UK Census Meme...

Like rosefox , from whom I ganked this, I'm not from the UK but hey, it looks like fun.

March 1961: Definitely a gleam in my father's eye; I'd be conceived late that year.

March 1971: Living in Latham, NY, having moved there in 1969. In third grade under, I think, Mrs. Ball. I believe I was reading a lot of Dr. Doolittle then, when I wasn't getting Oz books; this was the period when my Oz fannishness was really fully underway, and I had a complete crush on Polychrome, with lesser ones on Dorothy and Ozma. Doing lots of RPGing with my brother (yes, I know, RPGs weren't technically invented until '73-74, but we were doing "let's pretend" with rules and some form of stats by the time I was 5).

March 1981: Living in an apartment on Eastern Avenue in Schenectady, NY, having graduated from high school the prior year. I was living with Steve Reed and Ed Lord (noctyrnus ), and we were two doors down from the Fireside Pizzaria and four doors down from The Studio of Bridge and Games. I was working at Price Chopper, which was quite literally across the road. In some ways one of the most geekily idyllic couple of years in my life. We did a HUGE amount of gaming, naturally. Steve was tremendously influential on me, in a couple of ways probably badly, but mostly very good. He and I created multiple worlds together, demonstrated to all and sundry that power did not equal munchkinism, and in general had a lot of fun. I'd just met Eric Palmer a year or so before, and he was part of our gaming group from then on. I had already written my first stories set in my fantasy world of Zarathan (and was running games set there), formulated the ideas that would become Digital Knight, and with Steve created the characters that would later become Commander Sasham Varan and The Eonwyl. As I mention in the linked retrospective, Steve Reed taught me a lot, including some things about tolerance that I won't detail here because I don't know who in his family might be out there or what might or might not be public knowledge for them; I will say that it helped make sure that I didn't develop any prejudices against whatever people choose to enjoy in their own homes.

March 1991: Living in Pittsburgh in a small third-floor apartment owned by Morry and Sondra Endres (IIRC), in my first year at UPitt's MSIS graduate program, having gotten in because of nigh-perfect GRE scores; not only did they pay my tuition and so on, they actually paid me enough to live on while I went there. While I would later share that apartment with Kathleen, at the time we had just started dating a few months before and were having a long-distance relationship which included writing stories back and forth, and long phone calls. I think March was the month of the $495 phone bill. I think  I had just started going to the UPitt gaming club at that point, and was very active on Usenet (which I'd been on starting in the late 1980s). I was also running my friend Eric Palmer in a long-distance mail (not email) D&D campaign.

March 2001: Living at 2 Greenbush Avenue, my father-in-law's office which was also a residence, with Kathleen (pregnant with Gabriel) and our 4 year old son Christopher, and our then-friend Shelly Liebmann (who ended up self-destructing her life so badly that we later on had to kick out the woman who had once been like a second mother to Chris). This was quite possibly the low point of my life; living in someone else's house because I couldn't afford to live anywhere else, working for John Deep who by then was firmly on his course of self-destruction, having torpedoed his one GOOD business for his fantasy, and still unfortunately solvent enough to keep paying me; this was the only job that I ever had that it made me HAPPY to be fired/let go from. We were all depressed, irritable, and pressured. Gaming and online interaction was my only amusement and we had darn little else to look forward to.

March 2011: Today; I live in Troy, NY near Hudson Vally CC. I'm a multiply-published author, I have a good job with interesting things for me to do, I have four kids and a wife who has supported me through everything. My marriage has survived trials by fire and, I think, is now stronger despite (or perhaps because of) those trials. There are some money worries but no looming disasters (cross fingers). Things have gotten better, and I hope they continue to get better. :)

Bemmie HAS been busy...

Take a look at Enceladus now...