I am the second child in a brood of seven children, four of us born in Laos, the remaining three in US soil. Well, not literally. I lived in Laos the first five years of my life, yet am more American by assimilation. My family entered into a refugee relocation program after my parents arranged for our escape to the Phillipines. We were soon relocated from jungle village to desert city. In Phoenix, Arizona I grew up as any other American immigrant child, entering kindergarten at age five and finishing at Sunnyslope High School in my eighteenth year, excelling as most immigrant children do in my studies, participating in sports and extra-curricular activities when time allowed. Having tested well and being a national merit scholar, I matriculated at Occidental College, a liberal arts institution in Los Angeles, California, to study both English Literature and Biology on an academic scholarship. Three years later and rather despondent about gaining employment as a literary biologist, I took a one-year hiatus and returned to Arizona where, after meeting Magnus on the job at a health-nut store, I started attending Arizona State University. Studying Bioengineering for two years, while working full-time, soon proved more engineering and less bio, so I changed majors yet again, this time to the intimidatingly named Molecular Biosciences and Biotechnology. It became apparent that my personal value system and the philosophy behind biotech industries clashed. This disharmony having coincided with September 11 and imminent warfare (which may or may not include biotechnically developed bioweapons), led me to examine what was important in my life. So having six years of college education and more than enough credit, I abandoned the idea of a baccalaureate. Instead, Magnus and I decided to leave the trappings and distractions of metropolitan life and move to a small town in North Carolina where we could live peacefully with our dogs in a "cozy cabin in the woods." Strangely enough, I started working in a land development company. Then after three years of selling a packaged dream to those who were in the market for a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th home, I decided once again that my personal and occupational philosophies were at loggerheads. So I chose to wait tables while getting certified as a personal fitness trainer (as a child I always wanted to be a P.E. teacher). A year later I moved to Asheville, North Carolina and finished by studying Massage Therapy. Soon the time came for a pivotal move in my life, so when opportunity came knocking, my husband and I bought the boat his father, Paul Johnson, designed and built. Venus, a 28-foot gaff-rigged ketch opun which Magnus spent the first two years of his life, was located in Bermuda, so we flew there with the dreams of restoring her seaworthiness and sailing her down to the Carribean islands where we would support ourselves by chartering daysails offering sushi and massage therapy to our clients.....After three months in Bermuda, getting the vessel outfitted and rerigged, collecting supplies for our first crossing, we sailed Venus through the Bermuda Triangle. So ended our sojourn on Venus. After taking on water for eight days, which prompted the breaking of two bilge pumps during water evacuation on very little food or sleep (no time for that!), and eventually bucket-bailing the seas from our bilge, we grounded on a reef outside of a bay on the northeastern shores of Puerto Rico. A lengthy pre-dawn swim in tropical waters with warm-water predators, after Venus had splintered into flotsam and jetsam, towards some vague lights in the distance, was not my idea of fun, but the matter of choice was not present. Arriving on the beach in just my red bikini top and Magnus buck naked, we were just relieved not to be bailing water between bouts of sea-sickness. We spent the next month recovering objects as they washed in from the wreck site and planning the next move in our adventurous saga. The best idea was to go to Flores, an island of the Azorean archipelago, where Paul Johnson had bought a bungalow in a fruit orchard for his son´s sanctuary, and take a stab at being self-sufficient farmers. And that is where we remain today, on dry arable land . . in the middle of the Atlantic.
