ME:

Born and raised in the great Garden State, yes, I'm a Jersey Girl. Exit 142 on the Parkway, exit 14 on the Turnpike and my malls were Livingston and Short Hills. Legit Jersey. I didn't love Bon Jovi, but I do have the New Jersey album on vinyl. I have Born in the U.S.A. too and would choose Bruce over Jon any day. The movie Garden State does an incredible job capturing where I grew up, without the Natalie Portman wearing a helmet bit. If all you know about Jersey is driving along the Turnpike, the Bravo housewives and the MTV wannabees, you don't know Jersey. Give Jersey a chance, it will grow on you!

MYSELF:

I fell in love with cultural anthropology during undergrad and English became a minor, as did Environmental Science, and I left my dabbling with digital graphics and design as a certificate. So many interests, so little time.

I joined the workforce but after a few years missed the stimulation and challenge of formal education and returned for an MBA. Pursuit of the practical! Cultural anthropology and marketing were a beautiful medley, like peanut butter and honey, both very nice on their own but delightful when paired together.

Similarly marketing provided an outlet to combine my left brain strategic and analytical inclinations with my right brained creative intuition. I felt excited about my work in a way I never had prior.

ILDI:

I started this blog seven months into not just a new chapter, but a new book in my life. I hadn't previously taken a lot of big risks, I had pursued a solid education and followed a safe career path. Sure I liked to jump out of airplanes and whitewater kayak and ride a Ducati, but physical risks were always so much easier for me than financial risks, or in this case, taking all of the things that were constant and stable in my life and shaking them up like I was about to play a round of Yahtzee.

I have always admired those who took chances by finding their own path and it was time to put my money where my mouth was. So I decided to go big and jump in with both feet, trusting that I would grow by embracing the uncertainty that I had so often avoided. Timing is a quirky little character in our lives, it can appear to wreak havoc but also silently lead us into a perfectly beautiful, but hidden, clearing that we never noticed before as we focused solely on the hills ahead.

My adventure in Africa wasn't necessarily the first leap, but it was one of the larger jumps in my journey, leading me further away from the known, the comfortable, the secure. It was the experience that inspired me to start this blog; but my return to Portland is far from the end of my journey.