About Me

I manage a web design/user experience team at a media/publishing company in Indianapolis, Indiana where I’ve worked since 1994. We publish textbooks and computers science and business books, and my team designs and builds the online bookstores for those publishing ventures.

Need to talk to me? Here’s a contact form.

Biography

I’m married to a wonderful woman named Stephanie, and we own a 130-year-old Victorian home in The Old Northside, an historic neighborhood in downtown Indianapolis.

Stephanie

Stephanie and I have the same first and middle names, which causes a lot of entertaining confusion. I’ve known her for quite a few years, and for a good portion of that time I had a crush on her. Fortunately she fell in love with me, too. I am a very lucky girl, because she’s extraordinary. We got married on May 31, 2008 (and then went to Canada for our honeymoon and got married again for the legal piece of paper).

Stephanie and Me

Since 1994, I’ve been writing/designing/creating this website. I enjoy taking pictures of “big things” and advertising art and have been on the local news because of it. I have a dozen other photo projects in the works, and I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo several years, winning for the first time in 2011. In May of 2009, I took up knitting. Here are some photos of my projects. At the end of 2011, I took up rowing to improve my physical fitness. I’m a novice, but I really like it.

Our dog Spike is a wonderful little guy; he’s a Chihuahua/Shiz Tzu mix. He almost hardly ever gets in any trouble.

Spike

I have three awesome cats; Drusilla, Huckleberry Finn and Annabelle Lee; they were all rescued from outdoors by my friend Kathy, who does lots of work with feral and abandoned cats.

Drusilla

Huckleberry Finn

Annabelle

Stephanie has a wonderful cat named Lucy who picked Stephanie out as her new owner at the Humane Society.

Lucy

Childhood and Growing Up

I was born in West Des Moines, Iowa, at 7:01 a.m. on June 6th, 1968. This happened to be a couple of hours after Robert Kennedy died. That was great, because for the first couple decades of my life, the news had nice retrospectives of the event with lovely titles like “The nation mourns as it recalls June 6, 1968.” Thanks.

Me at one day old.

My family lived in Ankeny, Iowa through elementary school, which is a suburb outside Des Moines.

Me sneaking cookies from Grandma’s cookie jar.

I have four brothers and a sister. I’m the second child and first daughter, so I got to be the second mom for my youngest siblings. I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but at least I learned how to change a diaper and babysit, which can be handy.

Me in the early eighties with my siblings in our front yard, holding my brother Gary.

My dad was transferred to Canton, Ohio for a couple of years when I was in Junior High. I didn’t enjoy that much at the time. We moved again to Noblesville, Indiana, when I was in high school, and I graduated from Noblesville High in 1986.

I went to Ball State University because they gave me more scholarship money than anyone else, and I studied journalism/magazine design, philosophy and English. I graduated in 1991.

This would be me in college, with the big hair. It was the eighties. That’s my only defense.

I’ve lived in Indianapolis since 1992, and with the exception of cold winters and absence of good public transit, Indy is a great city. I love it, despite it’s conservative politics.

I moved to downtown Indianapolis in 1993, and have been there ever since. I rented apartments for many years in Herron-Morton Place, an historic neighborhood in downtown Indianapolis. In January of 2002 bought my first house house in HMP, which I worked on restoring until Stephanie and I bought our house together in Old Northside.

More?

If you must know every little thing about me – I believe I’ve answered every question I’ve ever been asked about myself here.

“Who am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I’ve gone that would not have happened if I had not come…. to understand me you must swallow a world.” Salman Rushdie, From Midnight’s Children