Okay, if you must have the dirty details. I mean, after all, everyone thinks everyone's business is their business, no?

Be careful -- I have opinions about that and my opinions have a pH of 1.

Anyway -- I was born. A rather mundane event, except to my mother. On second thought, since I was the third and last of three children, it probably was mundane to her by that time. I didn't have a baby book, no little spoon that was mine, no preserved baby shoes. Oh, well.

Where I was born is Long Beach, California. I don't remember it, as we were a bit nomadic in the late 40s and early 1950s. First place I remember living was a farmhouse at a location called Ferry Pass near Pensacola, Florida.

I grew up. Thank goodness. I would not go back and go through all that again for all the tea in China or anywhere else. (Sri Lanka, Celebes, India . . .) Let's just say that I made it. Then the good stuff began.

From 1965 to 1970 I attended Florida State University, and received my Bachelor's degree in Government and my Master's (cum laude) in Library Science. After receiving my Master's, I returned home, which at that time was in Jacksonville, Florida, and went to work at the Jacksonville Public Library System. There I worked in the Art and Music Department, under Jeff Driggers -- a wonderful boss and downright fine fellow. I was placed in charge of the film collection. I produced and hosted the travel film program and wrote program notes for the evening feature film program. I'll never say I became an expert -- my father-in-law's definition of expert is "'Ex' is a has-been, and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure!"

During that time, I married a fellow whom I had known since childhood. We went to the same church. (Cue the Church Lady: "Isn't that special?") Does sound rather middle-America, doesn't it? We were best buddies as teenagers, and I think that's part of why this marriage of 30+ years has worked. It helps to be friends first.

He was in the Coast Guard at the time, first going through Officer Candidate School at the Coast Guard Reserve Training Center at Yorktown, Virginia, then stationed at St. Petersburg, Florida. So I finished my indenture at the Jacksonville library system, and we moved to St. Petersburg. By this time we had one daughter. During our stay in St. Petersburg, our other daughter was born. That was it -- stop at two. We believed in zero population growth -- you know, replace yourselves. Well, since we had two girls instead of a girl and a boy, I guess we replaced me twice. Just goes to show, I told my husband, that he is irreplaceable.

Well, St. Petersburg, "home of the newly wed and the nearly dead," was an experience. First week we were there, I got unnerved by all the grannies and grandpas out in their little cars -- and it was always either a Ford Falcon or a Nash Rambler! We were driving down First Avenue North, where we lived, and we saw one granny in her Falcon. There were RED FLAGS, I kid you not, on her door handle and her radio antenna. I guess her family couldn't get her to quit driving, so they decided they'd better post warning flags so others could steer clear. I guess I shouldn't talk about the Falcons and the Ramblers. After all, we had a Volkswagen bus.

Problem there was that you couldn't get day care for kids under three years old in St. Pete in those days. They wanted them all potty trained. So I was at home with two in diapers, fifteen months apart. People used to ask me if they were twins. "Yeah," I would say. "The hard way." I went through that stage of being starved for adult conversation, though the kids were entertaining enough. The younger one, for instance, conducted her first scientific experiment at the age of six months, and from this learned how to bug her sister for the rest of their days.

But time came to leave St. Pete, and we migrated back to Jacksonville. In the period of time since then, I've been a federal employee, a registered nurse, and an enlisted person and later an officer in the Coast Guard Reserve. I saw how much fun my husband had been having in the Coast Guard and decided I should have some fun, too. During these years, we had a boat -- an old Lyman wooden lapstrake-construction 17-foot runabout. Great boat. We enrolled in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and spent time on Jacksonville's St. Johns River doing patrols and search and rescue. We also taught classes in boating safety, became Courtesy Examiners (doing boat inspections to ensure compliance with laws and regulations), and improved our skills with advanced classes in topics such as communications. I also wrote and published our flotilla's newsletter, the Signal Bridge, which consistently won awards every year at the Division and District levels.

Along about 1986, in company with my friend Barbara Kaufmann, I helped found Star Sector: Northeast Florida, a local science-fiction group. We had a great few years leading the group, putting on a mini-convention called Con-Tiki. Later on, the Star Sector crowd staged a full three-day convention called Cracker Con, which got cut short by the Storm of the Century in March of 1993. As a result of our experiences with Cracker Con, my science fiction pals have awarded me an intimidation factor of +15. I got that the old-fashioned way: I EARNED it.

After hanging around in Star Trek fandom for several years, I decided it was time to try something else. Actually, it was Star Trek V: the Final Frontier, that made me decide it was time to move on. There is a textbook example of a BAD movie! So I decided I wanted to find a fandom that had not been done to death, as Star Trek has. I found it in my old love, Hawaii Five-O, and founded the Iolani Palace Irregulars, which for 8 years was the international appreciation society for Hawaii Five-O. Eventually, the idea struck that people were writing books about every TV series under the sun except my favorite, so I decided to fill the gap myself. If I had known what I was getting into . . . It was published in 1997. It's called Booking Hawaii Five-O, and it is still (as of 2007) in print. In fact, it has just come out in paperback..

In the late 1980s, my sister-in-law Kathy, who is Mormon, got me interested in genealogy. In their religion, Mormons investigate their genealogy because they believe all are reunited after death. Genealogy is their way of keeping track, and is part of their rites which assure this reunion. So I got interested in my Packard line (my father's people), and was intrigued to discover that I come by my Puritanical streak honestly: I am a direct descendant of Massachusetts Puritans! So I've delved into it more and more, learning how to do it right. I have received my Beginning and Intermediate Certificates in a non-degree program designed by the National Institute for Genealogical Studies of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and administered by the University of Toronto. My area is American Records. Soon I will be applying for certification from the Board for Certification of Genealogists.

And at the tender age of 60, I am going back to college! I'm registered for classes starting 27 June at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. I'll be taking Intermediate Spanish II in preparation for taking a course in Spanish paleography (old handwriting) in the fall. I have just about decided to go ahead and get a degree in Spanish. Since I'm stuck in Florida, even though I do hate the heat and the current drought which has me depressed, I figure I might as well make use of the area and select as my specialty in genealogy (required for the abovementioned certification from the Board for Certification of Genealogists) the old Spanish lineages of Florida. I'm an hour away from St. Augustine, where a lot of sources are, and only a few hours away from Tallahassee and the state archives, another repository for a lot of sources on the subject. You know what they say in real estate: location, location, location. I'll need the Spanish paleography course to be able to read those old documents.

Now, that's all I'm going to tell of this boring biographical stuff, so it's time to go on to something else.

Updated 12 May 2007

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