Liz and Brad's Big Adventures: About Me

Hello there!

Some stuff about me...

I'm a bicentennial baby born and raised in the Portland area, birthed at the Adidas U.S. headquarters in North Portland... it used to be a Kaiser hospital.

I'm a sixth-generation Oregonian. I tell people that's why I'm so pale... the pigment has been bred right out of our skin after so many decades under the clouds!

Speaking of clouds, I love the rain. While some find a dark, drizzly day depressing and gloomy, I find it life-giving. Fall is my favorite season, though I find amazingness in all our mild Oregon seasons.

I met my husband the day we moved into college and got married three and a half years later, two weeks after graduation. That was almost 14 years ago.

By choice, and for a number of reasons, we have no children. But we do have Linus, our giant, trouble-making, now-elderly feline.

My degree from George Fox University is in Communications/Video Production, and I spent nine years working in news at KOIN-TV in downtown Portland. I went from being a news trainee to the head of the station Web site, which was a pioneer in the early years of the Internet boom (that makes me sound really old!)

A variety of factors (including a crazy boss who's now in prison for pretending he was dead and taking on a new identity!!! Seriously... read the article.) led me to resign and take a year off to discover my next big adventure.

When I quit my job after almost a decade of researching, writing, producing news, I needed an outlet for my story telling. I started my blog the next month (July 2007) with pictures and tales from our first trip to Crater Lake.

I ended up returning to my alma mater, taking a part-time position as support staff for (CE)2, an alternative-education program at Tigard High School. I work with at-risk youth, helping them navigate through life and the end of their high-school careers... including graduation!!

It's an amazingly fulfilling job that I truly love.