I was born in a wonderful place! My father was a missionary to the Caribbean and served churches on the island of St. Croix of the US Virgin Islands. Because of his job, we ended up moving quite a bit as children. I truly believe that is one of the reasons I am so comfortable meeting new people in new places. I have lots of old friends but I meet new people every day!
I was always a voracious reader as a child and made regular trips to the local library trying to learn about everything I saw or heard during the week. I often wonder how my life would be different if the internet had been around back then! I still make little notes of subjects to investigate but now it is so much easier to do research from the comfort of my home.
I was involved in a lot of sports throughout my high school and college days. I started playing football in junior high but I got hurt and became a manager, learning to name all the muscles and bones of the body and even taped a few ankles. I ended up in wrestling (the asst. football coach was also the wrestling coach and my favorite science teacher) to help build up my injured neck muscles and stayed in that until my junior year in college. I played tennis and basketball with my friends, dabbled in track and baseball but found a sport I really loved when I went to junior college. I played on a pretty good soccer team in Fond du Lac, WI and played in an intermural league at UW Stout.
I started drawing at an early age and pretty much made up my mind that I was going to be an artist when I grew up. I drew everything but especially loved drawing cars in high school (Blame Big Daddy Roth!). I tried every type of art I could from silk screening to paper mache to painting to... thanks to a fantastic high school art teacher who nurtured me through those 4 years! A big shout-out to Mr. Earl Ritter (and his lovely wife Anita)!
College was more of the same for my art career. I got to try lithograpy (with real stones), silkscreening, engraving, casting metal and throwing clay but my favorite class of all was Art Metals.
My plan was to go to graduate school at UT-Knoxville but, unfortunately it didn't work out quite that way. UW-Stout lost my records in their computer so I didn't have a diploma at that point. I went back to roofing and calling the university. I was involved in a near-fatal car accident in October (fell asleep at the wheel) and my diploma finally came while I was in the hospital. After months of rehab, I decided it was too late to try to go to graduate school so I headed out to find a job and the rest is history. One good thing that came out of the accident - during my recovery period I discovered wood carving again and have been doing it ever since!

AKind of nosy, aren't you?

This is a picture of the famous "Nosy Stool" that I made
for my father so he could look out the bathroom window
and see who had pulled into their driveway. It had to be
short because his balance wasn't the best. It sat against
the wall and allowed him to hold onto the window frame.