|
I grew
up next to the ocean in Bermuda, moved with my family to Virginia, and
attended schools there and in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts. I
spent sixteen months in Vietnam during the war as part of my Army service.
I have been working now as a volunteer in the Paleontology lab at
the La Brea Tar Pits museum for 24 years. I participated in researching
wild orangutans during three Earthwatch projects in Indonesian Borneo,
and then was a tour guide at the Los Angeles Zoo for six years. I
have traveled to and done extensive photography in such places as Chile
and Argentina, Belize, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa,
the Big Island of Hawaii, most of Western Europe, and the North Pole (which
I visited on the Russian nuclear icebreaker Yamal in 1994). I
have been studying the native vegetation of southern California for about
ten years, and have also botanized in Virginia, Death Valley and the eastern
Sierras. I have taken many classes, dozens of field trips with botanists
from the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden,
the Joshua Tree Institute, the Jepson Herbarium, and UC Riverside, and
hundreds of field trips on my own all over southern California. I
am a long-time fan of science fiction, the Firesign Theater, travel writing,
Russian history, Bob and Ray, bluegrass music, W.C. Fields and all things
Irish. I am married, and as of Aug. 2006, have an eighteen-year
old daughter who wants to be an actor and is attending Vassar College
in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. I also have two turtles, two basset hounds and a
bichon frisé.
|
