About Andi

Let’s see. What might someone want to know about me? Probably not nearly as much as I am going to tell you. I started this little corner of the webiverse in 2020 as a place for me to learn more and for a bit of a change from my previous site. You can read more at my welcome post.

I am married to Chuck who is an amazing guy and the best husband and dad out there. We started dating in 2001 and got married on my birthday in 2004. We live on a lake in Minnesota and have three amazing kids!

We are busy people. Our kids are active in sports and school, we do projects around the house (Chuck is VERY handy), take trips, go camping, go boating, go tubing, wake surfing, water skiing (we love being on the lake!), go fishing, bike rides, swimming, go on walks, downhill ski, play hockey, coaching sports and more. Life’s too short to sit around.

Along with being very active, we are advocates for STEM and STEAM. We are teaching our kids all about coding, math, science, technology and art, have robots all over the house and a dedicated room for crafts, building and being creative. We ran the First LEGO League Jr. robotics program at our local middle school for two seasons. It was a great experience to help these kids get excited about programming and seeing their ideas come to life.

I used to work as a legal assistant at an Intellectual Property law firm (they specialize in patents and trademarks). I loved being able to work at home and be available for the kids. I decided to “retire” from my job in 2024. I know there is more out there for me and I wasn’t going to push myself to find that when I had this job as a fallback.

I love building, working on and tweaking websites. I am learning more front-end and back-end aspects and I’ll see where it takes me. I would really like to find some kind of job in tech, maybe making or maintaining websites on the side. I know this is something I love and just need to find the right fit for me in the tech world.

Here are a couple websites I have created, helped with, or maintained:

• Angie Bromeland

  This is a site for a dear friend of mine which shows her freelance creative writing, copy editing, editorial writing and marketing work. Contact her for any of your needs!

• Kelly, Holt & Christenson, PLLC

  This is an intellectual property (patents and trademarks) law firm that I work for. They are a small firm providing big results with a powerhouse team of employees.

• Operation HighGround

  This is a non-profit company my dad organized to help soldiers reintegrate into the community after serving our country.

• Ganser’s Goodies

  A friend and former neighbor started a baking business to sell her delicious goodies. She asked me to help her put together a storefront for her to sell her baked goods.

• andihays.net

  My previous blog and web playground where I learned to use Wordpress and developed skills pertaining to developing, editing and maintianing my own site. I don’t maintain or update this one anymore.

I also LOVE books and reading. I listen to audiobooks ALL the time (while doing dishes, chores, working out, in the car, any spare minute I can find) and mostly read on my emotional support Kindle the rest of the time. I usually have a couple books going at one time in various forms (physical book, audio book and ebook). I also have managed a book club since early 2012 and not only are we book lovers, we also love puzzles. My kids are readers, too and I adore catching them reading, reading with them or hearing about books they are reading. And in the last couple years, I started subbing and my favorite job is working in the middle school library.

I keep a blog because I want to journal things. I am glad to have readers, but I do this for me. If you don’t like the content…wait until tomorrow. You might like it then. 🙂 And if not, well, maybe I’m just not for you. I tend to be quite random about what I post here. But I suppose that is because I am a very random person! I am really working on embracing doing things for me and not for everyone else.

My husband currently works for Google and when he started there, we uprooted ourselves from Minnesota and moved to Seattle. We were there for a year and decided it wasn’t a place we wanted to stay and moved back home. Then, in 2020 (yes, during the pandemic), we sold our house and built our dream home on Lake Minnetonka. We thought long and hard about getting a cabin, but with the sports our kids play, weekends away just wouldn’t really work for our family. So, we started to pursue the idea of living on the lake full time. We found a perfect place to build the house we wanted and enjoyed (and went a little crazy at times) the building process – which was all made more challenging by building during COVID.

Let me know if there is anything else you might want to know about me. I’m an open book. I’m quite chatty (as you can probably tell) and if you made it this far, thank you! I am grateful you are here.