Random facts about me...

No matter how prepared for it I am, opening a tube of biscuit dough makes me flinch every single time. Long-time coffee hater, I now drink 2 cups a day, black. The octopus is my spirit animal. You may notice a tiny tentacle here or there, in my personal projects. I am camp PC and Apple – I love my iPhone & iPad but would be lost without my PC. I always seek shade whenever I’m outside, but I love my house to be flooded with sunlight from end to end. It took me 25 cooking years, to finally get over the fear of stainless steel pots & pans. I don’t know how I ever managed without them. I actually crave salad and eat it by the trough regularly. Our house goes through 7-8 gallons of milk per week. If I’m not home, there’s a very good chance I’m at the grocery store. I am a Goo Hoarder…I have enough lotion and bodywash to last everyone in my culdesac, a good month or 2. Assembling Ikea furniture solo since 1997 8 years of ballet en pointe pretty much ruined my feet in my teens, but I would do it again right now if I physically could. Although I very seldom have a sweet tooth, I find cake and cookie decorating very therapeutic. I could crochet baby shoes for hours. I enjoy using my face as a canvas and am guilty of keeping some form of makeup stashed in most rooms. Books are slowly taking over our house and I’m totally okay with that [most of the time anyway]. A former picky eater to the extreme, I am now addicted to trying new recipes and ingredients at every possible opportunity. I have an irrational aversion to listening to music first thing in the morning, it makes me cringe. It’s podcasts, morning radio shows, or silence. I’ve been doing my own laundry for 30ish years, but I still cannot fold a fitted bed sheet.

My Background

…was originally in accounting, which started as an afterschool job in 1994. Although I’ve held other types of positions along the way, I always ended up going back to accounting.

Not for any love, I just simply had a knack for it early and it paid the bills.

I began tinkering with graphic design and coding in 2002 when a cousin encouraged me to blog for some much-needed release and introduced me to LiveJournal.

Customizing my layout quickly became just as therapeutic as writing posts. Over the years, the more I learned the more time I wanted to spend creating than I was.

I graduated from customizing layouts for LiveJournal and Myspace, to building my own WordPress themes from scratch. All self-taught.

But the demands of my job were already cutting into my family time, so it was near impossible to allocate any extra time to anything else.

I became so creatively stifled and so unhappy, I could hardly bear getting out of bed in the morning.

When the realization hit in 2014, that increasing daycare costs were negating my salary (bringing me WELL under minimum wage), the decision to leave was pretty easy.

The harder part was getting over the imposter syndrome that initially kept me from freelancing right away.

But get over it, I did, and I cannot imagine myself doing anything else for a living.