Where to start? I never thought that I could be anything even close to an artist. I gave up a career as a Public Health scientist studying substance use after 20 years and started writing books on Petitations©™ (pet-centered meditations) which led to a series of picture books on mindfulness, compassion, gratitude, yoga and finding your forever home featuring none other than Pippi the Puppy and her brother Norman the Grumpy Cat. My writing has gone from purely scientific to whimsical and joyful. My newest project is about a 15-year-old girl, Alex, with severe anxiety, who works with an emotional support dog. While the Pago the Schipperke dog trains Alex to practice Petitations to deal with her anxiety, Alex teaches Pago to do agility and obedience training strengthening their bond and helping both of them. I’m about to launch into writing the skeleton outline for the millionth time. I’ve met some of the most incredible people while researching this book.

During Covid I started a podcast: Mindful, Happy Kids with interviews, Petitations, and readings from my books. 4500 downloads later, we are still going strong and branched out to video on a YouTube channel with the same name. I learned how to conduct interviews during my doctoral training, but this is a lot more fun. I have several interviews in my back pocket and a couple more on the way.

I also started learning to do website design and search engine optimization (SEO) during the pandemic, so that I could create this website and help out some friends. Surprising to me, I thoroughly enjoy creating websites. The combination of putting my research skills to work, figuring out how to simplify complicated ideas and present them visually and making them retrievable in a web search is challenging and fun.

Well, it’s the wee hours of the morning in California so I’ll end here for now.