garden, living in Australia

January in Sydney

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School summer vacation in Australia falls December through January, and seems to be getting longer every year — Mitchell won’t actually be back in school til Feb 6th. Not that we mind. All three of us had had enough travel so we elected to stay home in Sydney for this vacation. This is a great time to be in this part of Australia, with lots of entertainment and activities and mostly good weather.

Entertainment

In the last few weeks we’ve seen multiple shows at the Sydney Opera House. All three of us saw Penn & Teller, which I had somehow never got around to in all my trips to Vegas. Very entertaining and confounding.

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My Quilt

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One of my favorite teachers at Woodstock School was Kathleen Forance, our art teacher. I had long been as much of an artist as I could manage , mostly drawing and coloring. Kathleen got me into textile arts: embroidery, batik, weaving.

My first experiments in embroidery included small scenes from my own life (or my imagined life). In perhaps the very first, I showed myself in bed under a multicolored quilt. That was my inspiration to make a quilt.

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Venice Biennale 2024

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The theme of this biennale is “Stranieri Ovunque” – Strangers Everywhere – which could be interpreted in multiple ways. The show particularly featured the works of marginalized people

Saw lots of amazing art. Some of it, particularly the entry by Australia’s Archie Moore “Kith and Kin” must have taken months of work on site.

One standout artist (for me) is Omar Mismar, who makes Roman-style mosaics of modern topics, as shown above.

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7 Horrifying Facts About Chemotherapy

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I originally wrote this in January 2016 and submitted it to Cracked.com, which I was greatly enjoying at the time. Never heard back from them, so here it is.

There are about a bazillion different types of cancer. Not all of them require or even benefit from chemotherapy, but, when we hear “cancer”, chemo is what we tend to immediately think of, and fear the most. Except, of course, dying.

I have “difficult” breasts, and I’ve had cancer scares before. Each time, the most frightening possible outcome, to me, was chemo (yes, chemo scared me more than death). My nightmare finally came true: in late 2014 I was diagnosed with breast cancer requiring surgery and then chemotherapy (followed by radiation and hormonal therapy).

While chemotherapy may well save my life (we’ll get to that), it has proved in some ways to be almost as bad as I’d feared – and, in other ways, even worse. 

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my life in tech, women in technology

My Brilliant Speaking Career

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This post was originally drafted in March 2015, don’t know why I never published it then. I was undergoing chemo at the time so I probably simply forgot about it.

Since I returned to the US to work and live in 2007, I have attended many highly technical events for each of my employers. At most I was present to run a camera, social media, or the event itself, so my knowledge of the technologies being discussed was not at issue. But I was becoming a recognized expert on social media and technology marketing, and began speaking at conferences (tech and non-) on those topics.

My employers did not always have clear policies about what conference travel they would pay for. Usually, if it was a related tech industry event, my expenses would be covered without demur. Sometimes I felt that I’d be stretching a point, and did not ask.

Then came Monktoberfest. Though the 2013 edition was only its third, Monktoberfest and its sister event, Monki Gras (in London), were already well-regarded events that combined unusual, thought-provoking tech talks with… really good beer. By all reports, it was a great combination, and my then-employer’s founder/CTO Jason Hoffman as well as our VP of Engineering had spoken at Monki Gras the year before.

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