My Long, Rambling Bio

I was born and raised and still live in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. The pictures on my home page are all Chicago landmarks (see the Marina Towers below my logo?). I'm the oldest of 7 — five brothers, one sister — so I'm used to being the boss. (Now that they're all adults, though, I gladly give up that responsibility whenever possible!) So far I have six nephews and two nieces. All my family still lives in Chicago, you've probably run into a Concepcion and didn't even know it. I'm a Mom too — one sweet, funny, FinalCut Pro-whiz daughter.

My Dad is from Havana, Cuba; he went to the same Jesuit high school that Castro did (Castro was one year ahead of him). Dad says he played on the same baseball team as Fidel and he wasn't much of a team player even then. I still have a lot of family in Cuba and in Miami Beach. My Dad's brother, my godfather, has been able to come up to the U.S. from Cuba a few times over the years, and we talk via Instant Messaging, far cheaper and easier than calling Cuba.

My Mom is from Chicago, born and raised on the west side of the city. Her mother was Sicilian (any Bonafedes out there?) and her father was German. My grandpa was a journeyman lithographer for some of Chicago's biggest commercial printers. So maybe printing is in the blood.

Dad and Mom met at St. Anne's hospital in Chicago where she was a student nurse and he was an intern. Think Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and you'll get the picture. They were married while Dad was a resident and I was born at St. Anne's, thus, the name. They both stuck with their careers for the long haul; Mom semi-retired from nursing just a couple years ago but still works evenings in the Rehab unit two nights a week, Dad recently retired from his practice (he's a board-certified Family Practitioner) at the age of 73.

Back to me. Me me me.

My claim to fame in elementary school was that I skipped two grades (first and third) which was also my cross to bear during junior high gym (I was 10, they were 12... think Carrie... oh the horror), as a 12-year old in high school and as a 16-year old college freshman. But I got over it, with the help of a few hard-won friends, supportive teachers, and a fake ID in college. And now, all my classmates are still 2 years older than me! hah! I go to reunions and think, look at all those old people. I won't be that old for another two years!

In high school and college summers I worked as a waitress (good money if they serve pitchers of margaritas, which I pushed like hell) and ran amusement games for a local travelling carnival (also good money). Not liking money, especially loathing the sweet untraceable cash income that is standard with these sorts of jobs, in other words totally clueless, I went to school to be a public high school teacher, my dream job. I received a bachelor’s degree from University of Iowa in Speech Communications and Theatre along with a secondary school teaching certificate.

But, guess what, no jobs for high school teachers in Chicago. A dream deferred! I went back to waitressing as a stop gap and one of my customers was an old teacher of mine who had written one of my college recommendations. A *bit* humiliating. She was now working for the local elementary school district and was able to score me a job. Not in my field, but I'd get to hold chalk again. For the next couple years I was a Title I teacher (federally-mandated reading and language development program) and later became a Bilingual Education teacher, Spanish/English, for grades K–5 in the same district.

In a couple years, after I had mainstreamed most of my bilingual students back into regular classrooms full-time (this was back in the day when Bilingual Ed. was not supposed to last longer than three years for any student), I was laid off due to lack of students needing bilingual education. Working myself out of a job became a recurring theme in my life from then on.

So I took the opportunity to return to school for my Master’s degree, which I received from Northwestern University’s School of Education a few years later. While attending school I and my Mexican-American boyfriend (who was the bartender at that margarita-drenched waitressing job above) started a Mexican restaurant, “La Fonda,” in Maywood, Illinois. Perhaps you were one of the 12 people who ate there during the year of its existence. Its menu was my first solo attempt at graphic design and the first time I commissioned artwork from an illustrator (for its cover). It came out very nice.

Since my boyfriend (now fiancé) was an independent long-distance trucker, I also got my Class D license — for tractor-trailers — and joined him on his cabover Pete on trips across the country during summer breaks. This was right in the middle of the CB radio/truckers are cool craze ("I was headed for b'ar on eye one oh just a mile out of shakey town") but I learned the job is a bit more dangerous, filthy and exhausting than AM radio had led me to believe.

I vividly remember inadvertently tearing apart the driveshaft (the torque twisted it into two like a piece of taffy) trying to get up a steep exit ramp from a full stop outside of San Antonio because even in first gear my overloaded trailer of cilantro was pulling the rig backwards into the cars behind me so I double-shifted into third and stomped on the accelerator which was the wrong thing to do in that situation, I've learned, very wrong, but I didn't want to wake HisSnoringness to ask for help and then the cab bucked violently (my head slammed on the roof and HS was thrown out of the sleeper) and the driveshaft gave it up and all the reefer hoses wrenched off their mounts at the same time and were spraying freon all over the place like Medusa snakes, they were really whipping, so here comes the monster tow truck but it's Sunday, only could pull us up the ramp to the truck stop where we sat for hours going through the yellow pages and running out of dimes (what's a cell phone?) MEANWHILE with no refrigeration the 80,000 pounds of cilantro started to go bad — really bad, there in the south Texas sun, as fragile greens tend to do — and I have lots of other wonderful memories to share, ask me sometime. But don’t ask me to drive a stick. Ever. Again.

(We were divorced a few years later, and surprisingly, "ripping apart my driveshaft" was not one of the grounds in the divorce papers. I was sure it would be.)

My first position after receiving my master’s was with DeVry Institute of Technology (now they're called DeVry University, all fancy-schmancy) at their flagship school in Chicago serving a mostly inner-city population. I loved that job and I loved the students, the hardest-working students I've ever encountered. I started out as a “retention counselor” — intervention for first-term students to help them adjust — and a general education instructor. (I taught truck driving. Kidding!) From there I was promoted to management positions in Student Services (Assistant Dean) and then in the Graduate Placement office (Associate Director). 

While at DeVry I saw my first renegade Macintosh in a sea of command-line driven IBM PCs and fell madly in love. For the next year I plotted a way we could escape and spend all our time together, frolicking in MacPaint and HyperCard. I subscribed to MacUser, Macworld, and MacAzine (yes, MacAzine) for a full year before I ever got a Mac.

The advent of PostScript showed me the way. I quit my job to start my own desktop publishing business in 1987, with PageMaker 2.0, Word 3.0, a Mac II and a 300dpi laser writer ($6,000!) as my silent partners. It was called Seneca Press — Seneca after Seneca Falls, New York, site of the 100th anniversary of the first women’s convention held there the week I opened for business. (A spur of the moment "woman hear me roar" thing.) I changed the company name to Seneca Design & Consulting in 1990 to more accurately reflect my business’ operations, and again in 2003 to Seneca Design & Training since I was doing so much more training than consulting.

Although I'm still in love with my Mac(s), I have since gone biplatform, (I get a kick out of my geekness set-up here — a Dell and a Mac share the same monitor, mouse and keyboard, I just flick a switch to pop back and forth) and have expanded my business to include training, consulting, writing and anything Internet. And while I'm still the chief bottle-washer, the office is often buzzing with designers, programmers, and freelancers and usually have an intern or two hanging around.

I'm an an active member of a slew of design and technical associations, listservs and user groups, and I'm a Board member of the non-profit People's Music School in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. More about what I do *other* than work in the AFK (Away From Keyboard) section.