Fair Warning

BEFORE MEETING ME:
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

A public service announcement for anyone about to wander into my orbit.

You want a warning label? Fine. 😏

Marian is not a “we’ll deal with that someday” person. If she notices something is wrong, there is an excellent chance that by the end of the evening she will have diagnosed it, rebuilt it, redesigned it, ordered a replacement part, and somehow created a Bootstrap page about it.

Typical evening activities may involve code, machinery, embroidery, cars, or all four at once.

Marian standing beside her red C6 Corvette
Exhibit A: The manual C6 is not theoretical.

She runs an embroidery business, builds her own websites and CMS, wrestles embroidery machines into submission, designs newsletters and graphics, drives a manual C6 Corvette, and has very definite opinions about how things should look and work. If you tell her, “That can’t be done,” you have accidentally assigned her a project.

Marian wearing a lighted headband while working on an embroidery machine
Exhibit B: This is apparently a perfectly normal way to spend an evening.

She is extremely detail-oriented. She will notice the extra blank meta tag, the image that is three pixels too tall, the wrong Corvette generation, the font that is close but absolutely not the same font, and the bobbin thread that is supposed to go under a spring WHICH APPARENTLY DOESN’T EXIST. 😂

Accuracy is not a preference. It is apparently a weather system.

Do not bring her a complicated explanation when a simple solution exists. She has limited patience for software that hides the button she needs, hardware that behaves differently from the manual, or instructions beginning with seventeen unnecessary steps. If the computer refuses to cooperate, it may acquire a new name. See: “Flippin HP.”

A Sphynx cat wearing an embroidered shirt that says I am not AI generated
This paragraph comes with receipts.

She has a creative brain with approximately 38 tabs open at any given moment. One minute she’s repairing PHP code, the next she’s designing an embroidered cat shirt saying “I AM NOT AI GENERATED,” and fifteen minutes later she’s researching Christmas pudding basins because she has decided she is making an authentic Christmas pudding over Labor Day weekend.

And once Marian gets excited about something, you are now excited about it too. There is no opt-out provision.

She also has a formidable bullshit detector. Don’t bluff. If you don’t know, say you don’t know. She’ll respect that considerably more than watching you confidently march into a wall.

Most importantly, understand this:

Marian does not merely have hobbies.
She acquires entire disciplines.

Marian playing a hammered dulcimer beside a mountain lake
There are apparently additional disciplines not covered by this warning.
  • She doesn’t buy an embroidery machine. She learns timing, tension, reciprocators, needles and bobbin systems.
  • She doesn’t maintain a website. She builds the CMS.
  • She doesn’t join a Corvette club. Eventually there are newsletters, flyers, graphics and QR codes.
  • She doesn’t make Christmas pudding.
Christmas pudding mixture being prepared in a kitchen
And yes. The Christmas pudding actually happened.

Apparently, Christmas pudding is now a project.

There is no known upper limit to the number of simultaneous projects.

So when you meet her, bring curiosity, a sense of humor, and perhaps a small toolkit.

And whatever you do, do not tell her something is “good enough” when it is clearly four pixels off. 😈