Je suis Kay — bilingual Acadian francophone from Campbellton, New Brunswick, right at the Québec border. French school to grade seven, English from grade eight, and Chiac in the kitchen the whole way through. Gen X, native in both. I live mostly in English these days, and I go looking for reasons to use the French.
I trained as an accountant — two years of Business Administration at Mount Allison in English, and an Accounting Technician diploma at CCNB Bathurst entirely in French. I landed on Prince Edward Island in 1996 and went to work for the only French-language newspaper on the Island.
Teaching found me in 1997 and never quite let go. It started with software and adult learners, most of them convinced they weren't technical and most of them wrong about it — a twelve-week program I built from scratch, a certification testing centre, a team of four instructors. Then my own training company in 2003, and a digital agency from 2015 to 2022. Close to thirty years of making something complicated feel possible to somebody who'd already decided it wasn't for them.
Somewhere in there I joined the Charlottetown Toastmasters Breakfast Club, mostly to get better at the standing-up-in-front-of-people part. In 2016 they put me on the stage at the District 45 fall conference to talk about building a presence online. I called it Launch Yourself Online. Ten years later I'm still at it — consistency or stubbornness, I've stopped trying to tell them apart.
The career underneath it has been IT and data for twenty years: systems, databases, the unglamorous work of making information usable. The longer I do it, the less of it is about the technology and the more it's about the people around it — mentoring someone early in their career, sitting with them in the messy middle of a problem, helping a team get better at how they work together. This past year I've been deep in leadership coursework: coaching, emotional intelligence, servant and human-centred leadership. Same instinct I had in 1997, different room.
That's still where my working life sits: IT and data, leading people and projects, and building apps through Two Shores Software Inc. — which is where Closet Cue lives.
I'm still a student, which feels about right. A Computer Information Systems diploma at Holland College, part-time and by distance, done spring 2027. Before that, a 200-hour yoga teacher training, a health coach certification, a personal trainer designation and a stack of nutrition coursework. Not to open a studio — I wanted to understand what I was doing to my own body before I said a word about it to anybody else.
The rest is just showing up. President and treasurer of the Home and School Committee at École François-Buote. Eight seasons raising money for Sherwood minor hockey. A year managing a Bantam AAA team. Charlottetown is small enough that if you show up you end up running something.
Accounting to IT, English to French and back, teaching the whole way through. The long way round taught me more than the straight line would have.
These days I make content about real life — style that works for actual humans, food worth making, and the ordinary moments that make a life beautiful. No perfection here. Just warmth and a good laugh.
Home base: my husband Barry, two golden retrievers (Stark and Pepper), and three cats (Gus, Juliet, and Shuri). My 26-year-old son lives nearby on PEI. And Closet Cue exists for the least glamorous reason there is — I got tired of having a full closet and nothing to wear.