Frances BuranBiography and history It is often said, You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl. At least, that was said to me on more than one occasion during this lifetime. I was raised in a small farming community n the rich, fertile Central Valley of California. After 4 years of college in the big city of Fresno, California, and graduating magna cum laude, I returned to my hometown. Shortly thereafter, I found that life in the city lacked the rich, fertile soil that my intellect had become accustomed to. And so it was, I moved to the Bay Area, specifically to what shortly was to become the heart of Silicon Valley. I found a position as a specialist typist at Stanford Medical Center, then Stanford University. With a background in typing abstracts and scholarly articles (and then some minor editing), I moved on, into the publications department for software documentation in Santa Cruz, a stone's throw from Silicon Valley. Up the ladder there too - beginning with inputting typographical codes for print and proofreading documentation, then to copy editing, and finally into indexing. In the late 1990's, when the opportunity presented itself to become an independent contractor with those skills (and missing the country), I moved myself and the computer to a former mining town (population, 560) in the central Sierra Nevada foothills. I have since migrated to another small community in Northern California (population 2,500), just north of beautiful Mt. Shasta. While I do have a home near downtown, I began my life here by digging up the backyard to start a garden and then I unpacked the computer. Location Read More Read Less