Okay, you asked for a bio. Here's the one from my webpage:
I was born on July 6th, 1965. I grew up as an Air Force Brat, but my Dad was connected to the Space program, so we spent an awful lot of my life around Houston. So I've been a Houstonian on and off for most of my life.
I went to U.T. Austin. Though I loved my alma mater, I have nothing burnt orange to wear. My children have nothing burnt orange to wear. In fact my adopted son even has a pair of A&M socks. I have instructed my wife to stop me from ever wearing a burnt orange sports suit like some of the bigwig Texas Ex alums do. I do root for the Horns, though, and still am known to put up the occasional "Hook-em" sign.
I got my degree in Mathematics. I took a lot of philospohy, logic, and writing classes. It was the most liberal artsy of the technical degrees. I really wanted to major in English, but I wanted a marketable degree seeing as how I wanted to get a paying job and all. Math was my compromise.
I tried to get a grad degree in math, but I lost my concentration.
My daughter was born mid-semester while I was taking Real Analysis. This required, for me, long stretches of quiet time for deep thinking about abstract stuff. If you know my daughter, Girlzilla, you know that all pretty much went out the window when she was born. (I stupidly refused the honorable withdrawal my professor offered me and took an incomplete instead. I crashed and burned with an F instead when I couldn't finish the course.)
Fatherhood has made me a better man. Fatherhood is my real education. Besides Girlzilla, we have adopted an African-American boy, Mr. Freshpants, and are trying to adopt a little Anglo baby we call Petunia. (Names of minors have been changed obviously.) Both came to us via CPS and our foster parenting gig. My motto for foster parenting: "CPS sucks, but some parents suck worse." Both Mr. Freshpants and Petunia are drug babies, but they're gonna be fine, thanks.
I am married to my best friend. Good thing, huh? Marriage has made me a better man too. Heidi and I like marriage so much we go around and tell people about it. We've been involved in Marriage Encounter and were on the National Board of Engaged Encounter for a while. We are advocates for marriage preparation in general.
I was baptized and had my first communion in the Catholic Church as a kid. I quit going as soon as my parents quit making me go. But now I'm back as an adult. I relate best to Christ through his Church -- it's relationships and people that present to me the most immediate experience of His grace. Being a Gen-X type, I am not impressed with all the hierarchical trappings of big organized religious institutions. But I am enamored of the universal community, the Body of Christ, the "we're all in this together" aspect of the Church. That the Sacraments link us all in community, that it's less "me and God" than "we and God", that's what I like most about being Catholic. It is the community I belong to that keeps me in the pews. I am almost too left-brained and analytical to fully embrace all the trappings of Dogma and Church Law. And I am too right-brained and too enamored of popular culture to embrace the kitschy religious aesthetic. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in a strange land at Church, but when we all roll up our sleeves and get busy with the work of the kingdom, I feel right at home.
I live and work in the NASA area where I grew up. While thoroughly white collar, this is basically a factory town. Instead of cranking out widgets and steel we crank out analysis and software. I work in essentially the same factory my Dad worked in.
But in my spare time, I got this degree in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston at Clear Lake. I am working on becoming a futurist. I am trying to do this without uprooting my family or jumping cold turkey from my stable software job to a new uncertain income source.
And if there's any time left over, I paint, I write poetry, I make stuff out of trash, and I fiddle with my web page.