This is going to be pretty rambly... and long.  I'm on a lot of drugs.  I figure nobody comes here unless they want to find out more about the author of this website, so here it is... more.

I was born on Valentine's Day.  This is only cool when you're little if you were not a tomboy and enjoyed pink foofy heart stuff.  I have since then developed a pretty healthy appreciation for pink foofy heart stuff, but nobody gets me birthday presents any more.  I don't even have birthday parties... people are generally either bitter or busy on Valentine's Day.  Being an "Alice in Wonderland" enthusiast I try to have unbirthday parties instead.

Yes, that is a Superman shirt.  I'm still a big Underoos fan.
I always wanted to make gloomy/gothy underwear sets and call
them 'Six Feet Underoos'.  Right?

I was quite a handful when I was little... I hadn't shown any signs of being ill yet and didn't know I should be saving my energy for the near future when I would suddenly become old.  My health has (obviously) impacted my ability to work over the years.  When I was young I started with logging and moved on to excavation and construction work, but then the lupus and narcolepsy kicked in and put paid to that (you can't be in the sun with lupus).  I moved on to banking and graphic design as well as some tech support gigs, but then the arthritis and even more severe narcolepsy ended all of those.  I was even fired from a few of them (I'm talking to you, Stream International, you bastards) for suspected drug abuse, because according to them nobody could reasonably miss that much work due to undiagnosed health problems even though I had medical documentation for all of my symptoms and hospital visits.  I became a stripper after that, because amazingly stripping is a great thing to do if you're unhealthy.  The shifts are short, you spend very little of your time actively dancing (most of the time you're visiting at the bar or resting in the dressing room) and if you're tired or sore the customers will just assume you're drunk.  It was easy to cancel shifts if I was suddenly sick and easy to pick up a shift if I was unexpectedly well.  Easy until the breast cancer, that is.  I'm almost afraid to ever look for another job.  I don't really want to go blind or deaf or get "hand falling off" disease or something.  A friend recently heard my list of jobs and the corresponding illnesses and said... wow, good thing you were never a hooker.  I about died laughing.

Cranky and sick.  This is the second time I got the chicken
pox.  I was hospitalized and quarantined.

I love my family.  I have the average number of parents (that's still two, right?) and amazingly they're still in love and married to each other, which seems to be rare these days.  They fell in love in high school and dad was a football player and mom was a cheerleader and it's all like something off of Gidget Goes to School.  I have one sister and she's nothing like me, which is probably why she was popular.  We didn't always get along but I think that's normal... we get along great now, which is also probably normal.  I have a lot of extended family that I adore in small doses and a few aunts and uncles that I don't see as much as I'd like (which is pretty much all the time).  Isn't it the future yet?  Where are my space cars and teleporters?

The fact that those other children are smiling would indicate to
me that we didn't know each other very well.  The fact that my sister
is smiling indicates that I didn't leave in any pins in my sewing for once.

When I was little my father was always bringing home animals that he'd found injured in the woods.  At different points he had an owl, raccoons, and all sorts of otherwise woodland-oriented creatures.  He also kept lionfish and oscars, and I was always trying to rescue the goldfish and keep them in coffee cups, heh.  It's no surprise that I carried on the tradition and keep a variety of pets myself.  It doesn't have quite the same effect when you live in a one bedroom attic apartment on the edge of downtown as when you live in a spacious house on the edge of the wilderness, but I make do with what I've got.  What I've got at the moment happens to be eight cats (indoor only... they think their life is so rough), one aquarium (an unheated fifty-five gallon with four ornamental goldfish), one fennec fox, two birds (an owl finch and a society finch), and three chinchillas. My father always jokes that I'm going to be on the news one day as the person whose animals are all being seized by the Humane Society because they live with forty goats on a decrepit bus. At least, I think he's joking.  Like I would give up my car for a decrepit bus.  Plus, goats are stinky.

Considering the rate at which I adopt pets, it's probably good
that I don't live in the country any more...

I received my first computer when I was a child, a Trash-80 from Radio Shack. It was the most awesome thing I had ever seen, with it's cassette drive and it's four-inch-wide heat-sensitive printer paper. I eventually moved up to a Macintosh LC, which kept me busy through high school graduation, and even a few years after that, although eventually I threw together my own PC (how could I say no to such a wide variety of software options and compatibility?). That PC lasted me until about five years ago, when I had to evolve in order to keep up with EverQuest, a part-time obsession of mine.

Yummmmmm... EverQuest... I started out by avoiding any and all MMORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games, or, alternately, Many Men Online Role Playing Girls... sorry, I couldn't resist) I came across, fearing that I would be forced to interact online with the kind of people that live in their parents' basement wearing plastic vampire teeth and using scented oils as an alternative to modern hygiene. The fates were against me, however, and they provided me with an unopened Ultima Online box at the local Goodwill bins for the low, low price of $1.99. How could I resist this? It couldn't hurt to just try it out, could it?  It wasn't a far jump to go from Ultima Online to EverQuest, and after that I was lured entirely to the dark side... World of Warcraft. No comment, except that now I play both WoW and EverQuest II.

Coinciding with some of this online gaming was a pin-up photography website I published that was intended to combine my enthusiasm for gaming with my love of lingerie and pin-up art.  This netted me a small amount of notoriety and I made a modest amount of money and went to a lot of sci-fi/fantasy conventions where I met some great people.  I can't remember most of these people now, since narcolepsy, menopause, and chemo have melted my tiny brain.

I really miss going to conventions.  A lot.  Rawr.

Probably the reason I was so easily taken in by crack-pedaling enterprise known as online gaming is that so much resembles my first gaming crush, Dungeons & Dragons. I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my uncle when I was just a kid... to this day I don't know whether I should be offering him gratitude or revenge (I did ponder signing him up for the EverQuest Macintosh Beta Group, which kind of would have been both).  I was in the process recently of developing a number of d20 supplements and campaigns... when Wizards of the Coast made the d20 system open-content (that means that other people could make products for their game and publish them), I was so happy that I had to change my pants.  They've since changed their minds about that, and will now go to hell.

Playing D&D in Seattle with my aunt...

I am really addicted to comics, animation, and most things Disney (including Disneyland, but not Disney World, because who has the kind of energy it takes to walk all over half a million parks?). I do my best to keep going to the park, even though they do their best to make it unappealing to me, committing such atrocities as turning the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse into Tarzan's Treehouse and making the Pirates of the Caribbean politically correct. Despite this, I still hope to one day make millions of dollars and become a member of Club 33.  Right now I would be ecstatically happy just to visit the park.  Once.  Even just to use the happiest restroom on earth.

Disneyland and my friend Mark.  I totally lost touch with Mark,
and his friend who was also super cute and who's name I can't remember
because drugs melted my brain.  Le sigh.

Sewing occupies a lot of my free time (hahaha... free time) and once in a while I actually finish something that I start.  I dabble occasionally in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and of course I make all of my own garb (that's what medieval reenactment nerds call clothing) for that.  If you've ever been interested in the middle ages you should check it out.

I love to draw... I draw every day.  Well, every day that I'm awake.  Some days I just miss completely.  I've always loved to draw... I can't remember a time I didn't at least scribble.  I doodle in a lot of different styles ranging from ridiculously cartoonish to something resembling those crazy art nouveau knockoffs from the seventies.  I'm currently working on a comic book.  Who isn't?

Knowing me (and I do) I suspect those are not butterflies but rather
an amateur depiction of Hitchcock's "The Birds".

I used to go out nightclubbing most of the time, but that's slacked off almost entirely while I focus on getting back into something resembling 'shape'.  It's a curious thing, but going out every night is actually less expensive than going out only once in a while, since everybody loves you and everything is free if you go out every night.  I still go to a local jazz and blues supper club once in a while (I'm a big fan of risqué blues and jazz), and on rare occasions I go dancing at one of the local goth nights.  Goth is a musically-based subculture, by the way, not a religious movement or any other ridiculous think you may have read in the news.  Since I'm old I listen to old gothy music, like Bauhaus.  Once I combined my love of Bauhaus and my love of Disney and stuck mouse ears on the Bauhaus logo and wrote 'baumaus' underneath... I wore a t-shirt like this to Disneyland the day before a Los Angeles Bauhaus concert.  I like some new music, too, but since I'm not stripping any more or going out very often I don't hear as much new music as I used to.

Woot, Bauhaus.  I made that dress.  I bet it wouldn't even
fit my leg now...

I try to not be so much of a hermit, but you know, I really enjoy staying home and doing quiet things and not making awkward conversation with other human beings.  I do have a few close friends that have figured out they will have to visit me if they want to see me in person... I'd rather have a small number of friends that I really enjoy rather than a large number of friends I barely know.  I still hang out with my best friend from high school on a fairly regular basis despite the fact that she's got her life way more together than I do and actually has no problem socializing with other humans whatsoever.

My best friend Erika, who is brilliant and gorgeous and hilarious.  She
is also a pinball wizard.  She hardly ever flaunts this.

As to the rest of my free time, I try to spend it reading books or watching movies.  I have a strange fascination with pre-1970 Harlequin Romance novels... I used to be able to find them all over Portland but now they are completely scarce.  As far as books that I've read that other people may have possibly read as well, some of favorite sets of books are the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and the Belgariad (and therefore also the Mallorean) by David Eddings (I cried when he died.  Really.).  I've also been rereading my old favorites, the Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist and the childhood (and again as an adult) classic Watership Down.  When I watch movies I only watch humorous movies with happy endings (bonus points for quirky romance, anything pre-1960, or anything featuring Jackie Chan or Audrey Hepburn).

Well, that's about it for me... I think that's more than enough for one person to write about themselves unless they're an egomaniac or phenomenally interesting.  In case you skipped to the end, here's a short recap: crazy cat lady, draws silly pictures, plays nerdy games, has no social skills, and, um, stuff.