JudyGS, a.k.a. Judith Grobe Sachs

How to get in touch with me | Who I Am | My Family, My Pets | What I do on the Internet | PGP Public Key

If you want to get hold of me, don't call; I hate telephones. Email me at judygs@uic.edu. I've just started playing with secure email using PGP Freeware; my PGP public key is at the bottom of this page.

Who I am

Since at half of what I do is for the WWW and the other half gets on the Web eventually, I suppose it's about time for me to put something about me on the Web. Besides, I have to keep up with my children and my brother Marty Sachs. (OK, fine, he's my brother-in-law, but after 35 years what's the difference?) I guess we're a modern family.

Name: Judith Grobe Sachs, call me Judy. I don't have a middle initial, I have two last names. (No hyphen, either. Sorry.) I was born in Pennsylvania, raised in Ohio, got my undergraduate degree (an A.B. with majors in chemistry and physics) at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.

Four years in Springfield were enough to convince me that I wasn't a small town girl, so I came to Chicago, Illinois for graduate school. I met my husband Ed Sachs on the second or third day I was in Chicago. (No it wasn't love at first sight; he had his "earnest graduate student" guise on, and I was enough of a hippie to not like that at all.)

Ed and I now have two Ph.D.'s (though neither of us are in our original field anymore) and three kids, two kids-in-law, three grand-kids, and live in Elmhurst, Illinois, the first suburban suburb west of Chicago. It's not as diverse as we would like, but the schools are good and we like it there.

The two things that are most important to me are my family (which includes too many pets) and my job (in that order and with the job coming in a rather poor second).

My Family

My husband of these many years (35 in 2005!), Ed Sachs. After a bunch of years of going though one job after any other, he's now working at Bank of America. I don't know how long he's been working there, but it's been a long time and he expects to work there until he retires. Yea! And he likes it too, mostly.

My son Daniel is 30. He graduated with University honors in May 1998 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (you won't find me calling it the U of I!), College of Engineering, majoring in Computer Science. We're really proud of him. He also got a Bronze Tablet award; they put the names of the top 3% of graduating seniors on a Bronze Tablet in the main library. Like me, Dan's second name is Grobe -- I really like the idea that the name "Daniel Grobe Sachs" will be in the UIUC main library for all to see for the foreseeable future.

Dan got his PhD in electrical engineering in May, 2006, still at UIUC -- he wanted to do signal processing, and it seems that UIUC is the best place for that in the country. (He really liked Carnegie Mellon when he visited there, but he didn't find anyone doing the kind of work he wants to do.) His wife Kathleen got her master's degree from Notre Dame a few years ago. She got has been teaching Spanish at a high school in the Chicago area. Now that Dan has graduated they can actually live together the whole week. Wow!
My daughter Julia is 28 and her husband Jobe Harter is also 30 (he and Dan are twins; born on the same day), and their daughter Rayna Lynn is 6 and their son Noah is 2. Most adorable children. And their third, Joshua Arthur -- who is named after Ed's father (Joshua was his Hebrew name) and my father -- was born on February 20, 2005. Julia is a pretty good photographer and she has good pictures of all three of her children on her LiveJournal. And there is a picture of Julia, Jobe, Joshua, and I (Judy -- a lot of J's!) that Dr. Desai took shortly after he was born below.

Julia is just about finished with her degree in teaching history at Elmhurst College. We are so proud of her for going to college and being a good mom all these years. And we're also proud of Jobe; Julia couldn't have done it without his support.

My daughter Emily is 24 and started last year going full time at DePaul University in Chicago. She went to Eastern Illinois for a year after high school and found out that going away for college at that time wasn't for her. She's been working at our vet's office and going to the College of DuPage since then. She's started at DePaul one course shy of being a junior. She's enjoying the better class of students at DePaul. But COD did really well by both Emily and Julia. It really is a service that the county gives its citizens. This time she is majoring in Sociology and Psychology.

We are really proud of Emily for taking control of her life this way. We were also proud of her during her junior year in high school, when she wrote an amazing essay that was published in the Chicago Tribune Voice of the People column. The governor called her a few days later and offered a summer job working as an intern in the Illinois state Commission on the Status of Women -- what a marvelous opportunity!
Perhaps you'll think me weird, but my family also includes 4 animals. Two cats: Charlie, a tan tabby and the "brat prince" of our house, and Isis, a black domestic shorthair. (Isis is the only cat I know who regularly purrs and growls at the same time. Julia got her from a shelter and she had a hard first year -- 4 pounds and 10 kittens. Wow!) Also Rico, who previously was our token dog and who is a true pound puppy (curly tail and all), but now has a little sister, Belle, our Katrina rescue; more about Belle later. Our sweetheart tabby Sherlock (not that they aren't all sweet), died at the too-young old age of 12, as did our previous token dog, Raccoon. (Only he was 13.) Snickers, a tortie (sort of); Ramona, our other black domestic shorthair who got no respect; and Andromeda, a Siamese calico, one of the prettiest cats in the entire world and also one of the best purrers have also died in the past couple of years. They all lived to a ripe old age.

And then there were the three kittens that Emily and I fostered a few summers ago summer for our favorite animal shelter, West Suburban Humane Society, the two girls Winken (the gray one) and Blinken (the black one), and the boy, Nod (the charcoal gray one; I think he's the one in the front, but I may be wrong on that). (Emily was their mother; I was just an aunt.) Giving them back to the shelter for adoption was one of the hardest things we've ever done. (Especially Nod.)

And since we have fostered dogs and kittens for WSHS, they gave us a call last September and asked us if we wanted to foster a pet from New Orleans. Twila, a medium sized mixed breed dog, came into our house September 16, 2005; we pretty much immediately renamed her Belle. We adopted her about two weeks later.
Belle is pointer and terrier and other stuff, a bit bigger than Rico, very sweet. She's not afraid of cats anymore, but now she wants to play with them. Poor cats. So now we have two token dogs. Not sure how that happened, but we're pretty happy with the situation.

And finally, for your amusement, feeding time at the zoo.

Of course, that's just our immediate family. We've got a large and wide-ranging extended family, too: one mom: Betty Grobe in Cleveland, Ohio; two brothers in Denver, Tom and Sharon Grobe, with six kids between them, and Paul and Marlene Grobe who only have two kids, but make up for that oversight by taking on semi-permanent boarders (actually now they have three kids; that's how permanent their boarders can get); two brothers here in the Chicago area: Jack and Deb Grobe with their three sons and David Sachs; the previously mentioned brother Marty Sachs in downstate Illinois; and one sister in Ohio, Sandy and Dale Brown, and their son Douglas. We're also blessed with two unofficial sibling families: Frank and Ilene Tobin-Chester and Les and Cheryl Saper, who live in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, respectively. Also many aunts, uncles, cousins, and assorted mishpocheh. (That's a wonderful Yiddish word that means "sure we're family, but we just haven't figured out how yet!")

This picture is from Dan and Kathleen's wedding in July, 2004. All the Sachs curls are natural. Emily's hair is shorter than in this picture, but she wins in the curly contest.

From left to right, there are Noah (Jobe's Mini Me), Julia, Jobe, Rayna, Kathleen, Dan, Judy, Ed, and Emily.

And below are Julia, Jobe, Judy, and Joshua, aged about 1 hour. The missing person in this picture is our Dr. Dina Desai, our family doctor, who delivered Joshua; she took the picture. Dr. Desai is our whole family's doctor, Ed and I, our kids and their spouses, and grandkids too. It's a really wonderful thing to have one person who knows and takes care of your whole family.

What I do on the Internet

I work for the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I have been most of my adult life. I got my Ph.D. here, left for 2 years to do a postdoc, came back to UIC as a visiting assistant professor in the chemistry department, was a visiting lecturer in the math computer science department, then began working at the UIC Academic Computer Center in 1984. The Computer Center has since merged with the UIC Telecommunications Office and we're now known as the Academic Computing and Communications Center.

My electronic mail alter-egos pretty much define my job. In addition to judygs@uic.edu, I am also known as connect@uic.edu in my guise as the editor and chief writer of the ACCC's newsletter, The A3C Connection, which is available on the Web at http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/newsletter/.

And, as if that's not a full time job, I'm also document@uic.edu, the keeper of the most of the Computer Center documentation. My big project these days is keeping up our online documentation on the Web. The Computer Center documentation was originally distributed on our VM/CMS system with a local software package (which I am proud to say I wrote) called Inform. Inform was designed to be flexible. Evidently we succeeded in our design, because my boss, Bob Goldstein, wrote a program that converted the document list and menu files used by the CMS version of Inform to HTML files for the Web. Inform had it's day on the Web, but it's gone now. You can see what's left of it in the Troubleshooting link on the ACCC Home page.

I'm not sure how my Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry prepared me for this life, though I've always liked to write. I also love to learn new things, and writing newsletter articles about stuff I know nothing about surely does let me do that. I'm particularly happy with the articles I wrote about spam and email headers.

I also have a work-related hobby, the copyeditor's list, though it's getting harder and harder to keep up with my CEL-mates. But I do enjoy the conversation and I learn something new practically every day. The CE-L archives are available online at http://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/copyediting-l.html

Not a bad way to live. Now if they only paid me a bit better. :-)

Judy Grobe Sachs, judygs@uic.edu

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