as early as 1999, when I built a site where I could post photographs of our house being built. Later I would learn to design for my blog running on ExpressionEngine 1.0 after my MovableType site was hacked. I've had as many as six different sites - of my own - running on various CMS - usually WordPress, but I'd frequently switch back and forth between WordPress and ExpressionEngine... a lot.

I've designed sites for some friends and a few clients, including making certain that the most recent ones are mobile-friendly, including my web design business page. For that, to save time, I used a template from ColorLib, and moved it off of WordPress to ExpressionEngine. I've used both the Foundation and Bootstrap CSS frameworks, a few times - with the former used on this site in its previous build. I rewrote everything from scratch so it's hand-written CSS now, with a very tiny amount of jQuery and JS.

Currently I work part-time for Aquarian Web Studio.

Some of my non-web development hobbies are knitting, crochet, painting, and watching television shows with my husband. We've been rewatching a lot of older shows that aren't in production anymore - 12 Monkeys, Fringe, Scrubs and the like.

My absolute favorite place to go on vacation right now is to Northern California, specifically in Half Moon Bay. If I were offered an opportunity to live there (as in - "Hey, here is this house just for you, it's paid for and all you have to do is pay property taxes & utilities - enjoy!"), I would not have to think for very long before answering. We make every effort to go every July for a glorious week of 60-70 degree days, vs. the 110+ we experience in Phoenix. I can hardly wait!

Oh, one last thing. I've been coloring my hair like in the photo in various shades of pink/red/orange/yellow since 2018. As long as I can manage to pay my awesome hair stylist, expect to see it if we ever chat on Zoom or in real life. 😊