I am a chemist, a teacher, a musician, a photographer, a gardener, and an amateur botanist.  I am an unabashed geek and proud of it. I play guitar. I play Eurogames. I don't own a television, and I don't get bored.

I've been living in New Jersey for six years now.  I sometimes still miss the Midwest, but most days I like it much better out here.  I've got a fantastic career and a house by the woods, and I can now spend my time figuring out how to pull cat6 cable through old plaster walls rather than fretting about making ends meet.

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

I'm looking to meet some interesting people to do fun stuff with, particularly people who want to play games or play music or go out hiking or skating.

On weekdays, I'm a senior research chemist in the laboratory of a major pharmaceutical company, making molecules from earth, air, fire, and water.  On any given day, I might be running hundreds of reactions, tinkering with million-dollar robots, supervising students from an academic collaboration, or discovering new ways to form chemical bonds.  And in between, there's metals in exotic oxidation states, torque wrenches, and five hundred psi of hydrogen gas.  I guess you could say I accidentally found my dream job.

On the weekends during the warm months, I'm out in the woods with camera and tripod over my shoulder hunting for orchids. There's fifty-someodd species that have been reported from New Jersey, and I've found thirty of them so far. One day, I'll find them all and write a book.

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, 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, and if not, I'd love to trade cuttings.  I tend to do things by hand, but probably only because hand tools are less expensive and until recently I didn't have the space for a workshop.

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

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.

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 lost my interest.  Contrast with the fantastic Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson.  I read the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony and loved all seven books of it.  I liked the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, but I thought the ending was a little weak.  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 metal (Symphony X, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Edguy, Anthrax), big hair bands from the 80s (Queensrÿche, Poison, Tesla, Skid Row, Ratt, Whitesnake), 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: 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.  At home, I like to whip up fancy things with reduction sauces and all that jazz.

Friends: Like family, with the added bonus of not being related.

Music: Johann Sebastian Bach said that "the aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul."  Kiss said "I want to rock and roll all night and party every day."  The truth is probably some place in between.

Internet: All the world's knowledge at my fingertips.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a live ethernet cable is worth a thousand libraries.  And we all know why the internet was born.

Good food and drink: Making the most of an otherwise pesky mortal habit.

Plants: How can something that can grow in a little pot on nothing but air, water, and sunlight not be amazing?  And they flower, too.

Stimulation: Thinking and feeling and being wrapped around the world is what makes us human.

Plumbing.  Electrical wiring.  Drywall.  Landscaping.  Can anyone tell I just bought an old house?

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.  Sometimes all of the above.

I'm not a particularly private person. How about some trivia? I had heart surgery while I was in high school.

...you know how to use an apostrophe, a multimeter, and a d20.

Not necessarily at the same time.