And, oh, before it closes:

Hi! I'm Liese. I was part of the Fool For Love delurk in 4 back on TT. I started the 5x5 thread, back when anybody could, and in doing so made a punctuation gaffe by putting the period after "porn" outside of the quotation marks, British style. This error traumatized me for all subsequent life and to this day I try to avoid ending a sentence with a quote. I also used to use a thesaurus before every post because I wanted you all to like me and think I was smart. I'm much lazier now, and I'm sure your opinion of my intellect has suffered greatly because of this.

I'm a stompy so at one point believed I should read every message ever posted on our boards. Hah. Haha. But I'm still pretty prolific these days. You can definitely find me in Write, Tech, Non-Fic TV, & Boxed Set, as well as Natter and periodically Bitches.

I live in the high desert in the American southwest where I did in fact leave it all to bring rock & roll to the needy. We used to be programmers back in the midwest but now my SO & I run our own non-profit which is primarily a traveling music school that works on the Navajo & Apache reservations. We're in our eighth year of it now. It is awesome and heartbreaking and we feel very lucky to be able to do it.

I'm married to a totally awesome guy who loves music and hockey, no kids, one very charismatic dog named after a horse. We just built the house of our dreams, an endeavor which swallowed up the good part of a couple of years and a whole lotta house-loves-carrots posts.

Oh, yeah, and I'm a Christian with anarchist leanings, which puts me as an outlier on the political spectrum here, ostensibly an independent, most notably visible when I voted for Nader in the Bush/Kerry election in a swing state. Oops. I voted for your guy this time, though.

I discovered on this board that I'm a subtaster, so I love all the extreme flavors mentioned. In addition, I also eat dry seaweed and raw fish and a lot of rice, plus kahlua pig and portugeuse sausage and poi, all of which may lend a clue to the last demographic piece, which is that I'm Japanese-American via Hawaii and damn proud of it.

I had the best intentions of making this short, but am apparently a tad egomaniacal to boot.

I cannot say enough how truly enriched my life has been through knowing and talking to this fantastic group of women and men all over the globe. You are a phenomenal bunch of people and I am a better (and much more well-informed) person for having known you. So thanks!

Joe, congratulations - your little guy is one beautiful baby!

I'm a Christian with anarchist leanings

Judean People's Front?

Joe, it looks like you have a wise one there. He is very photogenic

Awww, Baby Boucher! He's a handsome fella.

::fist bumps Liese, one of my two roommates at the first F2F::

Joe! Congratulations the baby. That quite a birth name, and his adopted name is pretty cool too!

Thanks, everyone. He's cute in just about every picture so I generally go with the ones where I don't look like hell or he's by himself. My wife is photogenic but I take maybe one photo to every twenty she takes so there aren't nearly as many of her to choose from.

P-C, I don't know if you've read it, but telling someone that he's placing too much emphasis on race in a discussion of Absalom, Absalom! is akin to watching the first three seasons of Buffy & commenting, "I think you're making too much of the high school is hell metaphor" or watching Angel & saying, "You're too hung up on his guilty conscience." Can't remember if I decided that he wasn't worth talking to or if the month ended and the book changed.

OMG, Joe! You're a daddy!

Does he have a nickname, or is it always the full "Thelonious"?

"Moby Dick is a whaling textbook, why do you keep babbling about 'obsession' and 'fate'?"

Beautiful beautiful baby.

Liese, thanks for filling newbies like me in on the deets.

Hi Buffistas! I bought Gothic Charm School today and reading the acknowledgments made me realize how much I miss you so I thought I'd come say hello.