Hi, I'm Brooke :) Nice to meet you or maybe I already know you?
My favorites in life: people, animals, wildlife, science, philosophy, and music. I've always been curious about the nature of things in general.
I was born in 1977 in Wisconsin and moved to California in 1988, where I live today.
My current life
Lately I've been fascinated with the movie Wisdom of Happiness and spend a lot of time meditating.
I work a lot with Drupal.
And I love hanging out with my cat Luna.
My past
Born in January 1977. Grew up in a small town till I was 10. Parents moved us to California for jobs. I always did well in school but lacked direction until later on in life.
After high school, I went to Europe for a couple of months. Then to UCSB in 1995, where I was supposed to learn microbiology and get a general education but instead I became fascinated with the internet and learned how to code websites. I've been making websites either full-time or part-time since then, even when working other jobs.
But I couldn't decide on a direction to take and made a wild decision to go to music school in Hollywood at the Musicians Instititute of Technology. I learned audio mastering and mixing there, though I was supposed to be learning to be a better guitar player. After that I did community college in Riverside, CA, and moved in with my girlfriend at the time, who is amazing still (you know who you are) and across town from my troublemaker of a brother. Then we broke up, it was not easy, and I moved to Santa Rosa with my brother and his friend. But, they didn't like having jobs or paying rent, so I moved out on my own.
I worked a ton of odds jobs, played some music, and moved around the town of Santa Rosa until 2011, when I met my ex-wife on a radio show. That's when I start doing computer programming full time and specializing in Drupal for work. I spent a decade making complex websites for some of the biggest companies in the world. But, it was a very difficult decade, ending with COVID and resulting in our marriage starting to waver. I got sick with COVID and had some knocks to the head dirt biking and from a faint episode I had from a brain malformation I have. Good times. I think I became quite horrible to live with and quite negative. So, she left in 2023. May she be peaceful and happy.
It's three years later, more or less, and I'm fairly healed and ready to go again. That's the plan anyway. I've learned a lot in these three years. Maybe I'll blog about some of it here. I don't know.
Random list of things I've done:
a lot of construction jobs, work for big companies as a computer programmer, ride dirt bikes, play musical instruments, read tons of books, snowboard and ski, mountain bike, fish, disc golf, Tae Kwon Do, mix and master audio, co-found record label, swim laps, dive into bodies of water from high places, bungee jump, skateboard (street and some ramps), pick up any animal I find and try to be friends, meditate, camp, study religion, follow politics, work in a factory doing science stuff, drive taxi, work at a automotive transaxle shop, work in a VHS movie rental store, work at In-N-Out Burger, work as a barista, be married, be divorced, care for an elderly woman with dementia, work as an activities coordinator for autistic adults, run cross-country, surf (boards and body), sing solos in choir, tutor Trigonometry, beatbox, almost die from Pneumonia from COVID, be on over twelve medications at once (now I take none), watch my roommate play a video game for hours, play video games myself for hours, read every Terry Goodkind fantasy book and thank him every day (RIP), read a lot of dystopian books (1984, Brave New World, We, etc.), use medical imaging software to visualize my brain, do 3D animation, code for the web since 1995, study at University of California Santa Barbara and a dozen other community colleges but graduate from none of them, take everything apart as a kid to find out how stuff works, get in trouble in elementary school more than any other kid, hang out at coffee shops, rock climb, make armpit fart noises, and other stuff and things.
