My Reunion Blurb ... or, more than you ever wanted to know about me

First, a brief recap for those who missed my 5-year and 10-year blurbs: BS biology and BS geology from Indiana University, MS marine biology with a thesis in fish ecology from University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Got married, got divorced, had one other relationship, now single again, no kids, not particularly looking. Lots of interesting jobs during all that, and now I'm at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO) in Savannah, Georgia, where I've been since 2001. Got big into roleplaying games for a while. Got big into online video games for a while.

In some ways, life hasn't actually changed much since last we left off with the Tale of My Life in 5-Year Installments. I'm still working full time as a staff scientist at SkIO, though I've moved to a different lab. I'm still living in the same townhouse. I still look almost exactly the same as I did when I graduated high school. Life has been very stable for a long time.

But most of the time it feels like everything is moving forward at breakneck speed. I got back into roleplaying games shortly after the last reunion, only this time it was almost all online. From there I rediscovered a childhood love of writing - because online roleplaying is all done in writing. In 2004, a friend passed me the link to Nanowrimo - "National Novel Writing Month", which is a writing marathon where participants write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. It happens every November. I've won the marathon three times now, and right after the reunion I'll be preparing for the fourth. I've been working on a whole series of stories set in a dark fantasyish world, along with a few other unrelated ones along the way. No, nothing is published yet, and at this point it's not even a gleam in my writerly eye, though maybe it will be more than a hobby in another five years. While doing all the roleplaying and writing, I've managed to learn something new almost every day, and I've met some of the greatest friends I've ever had.

As for other things, I became addicted to Wikipedia last spring, and now help organize articles about songs with some occasional writing thrown in on other topics. I'm working weekends at a Chinese takeout, at first for the extra money but later on because I became quite attached to the family who ran it. They sold it recently and moved, however, so I'll be quitting as soon as the new owner is fully settled in. And I have a blog at http://kayara.blogspot.com where I try to talk about something different going on in my life every day (please visit!).