I love traveling. I have been traveling internationally since I was 13 and my first international trip was Costa Rica. I taught elementary school in Bangladesh from 1999–2000 and ESL in the Czech Republic from 2002–2003. I took the opportunity during my graduate education to explore internationally as well and chose to study fossil whales in Peru for my masters and worked on a geology and health project in Ethiopia for my doctorate. Our next big trip that our family has planned is going to be to Norway in a few years to visit the "home" country!

Traveling is usually quite expensive, so I much more frequently "travel" to new worlds through reading. I am a total bibliophile! My reading ranges from biographies to science fiction. I read a wide range and try to read as much as I can. 

I enjoy being out in nature and just enjoying the calm that comes from that. I think that is why I ended up with so many plants in my house.I currently have in the neighborhood of 80 house plants and will sometimes find some time to make some macrame plant hangers for them. I've never thought of myself as a "crafty" person but lately I've played around with making soap and I even made some earrings with rocks I've found while out hiking.

I enjoy black tea, earl grey being my favorite...this is also Captain Picard's standard order.

And coffee, the Ethiopian Variety is my go to. Hard to spend a month in Ethiopia and not become biased. We had coffee literally on the side of the road, ground from beans of the plantation 20 feet away...so fun!

I also love chocolate. I'd love to claim that I have super high end taste, but really when the chips are down, anything will do. I actually got to help my dad run a workshop teaching teachers how to use a chocolate lab to teach chemistry and that was really fun.