Past, Present, and Not a Clue About the Future
Welcome! However you came to visit my tiny patch of the internet, thank you for visiting.
I'm a wanderer, bookworm, amateur photographer, history fanatic, and armchair archaeologist with my heart tied to places all around the world. I was born and raised in Michigan. You know, that state that looks like a mitten and we natives go around using our palms as a quick map to where we live?...yeah, there. I studied Fisheries & Wildlife and Spatial Information Processing at Michigan State University, with a year-long detour to Lancaster University in the UK. After a couple of years spent baking professionally while I decided what to do next, I threw caution to the wind and headed off to New Zealand to study GIS at the University of Auckland. From that came seven years as the lead technician on UoA's GeoDataHub digitisation project, personally scanning 25,000 maps in NZ's historical government archive. Then I moved to Wellington to work with modern topographic maps and data. Now I'm back in historical heaven, once again scanning an archive -- this time Crown aerial imagery exceeding 500,000 negatives -- and after that who knows what the future holds. More adventures I am sure.
I fell in love with New Zealand and decided that it was a pretty awesome place to be. My wife and I have permanently settled here and are now NZ citizens. We live with our two feline fur-children and when not working or binging the latest exciting show, we're off camping, re-enacting the Middle Ages with our local SCA barony, or exploring the hidden corners of our own backyard.
I first picked up Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World in 1998 and have been a devoted fan of The Wheel of Time ever since. My involvement in the online community has been constant since 2000 and I can be found in several guises, most prominently as Eniara Kisharad at TarValon.net. You may have also run into me at Dragon*Con, Jordan Con, Comic Con, or the A Memory of Light launch in Provo, Utah in 2012. I'm additionally a big Xena: Warrior Princess and Bad Girls fan, often found poking around other communities as Eniariom.
I love taking photos and a selection of my images can be found in the gallery on this site. New Zealand is incredibly beautiful, and I've recently discovered competitive ballroom dancing, so I have lots to photograph. My other hobbies include reading, writing, falling down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia, crochet and leather crafting, hiking, swimming, rollerblading, and -- when I want to kick back and relax -- video gaming.
My other profiles and links:
- GeoDataHub - historical map archive
- Retrolens - historical aerial imagery
- New Zealand Cartographic Society
- The Great Hall - Wheel of Time archive
- Tarvalon.net - Wheel of Time community
- Jordan Con
