about me

I was born and raised in Lancaster, PA where I grew up amid cows, ancient computers, brothers, and plenty of cousins in my lovely Mennonite bubble. Then at age 10 my family and I packed up into our Ryder truck and moved to the other Mennonite Mecca, Goshen Indiana. There I ignored middle school, parts of high school and found myself in college. There I met good people, weird people, best friend kinds of people, and wrote some papers and became an expert in the field of non-US history.

After college, several of my close girl friends and I decided to move up to the big city of Chicago.  We rented ourselves a lovely little apartment (emphasis goes equally on both of those adjectives) and explored city life or, as is more typical in Chicago, huddled our way through the winter to emerge pasty and blinking in the light of May.  After a couple re-arrangements, we ended up in two apartments one on top of the other (bedrooms for everyone!), but eventually one friend moved to Goshen to get married and I moved out to a communal household down the alley way.  The household is connected to an intentional Christian community that while I remain unaffiliated with has become one of my primary “homes”.

This also marked the beginning of my trip through graduate school, where I studied the art/science of librarianship, while also continuing my full time gig at a local high school library. Those were some busy years! However finally in January of 2011 I got to walk across stage and receive my diploma. A long 6 months of job searching finally brought me to my current year of voluntary service with a great nonprofit in the fair city of Seattle. So now I live 3,000 miles away from my Midwestern roots in a new city and job.

I used to have long hair and look a lot like this

In addition to my abbreviated life story, here is a list of things I love:
reading books that inspire me to be creative, perfectly brewed light roast coffee (a blasphemous statement in my newly adopted coffee-snob city of Seattle), my family, cooking without recipes, making bread & jam, taking pictures, walking around my new neighborhood, watching movie trailers (seriously best part of any film – on DVD or in the theater), happy hours with friends, finding creative ways to spend less money, obsessively tracking down and eventually acquiring the perfect brown flat knee-high leather boots, paradoxes, playing Civilization 5 on my boyfriend’s computer, video-chatting via an iPhone mounted on a radio-controlled car with my family back in Indiana and simultaneously using an app that my brother and roommate created to chase my brother’s dog around the house via that same radio-controlled car, activities that make me feel smart/helpful/useful/needed/, pretty trees and skies that feel never-ending.

Now I look more like this and get to hang out with my Seattle-living boyfriend - Alex.

Want to contact me? Send an email to themennogirl at gmail dot com
Miss the old “info for the context inclined” page, no worries it is right over here