JTA is saying goodbye to a team member this month: Anna, who has been doing base coating for Jeff since early 2020. While she'll still pop in at breaks and on some weekends, she won't be down twice a week like she had been doing, because she's off to Iowa City to (finally!) go to the University of Iowa.
Jeff and Anna go way back: all the way before she was born. A friend of her dad's from high school, Jeff is Anna's godfather, and he's taken his job seriously from day one. He was the very first one to visit her in the hospital, beating out even Jun's mother who lived in the same town! Though as a baby Anna really only liked her parents, as soon as she was old enough to play, Jeff became one of her top favorite people. He was always there to enact elaborate Barbie scenarios, and he of course drew and colored with her all the time.
Anna still draws to this day, both digitally and traditionally. She likes to draw her favorite game and anime characters and some of her (and her friends') original characters. She says drawing isn't just a hobby for her but a kind of art therapy, something to ground her and help her release stress.
Her first love, however, is music, which is what she's going to college for now, music performance with emphasis in french horn. She also plays piano and a bit of guitar, and when she was younger violin. Anna graduated in 2020--due to COVID she wore her cap and gown only down Jeff's driveway, where he and Caryle threw her a tiny garage graduation party. Due to the pandemic, she took a gap year, and during a lot of that time she worked at JTA, base coating a great deal of the work you enjoyed these past eighteen months.
Now she's in Iowa City, moved into an apartment with huge thanks to Jeff and Stan the Craft Van. We're going to miss her a lot, and not just because someone else has to do the base coating now! Jeff, Anna, and Jun spent many, many hours in the garage together over the pandemic, listening to music Anna picked, talking about all kinds of things, and just enjoying being together while they worked. We wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors, and of course she always has a place in JTA anytime she wants to take it back. Good luck at Iowa, Anna!
