Interests
One of my biggest interests is photography and working with web pages. I especially enjoy nature, wildlife, and surf photography. I have been organizing and sharing my files through Flickr, and lately I’ve been using Lightroom and iCloud. Exploring photo-cataloging tools is fun and at times unnerving, but it is nice to keep learning. I live in Solvang, California, and mostly grew up in Santa Barbara and Southern California, so much of this site shows the California lifestyle that good fortune has allowed me to live.
This website is a place to explore website ideas, share my photographs and interests, and see how websites evolve through time. It has been online for around twenty years. It contains nature, surfing, and travel photo journals, as well as places to visit in Santa Barbara County. Many slideshows of Santa Barbara and nearby places in California are part of the site. Events with family and friends are included in the Friends & Family section.
My husband and I retired from our wonderful organic market garden in September 2015. I retired from UCSB earlier that year. Before retiring, I worked as a Computer Resource Specialist for Santa Barbara County Public Works, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, and the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA) at the UCSB Library.
This website is my little non-paying side job; my reward is sharing some of my interests with others locally and around the world. While working at UCSB, I made friends with biologists who let me tag along and learn from them. My Channel Islands page and accounts of some of my other trips reflect those experiences. The Grand Botanical Adventure Across California reflects both my connection to biology and my interest in natural history.
California History is a newer section showing my evolving studies and interests, including California Mission history. I am currently a part-time archivist with Old Mission Santa Inés, where I am learning more about the roles of Spain and Mexico in California history. Adding historical studies to the website is a new adventure for me.
I am also updating my website design with newer tools, such as ChatGPT and Codex, to clean up my CSS and web pages. Maintaining a website can be daunting and somewhat expensive. Photo-editing and web-design tools are evolving quickly. It reminds me of when photography went digital and I could afford to take more photographs.
Updated February 14, 2026.