Hi there! Welcome to my blog. Feel free to join me on this crazy adventure called life. For my professional life, I’ve focused on informal education i.e. not the typical teacher in a classroom lecturing at her students but fun unique educational experiences in places like museums instead. I love…

Creating the LEGO Orchid from the Botanical Collection — I’ve always loved plants and flowers, but we are never able to have any in the house, because the beloved “li’l lion overlord” of the house likes them a little too much too.

Inspired by ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer — Creation stories impart central lessons and values of the culture or religion. In this article, I compare the creation story of the first man from two sources: the one I was raised with as a Catholic and the one that I encountered in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, a collection…

Thoughts to consider with ICWA and the Haaland v. Brackeen case — We all want what’s best for the child, but who decides that and how? The adoption system strives to rescue children from unhealthy homes and relocate them into healthy ones. It’s a complicated issue and one that is rarely simple, clear-cut, black, and white. Unfortunately, all too often the case…

How a community art project eased me out of my comfort zone — In the past few years, I’ve been working on re-establishing my relationship with art. As I’ve written about before, I was discouraged from art early on, believing that the best I could do was stick figures, and not even good ones. …

On imposter syndrome and expertise — We all have a little voice in our heads. Some of us are more familiar with it than others. It creeps in when we try to do something new, but also when we do something that we’ve been doing for years, usually something that we love. It whispers that we…

This modern classic by Robin Sloan should definitely be on your list — Sourdough or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market (or often simply referred to as Sourdough)was published in 2017, but is even more relatable now in the post-pandemic world. Lois is a software engineer at a robotic arm company. She moves out to California to work for a robotic…

Creating a model of one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements As a space and LEGO nerd, it’s a no-brainer that I would be on the lookout for LEGO space sets. I featured a few that I completed years ago in my first LEGO Diaries post, but I finally completed my…

I am perpetually grateful for this day in my life — I was in the middle of an internship in rural Vermont, in the middle of my Master’s program, in the middle of everything really. The area was called the Upper Valley, spanning both Vermont and New Hampshire, and even the room I was renting for the summer was in limbo…