I am a musician, a chemist, a teacher, a photographer, an indoor gardener. I am an unabashed geek and proud of it. I'm crazy about music, with my palate ranging from Bach to Poison to Tool, but I'm not fond of rap or most country. I play guitar. I'm a big gamer; board games (Settlers of Catan, Cosmic Encounter), card games (Bridge!), computer games, or role-playing are all good.

I moved to New Jersey from Indiana three years ago, leaving everything I knew and loved behind to seek fame and fortune and glory, or something like that. I've got a stable and fulfilling job and just bought my very own house, but the radius of my circle of friends is a little smaller than I'd like. I'm trying to change that.

I'm interested in making new friends, particularly people who want to play games or play music or go out hiking. See 'You should message me if...' below for details.

I have a wonderful girlfriend, she's winktwice (we even met on here, about three years ago).

I have a web site, too. It's at http://apostasy.dyndns.org:8080/~wildfire/

I work in the laboratory of a major pharmaceutical company. Half the time, I'm making molecules from earth, air, fire, and water. Half the time, I'm keeping our stable of robots well-fed and happy; hopefully they'll remember me favorably during the uprising.

Most of the things that I think are worth doing I do well. I like making things. I wanted to know whether it was getting too cold for my plants in one of my old apartments, so I soldered up a network of temperature sensors, wrote some code to have the computer poll them, and had my linux box stick the results on a web page. I needed places to put my books, so I built bookshelves. I wanted to make something special for a few of my close female friends, so I got a blowtorch and learned how to work silver. I've made clothes for myself and others, stitched some of them by hand, and even drafted a few patterns from scratch. I like plants, so I raise orchids. There's a 98.5% chance that I've got cooler plants than you do. I tend to do things by hand, but probably only because hand tools are less expensive and I don't have the place for a workshop in a small apartment.

I am a notoriously (and some would say infamously) crafty game player.

I would like to think that I'm a good teacher, but many of my less-motivated students might disagree, because my classes were challenging. The teaching thing tends to spill over into fields other than my specialization; I like to sow the seeds of knowledge when and where I can.

My hair. I've got more hair than most girls. If you're lucky, I'll let you play with it. If you're unlucky, you'll get enlisted to dye it blue.

I wear mostly black, but that doesn't make me goth.

Books: Neuromancer by William Gibson is a perennial favorite. I enjoy the fantasy genre but the incredible expanding plotlines of epic authors like Terry Goodkind and Robert Jordan have started to lose my interest. I read the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony and loved all seven books of it. I'm working on the Dark Tower series by Stephen King right now. And, true to my geekly origins, I do enjoy reading scientific and technical literature of all stripes.

Movies: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix (but not its two successors). I don't tend to see as many movies as other people because I don't own a television.

Music: I tend toward rock of various stripes, be it big hair bands from the 80s (Queensrÿche, Poison, Tesla, Skid Row, Ratt, Whitesnake), metal (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Edguy, Symphony X, Anthrax), or somewhat more recent miscellany like the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead. I absolutely adore Tool; I'm such a slut for hard, hard rock in weird meters like 5/4 and 7/4.

Food: No fish, no Mexican. I'm particularly fond of Thai, and I was spoiled by living in Chicago with half a dozen Thai restaurants a short walk away. I'll go for just about any place with three or more stars.

Good friends, music, internet access, good food and drink, plants, human contact

Plumbing. Electrical wiring. Cutting the grass. All sorts of stuff that you never think matter when you live in an apartment. This house is eating all my spare time.

Unwinding from another week in the lab. Having a nice dinner and a bottle of wine. Playing games with friends. Watching a movie and having a good snuggle. Debauchery. Sometimes all of the above.

The more interesting question is what I'm doing on Saturday night.

I am a hedonist, and for all the trouble it gets me into on occasion, I wouldn't have it any other way. Other than that, I keep no secrets of my own to people I know.

One or more of the following sound like fun:

Games: It's nice to have people over on the weekends and geek out with a couple games and maybe a drink or two. I've been having a hard time organizing these lately, since no one seems to want to commit until someone else does.

Hiking: Once it's warm out I'll be hitting the trail again with my tripod and camera over my shoulder, more often than not hunting orchids. So far everything is day trips, up to about 12 miles, on or off trail. One of these days I'll go overnight, but I don't have the gear yet. Hiking is something I can do alone, but having a little company is even better.

Music: It's been a long time since I've been in a band, but my fingers still know their way up and down the neck of a guitar or bass. It would be fun to jam again sometime.