Day 1a- Introduce Yourself

I'm a visual person. I like to see pictures and drawings and charts and videos. So, I hope to include them in most of my posts.

This is me:


I'm 27. I was born in Kitsap County, WA in March. I have two sisters and a brother that I was raised with and a half-sister from my dad's second marriage. In the first thirteen years of my life I lived all over Washington state. Most of that time was spent in Eastern Washington with a brief stint in Vancouver. My mom re-married when I was 13.



We moved here when my mom re-married and it's where I spent most of my early teens. The only pertinent thing about this town now is that my parents and siblings still live there and it's where I met one of my best friends, Bonnie, when I was 13. I lived with my dad for a brief time just outside of Seattle. After I graduated from High School, I moved back to the 253 for five years and lived here:

This is the first place that captured my heart. Tacoma is like that weird kid in school that everyone picks on because it smells and isn't as cool as the popular kid which may be why I love it. It was the main port in Washington before Seattle's port was built and retains a strong blue-collar, working class population still. It's gritty in parts and beautiful in others. Like the Neko Case song says, "there are no hollow promises of a bright future." It's a refreshing break from the self-entitlement that people in Seattle and Portland have. That life should owe them something and that you need to have 38 Ethiopian cafes within a mile of your $400-square-foot condo. So, I lived here and worked in a coffee shop and went to community college.

After I finished my Associates Degree, I moved here to finish my BS:



I lived in a house in a nice neighborhood with three other girls and still worked at a coffee shop. I finished my BS in Community Development and concentrated on housing and economic development. After I graduated, I took classes for a year as a post-bacc and planned to go to graduate school for Urban and Regional Planning. I stopped going after realizing that I couldn't really afford to keep going and that planning requires a lot of 'after hours' to attend neighborhood association meetings, city council meetings, and was too politically geared. I didn't want to jump through a billion hoops to get affordable housing developed. So, now I still work at a coffee shop and am competing with the hundreds of other like-minded people in Portland to try and get a job doing something I care about.


In the meantime, I live with my sweet fiancee and a giant dog in a duplex and our friends live on the other side. We live in a neighborhood downwind of a Nabisco factory so the air smells like cookies in the evening. My favorite things in the world could be described as vintage or whimsical. Our house looks like this inside:



I make subversive cross-stitches and watch a lot of Netflix. I love Indian and Lebanese food and baking. I'm a type A personality so I don't like spur of the moment or unexpected situations and plan everything in my life three steps ahead. I also like to clean. A lot. I'm queer identified and femme in every sense of the word.

In Russian, Misha is a diminutive for the Russian male name Mikhail (Michael). Most bears appearing in Russian fairy tales have this name, because it is similar to the Russian word for Bear - Miedvied (Russian Медведь), of which the diminutive form is Mishka. I, however, am not Russian. :)