20 Things About Me

1. I was born in Washington, DC and lived on the University of Maryland campus when I was a tiny baby because my parents were graduate students. I moved to Columbia, Maryland when I was 1 and lived there until I graduated from college. Columbia is a planned community, which makes it really special.
   
2. In high school, I was into theater. I was in at least one musical a year. I have very little talent in that regard, but I had a lot of fun. I am a very shy person, so being in the spotlight on stage was a way for a shy person to shine.
   
3. I graduated from Virginia Tech with a BS in Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. Materials Science has nothing to do with fabric, but rather that everything is made out of something and we figure out the best something to make things out of, even if we have to invent a new something.
4. I met my husband when I studied abroad one summer at Oxford University. He was a VA Tech student, too. We got married the summer after we graduated from college. We have been married 13 years, now.
   
5. Right after we got married, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech. I finished my Ph.D. in 1998 in Materials Science with a concentration in electronic materials.
6. I worked for a small engineering software firm for a few years until I got laid off. I decided at that point that I really wanted to be a stay at home mom. I hear a lot that I am wasting my education, but I love what I am doing. No one can ever take the education away from me, so it really isn't wasted.
   
7. I have three kids who span ten years. They are the focus of my life and a lot of things revolve around them.
   
8. I spend a lot of my time volunteering at my children's various schools and clubs. I write a weekly and a quarterly newsletter for one school. I run scoring for swim meets. I am a room mom. I am heavily involved in the PTA.
   
9. I have two sisters who are my best friends. One lives in Chicago and the other in Savannah. The second one is the wife of a soldier who is now stationed in Iraq.
   
10. I learned to sew when I was in grade school. My mom is an excellent seamstress and makes lots of exquisite clothes for her grandchildren. My sewing machine is a handmedown from her. I started quilting because it was the one thing she didn't do. Now she quilts, too, and calls me for advice. I am the only one of her kids who sews.
11. I have been quilting for about 6 years. Up until recently I have been a boring quilter. I really have not found it all that fulfilling, except the few projects that I trusted myself to go out on my own for. Funny thing is, the quilts most people love are the ones I designed myself. Go figure... I find myself leaning away from complicated shapes and dealing more with texture, value, and color. I think this not liking what I ahve been doing is why I have so many UFOs.
    
12. I keep my life in spiral bound notebooks. I usually have three or four going at once. Like now I have my PTA one, my moving house search one, my morning pages one, and my to do list one. I got the idea from my mom's late best friend who carried steno pads with her at all times.
13. I love to cook. I don't follow a lot of recipes to the letter, but I do use them as guidelines. I would love to learn more about wine to go with my cooking.
14. I plan in a few years to go back to school and get a teaching certificate. I want to teach high school physics or chemistry. I sometimes wish I could stay home forever, but Yale's tuition goes up every year, and someone is going to have to pay for college. Since our parents paid for our undergraduate educations, we feel we owe it to our parents to pay for our kids' educations. It is a pay it forward kind of thing in my family.
    
15. I love Christmas. I collect Nativity Scenes and leave many of them up year round. Last year I purchased the Jim Shore one where all the figures are wearing quilts. I have one that a friend hand slip cast and painted for me. It is gorgeous. It even has a drummer boy.
16. I am a true strawberry blonde. I am not a fussy hair kind of gal, but I have told my hairdresser that at the first sign of grey he had better be ready to make me still be a strawberry blonde.
    
17. I love to learn. I have taken classes at Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, University of Maryland, and Oxford University. My dad taught night school at UMD when I was growing up to offset the cost of out of state tuition. I used to go with him when I was in high school and I learned a lot about transportation and marketing.
    
18. I have the highest respect for my parents. They are two people who worked very hard to raise us and give us all sorts of opportunities. When I find myself in a quandry, I often ask myself, "What would Mom do?" They are now living out their retirement in Florida, 20 minutes from the beach. They survived their first hurricane last week, only losing one gutter.
19. I love the beach. Every year I have to go to the beach at least once. The last couple of years my entire family has gotten together on Isle of Palms. We already have plans for next summer. The summer of '04 I got to go snorkling off St. John, USVI when my husband's brother got married there. I am ready to go back and snorkle some more with the kids this time. (Well, the ones who can swim...)
20. This year has been a year of upheavel for us. My parents moved from my childhood home to Florida. My grandmother left the central Ohio farm she lived on for 71 years to go to a retirement home at the age of 92. My mother-in-law in the process of selling my husband's childhood home and moving back to her hometown in southern Minnesota. My older sister moved, but just to the other side of the house next door into a house she designed and had built. My younger brother-in-law was deployed to Iraq for the second time. And now we are looking to move into a better school district. (That and a better house than we could afford when I was still in school and we were in our mid-twenties...)