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C olleen has a long history of standing to the left. Photographers, take note!
She was born and raised in sunny Santa Barbara, California, where her mother taught her to create things by hand, while her father helped her discover how things worked. It may have been all the years of scouting, piano lessons, summers camping with her father, afternoons imagining with her mother, dance lessons, softball practice, music ensembles, art projects, storytelling, theatre performances, creative writing, exploring strange new imaginary worlds, seeking out backyard life-forms and distant civilizations, going boldly where no Laird had gone before...
 ...well who can say, really? The point is that she has never lost the gift of wonder and adventure nurtured by her loving parents. Colleen is addicted to new places and experiences, learning, and travel.
She hates being stuck in a rut.
Ironically, Colleen has been a student for a very long time.
She earned a B.A. from Macalester College (a small, liberal arts school located in the midwest) with official majors in Biology and Asian Studies, and an unofficial major in GoldenEye. During her junior year, she studied abroad at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where she developed the bad habit of absolutely loving Japan.
After graduation, she taught English as a Second Language to adorable and unruly (in equal measure) high school students in Onomichi, Japan with the JET Program. She decided, then, to return to school herself, with the aim of teaching adorable and unruly (in not so equal measure, as it turns out) American college students.
Colleen is currently a Ph.D. student of Japanese Cinema and Gender Studies, working on her dissertation on contemporary Japanese female film directors, at the University of Oregon.
That is where she met Josh.
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Josh was born in (not exactly sunny and warm) Anchorage, Alaska, where he learned to resist the daytime/nighttime schedules imposed by the regularly setting sun, where he gained his tolerance for extreme temperatures and first decided that t-shirts were all-weather gear. When he and his family later moved to suburban Denver, his parents taught him to appreciate outdoor pursuits such as camping, fishing, baseball, soccer, and scouting as well as indoor pursuits such as the piano, disassembling and reassembling electronics, and eating spicy food (unless, of course, spicy food is available outdoors).
He earned a B.A. in Physics and Anthropology at Bucknell University (a liberal arts school in Amish country, Pennsylvania), where he also first grew attached to the country of Nicaragua by working in a refugee community formed by Hurricane Mitch.
Consequently, in sharp contrast to Colleen, he has a high tolerance for cockroaches, scorpions, snakes, crowded buses, crazy taxi drivers, and tropical diseases.
Dozens of trips and thousands of dollars later, Nicaragua is still imminently on the agenda. He is now months away from a Ph.D in Anthropology at the University of Oregon, where he has written a dissertation on several "fair trade" cooperatives that produce t-shirts and delicious coffee.
He enjoys short- to medium-length walks on the beach.
He would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red, or orange, or pink - he is not a "spring."
And until recently he thought that George Elliot was a man, Evelyn Waugh was a woman, and Van Morrison's song "Brown Eyed Girl" contained reference to some guy named "Rodrigo."
And then he met Colleen.
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