About
Three decades. Three internet companies. One throughline.
I’ve been building things on the open internet since the year Netscape went public. The throughline is the same now as it was then: use the web to solve a real problem for real people, and let the rest of it sort itself out.
The short biography
I trained as a medical technologist with a focus in cytogenetics. I earned my Bachelor of Science from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 1989, after three years of biochemistry at Texas A&M.
Then I taught myself ColdFusion in 1995 and built my first internet company, adoption.com, a platform that helped place children with adoptive families. I sold it years later; the URL is no longer mine but the founding is permanent.
After that I lived a few lives at once. I worked overseas. I raised a large family. I trained as a real estate agent. I built my own home from the ground up. I have lived in luxury houses on two continents and I have packed everything I own into a backseat more than once.
I founded Bone Voyage Dog Rescue in 2019 from an inheritance my aunt left me, with a single rule: every dollar gets a dog home. We rescued street dogs from Mexico and matched them with adopters across North America. We closed operations in 2024 when the math stopped working, but the website remains, ranks, and continues to do good in a quieter way.
Today I admin a 65,000-member expat community on Facebook and I’m building Ajijic.org, the relocation guide for Americans considering Mexico’s Lake Chapala region. I’m also writing about brain health and consulting on a few projects that matter to me.
Why brain health.
I am APOE4 homozygous. That means I carry two copies of the APOE4 gene, which raises Alzheimer’s risk roughly ten- to fifteen-fold over the general population. My mother is living with Alzheimer’s in Mexico under the care of full-time nurses. My scientific training and my family history collide on this topic, and I’m putting that collision to work in public.
The research is moving fast. The translation of that research into something a non-scientist can actually use to plan the next thirty years is moving slowly. That gap is where I’m writing.
Why I keep building.
I’m fifty-seven. The world keeps telling women my age that the building part of life is behind us. The numbers I look at every day disagree. People in their fifties and sixties are starting more companies, writing more books, and shipping more software than any cohort in history, and the tooling has never been better.
I plan to keep going. If something I publish makes it easier for the next woman in line to do the same, that is the whole point.