That picture was taken by my neighbor, Danny Andrews, in the winter of 1998, after a rare Georgia snowfall.
Now I need a picture of my truck, a 1995 charcoal-grey Nissan.
This is my Better Half, Marc van Iersel, a Dutch horticulture professor. In that picture, he is standing among the ruins of the Roman city of Conimbriga, near Coimbra in Portugal.
My Hobbies
Beer. Fine beer.
Food. Good food, and I have several specialties that I might post
here some day.
Travel. Here are some
of the places I've been.
I've studied several different martial arts since 1983. Here is my martial arts CV. I'm currently studying
Shorinji-Ryu Karatedo with the
Budokai at the University of
Georgia.
Music - almost ANY kind of music! - and especially local bands.
Slowly but surely, I'm learning Dutch. Links
Auburn Football: War Eagle!!
Carolina Basketball: Go Tar Heels!
Lowlands-L: The home page for
the lowlands dialects, including German, Dutch, English,
and even Appalachians (the closest to my own dialect)!!.
Ogasawara-Ha Shorinji Ryu Karate Do
Phenix City,
Alabama: My hometown! (Egad...)
Hawkeye is a grumpy little
tortoiseshell cat that really wants to be sweet when she's not hiding
somewhere. I acquired her in the summer of 1996 as an 8-week-old kitten.
This is Ivory, my little
spitz, who joined me at the end of January, 1997,
when she was about 14 months old. Yeah, I know, the "official" name of her
breed is American Eskimo, but that's a misnomer. The breed is really of
German origin. I got her from a rescue group in Atlanta. Mine is her
third - and LAST - home.
The fellow in the picture with her is Cole, a border collie that I found on the intramural fields on campus. I re-united Cole with his owner the next day.
This is Krystal Burger. She is Marc's collie mix. He found Krystal living in his back yard about three weeks after he bought his house in 1997, living off of lizards and acorns and suffering from heartworms. She's probably a couple of years older than Ivory.
This is Natasha ('Tasha) Fatale. She's my chow mix, and is probably about the same age as Ivory, though we really don't know. My neighbor found her wobbling along the side of the road around the first of 1999, literally within 24 hours of death. She had lost about half of her body weight (she now weighs about 45 lbs) and almost all of her hair... These two pictures - Tasha#1 & Tasha#2 - were taken about a month (and 10 pounds!) after she was found, which might indicate just how bad off she was. Tasha is the happiest dog I've ever met!
And finally, our most recent addition, Annika, who happens to be deaf! We found her late one Friday night sitting in the middle of the left lane of a 4-lane highway in July, 2002, at about 14 weeks old. Her chin and paws were skinned up, as if she had been hurled from a moving car. We started to name her after the Star Trek: Voyager character Seven of Nine, since she was at the time the seventh pet of nine household inhabitants (and tertiary adjunct of the cat matrix)! However, Marc preferred Seven of Nine's pre-assimilation name. And it stuck.
Our furry friends who are now Resting in Peace:
Dr. Jerry Alan Veeh, Ca.T. Spring,
1987 - November 2004. At 17.5 years old, he just died of old age. He
was named after one of my
statistics professors at Auburn.
Robert Lund
found him in a tree in the spring of 1987 when he was 5 or 6 weeks old,
and I kept him.
Boris Karloff Early 1998 - February 2005.
Boris died too young, of chronic active hepatitis. He was only 7 years
old. Boris was Marc's chow mix. Marc found Boris at work the day before
Halloween in 1998 when he was about 9 months old. He was terribly thin,
and his collar was *way* too tight. He was such a handsome fellow!
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