All about me
Well, everything about me that I'm willing to put up on the internet for any joe random to read.
I am a chemical engineer. I'm also a shamelessly self-taught computer geek; my only programming classes were in Turbo Pascal in high school and "Compsci for engineers who are probably never going to program again" in first year engineering. Since then, I have taught myself Perl and (shudder) Visual Basic. The second was not by choice, believe me. I've started mucking about with Perl/Tk, but I don't really have any project I want to build, so it's on the back burner. I also made the mistake last summer of admitting that I had programmed MS Access and its bletcherous Visual Basic backend, and got stuck doing the front end of a program.
I write fiction and articles for my website. Most of my fiction has a tendency to get long - not so much long-winded, but the storylines keep getting more and more complicated. I think I'm going to have to go over some of them with pruning shears and cut out some of the less necessary subplots. The articles are a lot easier to keep to a reasonable length, because I can keep them to one subject. I also outline them first; the fiction has a tendency to grow more organically around a much vaguer outline.
I spend far too much time mucking about on my computer. I should at least make an attempt at being semi-productive.
I started sewing again. I suppose "again" isn't really accurate, because I haven't done a whole lot since, oh, home economics class in junior high. Anyhow, I've made a nice shirt for myself, and two for my boyfriend. In the works are another shirt and a skirt for myself, and a pair of pants for my boyfriend. I have an oldish singer genie, one of those sorta-portable ones that you can stash somewhere when you're not using it. When I got it, the shoebox with other stuff (like extra needles, pins, buttons...) had a little pocket-sized book on dressmaking. The cover fell off, so I glued it back on, and it was printed in 1943. Just before the title page inside the cover, it says "In order to cooperate with the government's war effort, this book has been made in strict conformity with WPB regulations restricting the use of certain materials." I'm not sure if it's the book itself it's talking about, or the advice in the book. It's also got a section on making new clothes from old ones. Rather an interesting read, even if the styles they show are a little dated.
Let's see. I'm 25 years old, female, blue eyes, brown hair just wavy enough to tangle a lot, fairly average-looking, and recently married. Oh, and that's me and my husband in mid-August, 2002 (before we got married), to the right.
I have cats. I also finally broke down and made a page just for them. This was a surprisingly difficult decision, because one of the things about other people's homepages that I hated was that they had gobs of "cute" pictures of their cat, dog, kid, or whatever. But when my Mom sent me that picture of my cat in her sink, I just had to put it up. So if you like cute kitty pictures, enjoy.
And finally, no, this page probably won't be updated regularly. I've never been a big fan of the whole 'blog' thing. I occasionally post something in the diary section of Write On! or kuro5hin though, if you want to know what's been happening with me (that I'm willing to post on the internet).
