What to say? I'm one of those people that always has a devil of a time figuring out what to write about myself. For vital statistics that I'm willing to give out to perfect strangers, my birthday is February 10 (yes, showering me with presents is encouraged), I'm a child of the 80's, both physically and in the fact that I love Care Bears and My Little Ponies, and I've lived in Utah my entire life.

I've had a presence online since 1997 under variations of the name Firebyrd. Though I had the misfortune of having started out on AOL 3.0 because that was the service my dad got, even that wasn't enough to keep me from what has become one of my true loves-the Internet. What's better than to have something that you can waste hours of your time on and come away no better than you started one day, then the next learn more than you would in a week of college courses? If nothing else, I can say that I've learned far more about human nature than I knew before as well as the very strange things that the lunatic fringe do.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. Yeah, yeah, I might very well vote for Mitt if he gets nominated, but it's from the fact that he's got a history of being able to take things from being in the crapper (Hi 2002 Olympics, I'm looking at you) and make them successful rather than our shared beliefs.

I'm a voracious reader. At last count, we had over 1100 books, but I'm in the process of slowly culling them. I've had an Amazon Kindle for just about two years now and physical books have changed from being as necessary to my life as food or water to being clutter I never touch. Speculative fiction is my usual playground, but biographies and memoirs have had an unusual hold on me in the past year or so. I also claim to like writing, drawing, painting and the like, though sometimes it seems more like I enjoy simply having something finished rather than the actual process. I'm also into gaming. While previously I was primarily a console gamer, the entrance of children into my life as well as my brother reintroducing me to World of Warcraft have turned me into a PC gamer. Kids have to work harder to get between me and my keyboard than they do to disrupt my play with a joystick. I'm not much of a tv watcher generally, but I do enjoy House, Angel, Dollhouse, and absolutely adore Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Mmm, Spike. My latest hobby is to customize My Little Ponies, redoing them in forms never seen before, and, at least some of them, would never have been imagined as children's toys.

I also love animals. I've had numerous pets throughout my life, from rats to lizards to rabbits to fish to cats to birds and so on and so forth. My current menagerie doesn't seem like a whole lot to me, but tends to make people pop their eyes out in astonishment about how many pets we have. We have several cats, Salem, Freya, and Lottie; two cockatiels, Elvis and Fafnir; and a couple other parrots. As of five years ago, we also attempt to care and nuture two young of the species Homo sapiens. Enoch, our son, will be five in April and Bea, our daughter, will be four in October. Despite their best efforts otherwise, they are still surviving and even thriving, proving that there is a God. Despite my efforts to avoid gender stereotyping, Enoch loves trains, cars, and fire trucks, and Bea loves clothes so much she'll actually choose them as a treat over toys sometimes. This leaves me scratching my head, but at least I've managed to get both of them to like ponies!