"Leap, and the net will appear." -- John Burroughs

In October 2007 I phoned Deanna Kosaraju and said, "I'm thinking about quitting my job and doing a service year at a nonprofit. Can you use me?" I started going in to the Anita Borg Institute office after the 2007 Grace Hopper Celebration, and five months later I was hired as their Communities Program Manager.

For the last four years it has been my honor to work for the Anita Borg Institute. I've learned so much from the exceptional staff, volunteers and community. It was fun to build the Institute's social communities on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and to see them fill with inspiring technical women and diversity champions. But a few months ago I started thinking about moving on. And then I started preparing: updating profiles, looking at job listings, talking to a few friends.

In that wonderful way fate has of giving us a nudge when the time is right, yesterday I was laid off. I feel extremely fortunate and grateful that my volunteer service turned into a four year paid position. I'm enjoying some time off for rest and play, and I'm excited by the possibilities of this new adventure.

As I did in 2007 when I started this blog, once again I leap into the unknown trusting that the net will appear.

I'm Geeky Because ...

She's Geeky, the unconference for geeky women, opens with a circle. We introduce ourselves with our names and a sentence that begins, "I'm geeky because". I've attended at least one day of every She's Geeky Bay Area since the first one in 2007, and I've made it a personal challenge to give a different geek statement for every day of every event. And I haven't yet run out of reasons why I'm geeky.

This year I'm geeky because I took the day off from my full-time job supporting technical women to attend She's Geeky as myself.

It's Only Stuff

I spent a leisurely morning offline, reading the newspaper over breakfast and then watching last week's Lost on Tivo while I laid out my pills for the coming week. Eventually I sent My Beautiful Wife a text message asking how her workday was going. She responded that she'd mostly been glued to Twitter following the "EQ and HI tsunami" reports. What?!?! I turned on the TV and booted up the Macbook and learned about the powerful earthquake in Chile and the tsunami warnings around the Pacific rim.

I checked in with Twitter friends in Hawaii and learned they were safely ensconced above the danger zone. Someone tweeted the URL for a CBS station on Oahu that was streaming live coverage. A Twitter friend in Santiago, Chile had posted "Terremoto en Chile" ten hours earlier. Another had messaged back to her in Spanish, "Can you phone my parents?" and later the tweet shown above, which translates as, "Now I know about my parents. Very scared but they're fine. The house is damaged but it's only stuff." Soon I was watching The Weather Channel on TV and both CNN and Hawaiian CBS coverage simultaneously on the laptop, mesmerized by the ocean's retreat in Hilo Bay.

I'd been absorbed in this for some time before I realized that this would be a perfect time to make my regular Saturday call to Mom. My mother was a Navy WAVE stationed on Oahu in World War II, which began her life-long love affair with Hawaii. She had just come in the door when I rang, and I told her to turn on the TV. We watched coverage of the earthquake damage, the aftershocks, the tsunami's advance; together, two thousand miles apart.