~ Mara: November ~
Mara is a self-employed Computer Programmer/Web Developer, owner of Hello World Web Design and Hosting in northern California. She lives, eats, sleeps and breathes the Internet. She's an old-fashioned geek girl who believes in writing (computer) code by hand, the way God intended. Although a true and natural geek at heart, she was a late-bloomer who's making up for lost time.
She learned the ways of business at an early age by working in her father's retail shop. As the first-born child, she desperately sought to prove herself and make up for not having been a boy. When Mara started her first business at the age of twenty-three, it grew quickly from a cottage business to three successively larger retail outlets.
As life circumstances changed, Mara closed the shop and tried her hand at everything from being a travel agent to retail sales and middle management. A consummate perfectionist and over-achiever, she consistently excelled at everything she set her mind to, at least career-wise, yet there was no single profession that grabbed her interest for long. She returned to college in 1999 with every intention of completing her degree in Psychology. She planned to become a Clinical Psychologist. Instead she took a basic computer class for fun, and stumbled upon her true calling in life. All things computers became an instant passion and obsession.
Mara bartended at night to finance her college pursuits, and declared a double major in Computer Science. She graduated in 2004 with two degrees in Web Programming and Web Server Administration, narrowly missing graduating with honors.
As a cancer survivor herself, Mara's choice to participate in this project an obvious one. Having cancer was an experience that profoundly changed her, both physically and spiritually, and she feels a bond with anyone anywhere who is having "a cancer experience." For Mara, having cancer was a turning point. It was a beginning, not an end. It meant things needed to change, and change they did.
Mara is something of a human dichotomy, for as much as she enjoys all things geek, she also craves what might be seen as a very simple life. During the all-too-brief respites from work she enjoys being outdoors, surrounded by nature and away from large groups of people. Give her a fire pit and a canopy of stars and she's a happy camper.
She has a wide variety of interests that range from cooking to yoga, home renovation to UFO watching, with extra check marks next to traveling and road trips. She comes by her love of road trips honestly, having seen 48 states and Mexico by car before the age of two. Sadly, she doesn't remember much of those trips, but the stories of her having "Montezuma's revenge" in Mexico at eighteen-months-old (and this was when cloth diapers were still in use) make for lively dinner conversation during holidays with the family. Or not.
Mara now lives near Sacramento in a quaint house built in 1917. It is currently being renovated (with Mara doing a major portion of the work). There are plans in the works for her to flee from suburbia, taking up permanent residence in a remote cabin somewhere in the wiles of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But fear not! Where Mara goes, the Internet is sure to follow.