I attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate many moons ago and received my Ph.D. from the School of Social Science at UC Irvine. I was lucky to spend a year in Western Samoa doing postdoctoral research.

Some fun things my family does include traveling together (see links to the boys' pages) and a family bookclub. We all liked Philip K. Dick's Ubik, had violent disagreements about Irving's Owen Meaney and Robinson's Housekeeping, and even did a session on Grizzly Man, moving into film. Sometimes we meet face to face and other times through email. Some of the online meetings are logged here.

We love to travel together. In February, 2005 Jeanette, then 12, her friend, and friend's mother and I went to Baja California to see the whales up close, getting to touch them (well, I was actually preventing the girls from falling into the water as they reached out but they did indeed touch them). Hearing the whales breathe inspired a new connection to nature that I had never experienced before. In August 2006 the family went to the spectacular Marble Mountain Wilderness in Northern California. We did not see Bigfoot but we know he was there.

In 2008 we went to several national parks in Colorado and Utah, including the magnificent and uncrowded Sand Dunes National Park. We went to Washington D.C. in 2009 as Christopher got a job in the foreign service with USAID. We ate at an amazing Ethiopian restaurant. Jeanette went to Honduras with the Amigos Program. There was a coup three days after the Amigos arrived, but they got to stay a full month and she had a great experience.