Susie, Loyal & Xavier
Loyal
Loyal was born in 1971 in Spokane, WA and lived there for ten whole days before being flown across the country to his next home. His father was in the Air Force and as a consequence Loyal has lived in many places in the US(including New Hampshire, where he grew up next door to Meredith Wade) and spent three years of his childhood in Brazil, where he became fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. He ended up in Texas, attending high school in San Antonio and college at Texas A&M in College Station, where he graduated with a BS in Computer Science. In 2002 he relocated his family to the San Francisco Bay Area so he could join PayPal, where he worked for over four years. He is passionate about the outdoors: in 2001 he took a semester-long course with the National Outdoor Leadership School to Patagonia. He spent a total of 79 days hiking and kayaking in the wilderness, with no way to communicate to the outside world. He also loves road cycling and roadracing, backpacking, hiking, and traveling the world. He currently works
remotely for a startup dot-com in Burbank, CA. His goal is to balance work, home life, and exercise so that he can stay in shape, spend enough time with his family, enjoy life, and still be able to make a living. His favorite thing about living in community is wandering the path and finding spontaneous connection.
Susie
I was born in 1977 in a motel near Laurel, MD and grew up in Austin, TX with my parents and four siblings. I was home schooled and helped my mother make a living by letterpress printing and hand-binding limited editions of miniature books. I grew up to work as a bookbinder, a ballroom dance instructor, and a support technician at Apple Computer, before I met Loyal in 1997 and was swept off my feet and away from Austin. We lived together in Seattle during 1999-2000 and spent nearly every weekend of that time hiking, snowshoeing, mountaineering, backpacking, road cycling, and traveling. We married in 2002 and moved shortly thereafter to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I got my Associates Degree in Spanish, which included studying for a semester in Spain. Since living in the Bay Area I have fallen in love with road cycling, particularly rides of 100 miles or longer. Unfortunately my beloved rides have had to make way for my beloved children, Xavier and Lily, who now take up most of my time. My current hobbies are reading, journaling, taking long walks, spending time with friends, backpacking, traveling, and getting used to a different kind of cycling: cruising around the neighborhood on an old bike with the kids in a trailer on the back. Loyal and I love the West Coast and are minimalists and environmentalists, which makes CoHo a wonderful fit for us. My favorite thing about living in community is sharing the joys and struggles of being a parent with the other CoHo parents and grandparents.
Xavier
Xavier was born in October 2005 in Austin, TX, on Susie's mother's living room floor in front of her whole family. He is an avid bookworm and practicing outdoorsman, and his hobbies include studying water, socializing, hiking, and watching freight trains go by.
Lily
I gave birth to Lily in our home at CoHo in February 2008. Afterwards I hemorrhaged badly and had to be transferred to the ER, a challenging experience that we could not have gotten through without the incredible support and love we received from the community. Lily is extremely sociable (imagine that!) and enjoys spending time with her CoHo extended family.
