About

I started this blog in April of 2015, just after Boston’s snowpocalypse snowmageddon long winter, on the occasion of finding my 1000th geocache. My husband is the more serious cacher in the family, and I accompanied him on this trip for him to find his 10,000th cache. You can read more about it here, in “My First Thousand Finds.”

I don’t intend to write only about geocaching, though, but rather to use geocaching as a metaphor for finding interesting things in unexpected places.

My own main avocation is music. I started learning to play the violin in elementary school, but I quit playing twice for long periods to pursue other interests (once in graduate school, once when my kids were babies and toddlers). When I re-started again for what I hope will be the last time, I also started a blog on violinist.com, in which I wrote about my musical adventures and mis-adventures. While I’ve had ups and downs in playing and especially practicing frequency, I’ve been at it now for almost 12 years.

I am trained as a Neuroscientist, but made a lateral career move out of academic research to concentrate on science education. I have taught part-time with several STEM-related educational organizations, including the UMass Boston Urban Scholars Program, the Innovation Institute, and currently I am with the California office of Science from Scientists. (Read a Q & A about my work as an SfS instructor here.)

I also started to explore my lifelong interest in writing science fiction. These new endeavors were daunting at first, and I thought back to when I started playing the violin again, another big scary project. What had helped the most?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer was “the blog.” When I was freaking out about something or other violinny, I found that writing about it often put the problem into perspective, helped me break it down into manageable steps in my mind, and connect with other people who might feel the same way. I was most clear about that process in this blog: Karen and Julie.

I feel more at peace when I leave the lesson, like I know what I have to do.  And, I plan to go home and blog about it.  I think about Julie Powell again as I’m walking back to the T.  And this time what I think about is how she didn’t let Julia Child’s dismissal get her down or crush her.  How she might indeed be kind of trivial and annoying the way the movie critics say, but that, in the end, her very ordinariness is why I cared about her at all and read her book.  We can’t all be Julia [Child], or Sarah [Chang], or Jasha [Heifetz], but we can all find our own way, and connect with each other.

Here’s to big scary projects, and to connecting!