Patty's Home Page

Homepages, "homepage.html". This phenomenum was popular in the late 90s, when so many regular folk put up their mark on the web. Even now, though, to me, it's strange to be writing a page "about me", it seems egotistical. Then to taking it to the grand height of registering your own domain name . . . well geeze, I'd usually rather hide in the corner, blend into the wallpaper. . .

So why did I do my first personal "homepage"? I guess: because I could. At least, that's how it began. I put up a tiny "here I am" on the spot.colorado.edu server. This got me hooked. Although not everyone will understand this, I find it fun to do web pages. At my job as lab coordinator in the chemistry department of CU Boulder, they let me do whatever I want (as long as it was good for the students), and so after my first personal "mark" on the www I decided to build a web site for organic chemistry. I used a Mac in my office as the server, and named that Mac "orgchem". Begun in 1997, the project expanded to a large and comprehensive web site for students of the sophomore-level organic chemistry courses (orgchem.colorado.edu). I retired in 2011, so eventually one will have to go to the Way Back Machine to see how it looked at first.

Back to the personal web page front. By early 1997 I had a few pages of recipes up on the web, tucked into a private corner of the organic chemistry web site. Then something happened: in April of 1997, my son was diagnosed with leukemia. That story ached to get out of me. The words flowed quickly through my typing fingers to the web. Beyond the personal story, you have to realize that I was (and am) an information hound, and I read everything I could find in print or on the web on leukemia. I wanted to share what I had learned with other parents of children with leukemia. So, I gathered the information and web links for other parents of children with leukemia and placed them on orgchem (orgchem.colorado.edu/Patty/Jamesleuk.html) where they resided for nearly 6 years.

I found that I wanted support to get through the cancer ordeal, so right after my son's diagnosis I joined the newly created listserve (e-mail list) for parents of children with all kinds of cancer (ped-onc), and later I joined one for parents of children with ALL (ALL-kids). So much patient-generated information flows through these lists that I felt it too should to be gathered together into a central web site. So, I authored a web site for parents of children with all cancers - the Pediatric Oncology Resource Center - and placed it briefly on my work server and then on the ACOR server in January of 1999 (www.acor.org/ped-onc, now www.ped-onc.org). I owe a lot to ACOR, for hosting the lists that helped me deal with what we were going through, and for hosting the ped-onc web site (all for free). Hats off to ACOR.

In 2001, I took over the ALL-kids domain and authored another small site specifically for parents of children with ALL (www.all-kids.org). In 2001-2, I was also active on the task force for the proposed Children's Oncology Group public web site, helping out by providing the parents' view and by building a prototype site (my son helped in this too).

In the late summer of 2003, I felt it was time to organize my endeavors and dissociate my personal web pages from my work web pages. By September 1 I finally settled on and registered my own domain name, and September 2 www.pfeist.net was born, with a whole lot of thanks to my son the computer master. This current site will serve as my "home base", and to help organize my personal story and my hobbies, and to direct people to the other sites that I author.

I'm still active in and administrate the listserves for parents of children with ALL, childhood cancers, and survivors of childhood cancers. I still maintain and update all of my sites with new information as it flows through the lists. (2012)

And what ever happened to my recipe pages? Ah, now that the battle with leukemia seems to be over, I'm getting back to them. And I'm adding the hundreds of recipes of my mother's, translating her handwritten cards into a database that I can eventually upload to the web. I have another hobby too: digitizing the vinyl LPs that my husband and I collected during the 1960s and 1970s. I digitize them to aiffs, then to mp3s, to transfer to my iPod. I plan to share my collection with other vinyl buffs on the web.

Update 2006: I have finished digitizing our vinyl records. Here is a list of the albums:

Vinyls, Patty and John's collection - I have all of the songs on these 168 albums as mp3 files

Another update, 2006: In September 2004, I began scanning in all of my father's slides, dated from 1947 to the 1990s. It took nearly 2 years, but they are finally done. Now I'm working in iPhoto to make different slide shows to share with my family.

2012: I wrote the bag-lady web pages on how to create your own, unique grocery bags (www.pfeist.net/bags).

Yup, now I have a lot to share on my "home page". Life's like that. Get enough years under your belt, and you gotta lot to say and share. Maybe someone will enjoy listening, maybe someone will be helped along their path. If not well, hey, that's okay. I'm not going to put a counter on this page, so I won't get discouraged.

:-)

Patty Feist