You will find posts relating to many of my interests, but mostly it will be an outlet for my thoughts on public outreach and running an effective outreach campaign. Eventually, I will pull everything together to offer an eBook on the subject. Many of the posts are chapter excerpts and explorations of specific questions and best practices. How do I know what I’m talking about? Currently, I am the program coordinator for the geologic hazards program for Oregon Emergency Management. This gives me plenty of opportunity to try many of these concepts out on an unsuspecting research group, the entire state of Oregon. <insert mad scientist laugh here>
You will also likely find bits about some of my other interests; Merovingian material culture, graphic design, and (quite honestly) whatever else comes to my mind at any given point. This means you could be in for a wild ride. Squirrel!
If the Merovingian thing piques your interest, I encourage you to pop over to my other blog, Suvia’s Letters, where I keep most of that information. This is where my academic heart beats the fastest. Nothing gets my juices flowing quite like delving into some new bit of information or translating an obscure article in a foreign language and making it accessible to a whole new audience. One of the reasons why this period interested me was that so little is known about it. At least that’s what I thought years ago. There is actually quite a bit of published research… in French, German and other languages. So I spend a lot of time going through publications and pulling out the information and posting it on Suvia’s Letters. I also spend a lot of effort trying to get information out of researchers across the pond. [Mr. Perin…call me!]
Another interest of mine is graphic design and drawing stuff. I don’t get to do this as much as I’d like. This artistic outlet also serves another purpose by providing a (currently rather meager) source of income. You can see my designs at my Cafepress shops. Take a look at Malarkey Pie for sciency/geeky stuff and Suvia’s Emporium for historically-inspired stuff. I come up with something especially cool or clever, I’ll post about it here. Please to consider purchasing something for someone on your gift list. Your purchase helps to fund a future research trip to Europe as well as the cost of running this site.
A future post will be on my fantasy research trip to the museums housing Merovingian artifacts and visits with researchers and visits with living history groups. My husband would like to visit Italy to see where his family originated, but that would be just for fun. The other part of the trip, the Merovingian part through France, Germany, Belgium, and Poland would be work, work, work! No, really. I suppose I should go buy a lottery ticket. 😀 It’s for science!