MORE BIOS!! MORE BIOS!!

OK, here’s my condensed story…I graduated from Stanford and the UCLA School of Law. I spent six months studying in Italy and six months living in France between undergrad and law school—also worked in a casino at Tahoe, spent two months camping in the Northwest, and other such stuff during that two year gap.

After UCLA (and “student lawyer” stints in a California prison and youth authority and West Virginia mental hospitals), I moved to Eastern Kentucky and worked for Legal Services there, as a staff and managing attorney. Went out on my own for eight years, tried the “Back to the Land” thing, ended up in town again. I married a guy who is still my good friend; things did not work out. Ran for Judge, came in second of three in the primary, lost in the general.

I decided the end of the marriage was the end of my life in KY, and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked for law firms, then decided to move to Hong Kong (1994), spent a month there looking for a job and decided it was too much for me. So I went out on my own again in SF and have been self-employed ever since. After many different areas of law that did not satisfy me (family law, real estate, mass tort litigation, and others), in 1996, I started doing immigration. I chose it because of my love of the world and its peoples, and it stuck. The agencies and the laws are terrible, deliberately convoluted, and creating Catch-22 over and over, but I still love the work and am doing it to this day.

Then I went to a wedding and met the love of my life, who unfortunately lived 2400 miles away (in Northern Virginia), so I made another move. After three plus years in the DC area, Jim (Gruenebaum) retired from the Department of Justice (no, thankfully he is NOT a lawyer!) and we moved to this wonderful place, New Bern, in Eastern/Coastal North Carolina. We are here to stay, hurricanes notwithstanding. He has two adult daughters and I have no kids, just kitties.