How many children do you have?  Ages?  One daughter. She’ll be five in June.

How do you enjoy spending time with family?  We love to visit museums and gardens and recently visited Duke Gardens.  Springtime in North Carolina is so beautiful – new flowers in bloom every week from mid-March right through July.

We also spend a lot of time reading together. My husband and I are very proud to be raising a reader. Of course, even when we’re not reading to her, we spend a lot of time sharing books and discussing our huge monthly collection of periodicals.

And my husband might put this one first – we enjoy following sports and sharing them with our daughter. Most fall Saturdays, you can hear her singing “Hail to the Victors!” For March Madness, it is replaced with the Tarheel fight song.

What do you and your husband enjoy doing together?  We really enjoy eating great food. We’ve both gotten to be pretty good cooks, so if we go out, we really want to make sure we’re eating something we can’t make for ourselves – that way our dinners out are always extraordinary.

Guilty pleasure: American Idol. We love this silliness. Oh well, nobody is perfect.

If we have an opportunity, we really love touring historic sites. I left this off my “as a family” list because I can remember being my daughter’s age and being dragged to hundreds of battlefields and graveyards and growing up thinking I hated history. Eventually, I came to love it, but I’m wary about shoving it down her throat.

 What is your favorite vacation spot?  Our home state has so much to offer: history, beautiful mountains and some

of the finest beaches in the world. It is great to be able to get away quickly and easily for a long weekend at the drop of a hat. I’d say we split those trips evenly between the mountains and the coast. Our favorite beach

in NC is Emerald Isle. When we go to the mountains, we tend to prefer to be away from any crowds. Blowing Rock has some great restaurants and frequently has an open air craft market in the summertime surrounding a lovely public park in town. Asheville, further south, is a longer drive, but offers its own flavor of bohemian chic – it’s known as the Paris of the South. Don’t miss the Vanderbilts’ summer home: Biltmore house – but get the weekend pass if you are trying to relax – it’s too much for one day, especially with a little one.

We tend to visit Traverse City, Michigan annually. Not only is this a beautiful place to spend some time on the water, it is close to friends and family – plus it’s the Cherry Capital of the World!

On business, I have had an opportunity to visit some of the greatest cities throughout the Americas. I particularly love San Francisco and Mexico City. As soon as we have an opportunity, we will try these spots as a family.

Who is your favorite movie or TV star?  I guess I don’t think much about this one. I have a favorite show: The Office and multiple “favorite” movies, but not a favorite star.

How about your favorite movie?  I tend to break things down into genres to answer this so here goes:

• Comedy: Airplane
  
• Romance: Somewhere in Time
  
• Drama: Godfather, Part II
  
• Sports theme: Chariots of Fire
  
• Western: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
  
• James Bond: Thunderball
  

I could go on, but I won’t. This discussion often takes hours.

What are three to five books that you’ll always keep on your shelf? 

• The Holy Bible. 
  
• The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger). 
  
• The Sun also Rises
  
• (Earnest Hemingway). 
  
• The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald). 
  
• I Am One of You Forever (Fred Chappell). 
  

Actually, I’m a bit of an evangelist about these and have given these all away numerous times only to replace them. I feel they are “must reads.”

What about favorite children’s books?

• Guess How Much I Love You (Anita Jerum). 
  
• The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein). 
  
• Just in Case You Ever Wonder and You Are Special (both Max Lucado).
  

How do you spend your days?  I work in marketing communications. Most days are spent enabling our outstanding sales force, developing branding and advertising and planning public events. I travel about 30% of the time including multiple trips to Paris, Latin America and multiple destinations in the U.S. The best part is coming home to the warmest, greenest place on earth – better yet, to my family.

What’s a job you think you might have enjoyed doing, if you had pursued a different path?  Why?  I think I’d make a pretty good wedding planner. I am pretty good with the small details of events and would love to manage them for something as joyful as weddings 100% of the time. I can remember a Sales Director telling me once while I was worrying about the details of a customer appreciation event – “Don’t worry about it, it always works out beautifully in the end.”

I think it would be fun to make brides feel the same way. So many get overstressed over the little stuff – the event itself is important, but I’d counsel them to work harder on the marriage that follows.

What do you feel truly passionate about in life?  People. I love my work because I get to interact with so many different

people. More importantly, I am a part of helping them achieve success in their businesses and their lives. I hope to instill this passion in my child so that she to can be committed in her life and her career to the kind of work that helps people accomplish their goals.

PC or Mac Lover?  Having worked in marketing communications for years on behalf of IBM, I am a

totally biased PC lover.