Pia - who is she?

Pia's Worlds -  sometimes I wonder why one world is not enough? It never has been enough for  me to just be involved with one thing; I get curious about something and want to explore it and learn the why or the how.

So this is a place where I can explore my curiosities, my passions, my interests, and share a little. My family is first in my life and my children are my life. We are close whether we are physically close or far apart and I still feel I want to scratch someone's eyes out when a child of mine is hurt ...

Books! Books have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Trekking to the library when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 and ever since, carrying home as many books as they would let me borrow. Children were only allowed to borrow 3 books, but could borrow as many plays as they wanted I found, so I would get my 3 books and then as many books with plays in them as I could carry.  Reading was my escape and the characters of many books became more real to me than the members of my own family.

These days I work with rare books  and fine art in an old adobe building which is a national landmark. I began my rare books career in San Francisco in the early 70s at John Howell-Books and am eternally grateful to the employment agency that sent me there "because I was as odd in my skills as the request for an employee who spoke languages and knew literature and liked people ..."

One day in the early 80s I walked into a computer store and asked the salesman to help me. He pointed me to a computer and said "play with that" and walked away. I was so turned off by his chauvinistic attitude, as I saw it, that I thought to myself "when I break this it will serve you right!". To my surprise I did not break anything and I actually figured out how to write a couple of paragraphs and I also doodled ... I bought my first Mac and have never looked back.

I love the elegance of code, especially when I understand it  :)!  "Fiddling" with originally Tango, then Lasso, now php, Joomla, FileMaker Pro and various other software is exciting, and can be so frustrating, but, oh so rewarding, when I make it work!  To have one little blank space defy me or having a single quote instead of a double sneaking in ... Like this website which is  a Joomla effort on my part and is a learning experience. Probably will always be a work in progress ...