I decided tonight that it was important to have a page dedicated to all the lives that have had impact enough on mine for me to comment upon them. As a rule, the amount of text dedicated to an entry is meaningless.
Let's start with my household. To begin with we have Hlynna, my wife. If I may be excused for using a somewhat tired phrase, Hlynna is very much my "other half." She knows how I think, and how I will generally react to a given situation. She knows everything I know about myself, and probably a few more things about me besides.
Hlynna and I met on the Internet, or more precisely on IRC, on the channel #callahans. However, we weren't that close on IRC. We were certainly friendly, but if it had just been IRC, we wouldn't have gotten together at all, let alone married. We met properly, in the flesh, at a Realspace in Peoria, Illinois.
Our meeting was a bit peculiar - suffice to say that we spent a good deal of time in one another's company. We hung out with the other folks there. We went to the mall with the other folks. We took sauna together at the hotel. We became close. Afterwards, we continued to talk, both on-line and on the phone, and then we met again at the Realspace in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. We hung out together quite a lot, and she took me on something of a tour of the city, such as it was. We became closer.
Later, after she told me that she was having financial troubles in Mt. Pleasant, I told her that if she ever needed a place to stay, she could come and live with me for a while. She took me up on the offer, and since she couldn't afford a bus ticket, and she had a lot of stuff to move, I drove to Mt. Pleasant and got her. She moved into the house I was sharing with my friends Mark, Thalia (neé Leila), and Amber. She slept with me, and, perhaps predictably, we fell in love. After a long courtship, we were engaged. After two years of being engaged, we finally got married, at the Callahanicon 2001 Nashville Annex. We figured that since Callahan's brought us together, it was only fitting to get married at Callahanicon.
Spot was born in 1999, to a former stray adopted by a friend of ours, Jan (of the Magic Fingers) DiMasi. As Jan couldn't keep all of the kittens, she decided to give one away. As my previous cat, Nuku Nuku, had recently died, we decided to adopt Jan's kitten. Hlynna and I debated his name for a few weeks, but finally, decided to name him Spot, after Data's cat in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Spot has been with us ever since, through our move from the Midwest to the East Coast, and through two moves while on the East Coast. He's never been too happy about moving, or travelling in the car, but he seems to put up with it. Spot, like many cats, I think, is a "crevasse-kitty" He likes to lay down between people, or between people's legs, where it's warm. He gets along with Mina, two and a half years his junior, but he's none too happy when she tries attacking his tail. For some reason, he's also inordinately fond of people who don't like cats. I chalk it up to simple feline perversity.
You can see pictures of Spot here.
Mina is the newest addition to our family. At our best guess, she was born sometime in late 2001. She is a small, long haired, calico, with white feet. She's still a kitten, so she's very energetic. She loves to crawl into boxes, like most cats, and she can amuse herself for a good half an hour chasing an errant milk ring or hair tie. She also loves the scratching post that we bought for Spot at the thrift store. It's covered in carpet, and has a wheel on top from which are suspended four stuffed mice. Mina will bat at the mice, or sometimes jump on top of the wheel and try pulling a mouse up.