Suzanne is originally from Wading River, Long Island, NY.  She has lived in Las Vegas, NV, Chicago, IL, Fairfax, VA, and now resides in Arlington, VA.  She currently works as the Director of Human Resources at her company.  She's also attending NVCC and working towards her AAS in Business Management.  She has the most active social life on the planet, pretty much runs her office, and STILL manages to pull total nerd grades.  ;)

When I went to the office of the company through which I'm contracted to observe elections overseas, all I planned to do was to pick up my travel package and tickets.  When I got there, I met Suzanne, with whom I'd spoken on the phone several times in the planning run-up to my trips to Ukraine in 2004 and Albania in 2005.  We'd struck up conversation and a fast friendship.  While I was away, we'd emailed back and forth a bit, and when I created my blog about the travels of an American girl overseas, she'd begun reading it (as it turns out, she's apparently very easily entertained, LOL!) and we corresponded on the blog site a lot.  We'd kept in pretty close contact after I returned; it was just after my return from Albania that I'd moved to Pensacola, and she was my lifeline to all that I loved and missed in my previous life up north. 

During the first months of my stay in Pensacola, I was just shy of miserable -- with work, with life.  Suzanne, in concert with our friend Bob, did her best to cheer me up, including but not limited to offering to come down here and take matters into her (their) own hands!  She's always been the best source for advice on love, life and work and, naturally, for some good, old-fashioned, true friendship (she's one of the only people I'd initially told about "NexGen"!).

Every time I go back to the DC area, I have GOT to see her before I leave, for dinner/drinks/debauchery (of course, our schedules sometimes have a mind of their own....)  Suzanne is brilliant, determined, devoted, and riotously funny; she's the kind of person my Mom describes as "a doll!" -- beautiful on the inside and out, and an absolute pleasure to know.