A little about me: I develop web sites for a living. My husband sells boats. We also buy boats: We have a Com-Pac Sun Cat, a Boston Whaler, a couple of Hobie Adventure Islands, several kayaks, an ancient aluminum boat, an inflatable dinghy, and a jet ski. We like to sail, fish, go cruising around the harbor, and generally mess about in boats.

We have a dog, Libby. She’s part German Shepherd, part junkyard dog. She’s six months old today, and already over 60 pounds. The vet says there might be a little Mastiff in there. We recently lost our old dog, Tango, to old age, and our middle-aged dog, Misty, to aggressiveness.

We live on several acres east of Punta Gorda. We do in fact live in a swamp — our property is on the inside of a bend of Shell Creek, with 100 yards of swamp between the creek and dry ground, on 3 sides. So we’re surrounded by what is now often called “wetlands.” But really, it’s swampland, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We have a spring-fed pond in our front yard. I just recently used the “area calculation” function on my new handheld Garmin GPS/chartplotter to determine that the pond is just about one-third of an acre in size. The pond is popular with our friends and neighbors. Sometimes, on a week-end or holiday, while we’re getting a boat ready to go out, friends come over to swim in the pond. It seems that everyone has to go somewhere else. Even though we live in a veritable paradise, we leave our paradise even while our friends come over to partake of our paradise. It’s all good, though.

I use a Mac and have an iPhone. In fact, our entire household is pretty Mac-centric: Two Mac Book Pros, a Mac Pro, two iPhones, an Airport Extreme Base Station. I do run Windows on my Mac — I would never use Windows voluntarily; I only use it because the nature of my work requires it. I have Windox XP, Windows Vista, and the RC version of Windows 7 installed on my Mac using virtualization technology.