I revel in anything outdoors ~ less so if it involves snow or a great deal of long-term exertion! I am a water baby. Any wet, damp, moist pond, marsh or swamp makes me extra-happy. Mud = bliss. I get pretty content with my critters curled around me. I do the 12-step thing, which has blossomed into a pretty groovy spiritual life. I live a long way from most of my friends and miss them. I feel guilty for liking driving so much when it consumes fuel as it does. I head towards science fiction & mysteries when I go to (dive into) bookstores, but especially like books with rich, textured characters, good tension, and long, braided plots. I like to play board and strategy games. I have a strong but relatively unrealized subbie bottom streak with switchey tendencies. I travel far less than I'd like to. I'm fat, variably smooth or hairy, playful, kind, oversenstive, imaginative, like both adventure and home. I am a consummate ENFP.

Adoring and reveling in my sweetheart. Wondering if I'll ever be a parent whom my daughter likes. Reading satisfying mysteries. Enjoying my new not-church. Adjusting from being an environ teacher for Parks & Rec to being the same for a small environmental department. Neither spending enough time in prayer & meditation, nor walking the dogs enough, which can often amount to the same thing. Loving our new house. Escaping to sit and sigh at the salt marshes. Not going to enough meetings. Replaying our recent trip to north Georgia, with many happy returns. Pondering on, and sometimes being, the change I'd like to see in the world. Singing to myself. Eating good food, and bad, too.

Research. Googling. Reading. Listening. Not judging. Loving my 4-legged kids. Cuddling. A fair variety of sex. Being codependent. Being less codependent than I used to be. Aligning myself with the "good living is the best revenge" school of healing. Melting every time I hear Sarah McLaughlin's "Arms of the Angels" or Joan Armatrading's "Willow." Being silly. Dancing my ass off, although there's still quite a lot of it left!

My butt. It's huge. Really, it is. Also, some mysterious non-rosacea red bumpy patches on my cheeks that are now permanent and may or may not be lymphocytic infiltrate A or B. I talk a lot, with a fair amount of opinion. I'm tall, wide and that same significant butt travels behind me. I'm perceptive, but a lot of years of intense active listening has left me a little burned out as a listener. My hair's now more salt than pepper, and very short - straight people take me as butch, although I'm really pretty femmey, especially in response to hard-core butches and the handful of testosteroney men I like. Getting closer to following my heart's desire / my calling. I have a child side. I have a big vocabulary. I grew up in Palo Alto and somehow my Californianess (northern, thank you very much) comes through to people. If I like you, I'll get to know you quickly. I trust my gut instincts more than I used to. My OCD side can still get the better of me. Did I mention my butt?

Perhaps 100 qualify for each category, which makes for longish lists... So, with order showing no particular importance: A Place of Execution, Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Kingsolver,the Bone People, Harry Potter, Louise Erdrich, Mama Day, Mercedes Lackey, Mundane's World, My Sister's Bones, Narnia chronicles, Neal Stephenson, Neuromancer, Perma Red (so few people have read this - go! find it!), The Red Tent, The Secret Life of Bees, Sherri S. Tepper, Shipping News, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Snow Falling on Cedars, Stone Butch Blues, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ursula K. LeGuin, Venus Prime, White Oleander, Winnie the Pooh; 9 1/2 Weeks, Angel Heart, Bend It Like Beckham, Body Heat, the first 20 minutes of Bound, Brokeback Mountain, Cellular, Chicken Run, the Crying Game, several of the Emmanuelle's, Fight Club, Finding Nemo, Forrest Gump, Frailty, the Graduate, Harold and Maude, Identity, If These Walls Could Talk 1 and 2, the Incredibles, The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love, Indiana Jones, most Jackie Chan's, most James Bond's, Kissing Jessica Stein, L'Anee de Meduses, Laurel Canyon, Miss Congeniality, No Way Out, Personal Best, Pleasantville, Saving Grace, Secretary, Sex, Lies and Videotapes, the Shawshank Redemption, Six Degrees of Separation, Six Feet Under (ok, so it's TV, but it's the Very Best), Shrek 1 & 2, Sirens, Swimming Pool, Thunderheart, Torchwood (again, TV, but DAMN all that bi kissing in the midst of risk and power gets me hot), Waking Ned Devine, the Transporter; Allison Krauss, Annie Lennox, bluegrass, Bob Marley, the Dixie Chicks, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Garth Brooks, Grateful Dead, Indigo Girls, Joan Armatrading, Lucinda Williams, Martina McBride, Melissa Ethridge, Neil Young, mucho disco to dance to, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Talking Heads; avocado, broccoli, caesar salad, ceviche, cherries, chocolate in many forms, coconut, cucumbers, eclairs, enchiladas, garlic, guacamole, hush puppies, kufte, lemon flavored things, lhassi, mexican ginger pig cookies, oreos, palak paneer, palm leaf pastries, papadum, peaches, rice, samosas, scallops, skordalia, smoothies, tilapia, toast dipped in cocoa, yu shiang eggplant, watermelon juice, zuchinni.

Outdoor time in natural places. The doggies and the kitties. Spiritual time. The ocean. Good food. Mischief. Friends. Sleep. Love. Hope. Play. Sex. A spiritual shield between me and my ever-twisty-linked alcoholism.

All of the flora and fauna that I'm half-learning as I poke around my park and other Florida outdoors. After 39 years in the west, learning all of the east coast organisms feels both like a candy store and a long list with lots of holes.

wondering what time I'll get to bed, and then what time I'll get to sleep, and whether I'll get stuck in all the on-line mud I like to immerse myself in, and whether our daughter would rather be a TV blob or get some individual attention, and when I last walked the dog, and if I'm working or I get to go to my weekend women's meetings, and

My privacies deal mostly with the things in life I've done which I consider "bad," and which aren't that many. The conventionally taboo subjects of sex, childhood secrets, and the greediness of our darker sides, I'm pretty okay revealing.

... if just about anything other than that you mean me ill.