you'd think that someone who has a weblog on the internet would have no problems writing a biographically inclined blurb about herself, wouldn't you? oddly, it's probably the hardest thing for me to write.

let's see, my name is heather. i'm a girl, complete with long hair, a love of anything fuzzy & warm and a healthy phobia of spiders. i've two parents, no siblings, no pets and a handful of delightfully strange friends who love me for some untold reason or three. i was born and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where i still live today (just a block and a half from where i was born on July 3, 1972).

i like technology, cloud-watching, taking photos and, currently, Granville Island Brewery's Lions Winter Ale. the book i've read most often is The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon. i think i'm up to eight readings, but i'm not sure. the MP3s i play most often these days would be something by Wilco or Of Montreal. my favourite food changes on a quarterly basis. this season it's sushi -- with yam rolls featuring heavily. yum!

i'm dating a superawesome guy named Christopher. i'm short and fat, but i'm still kind of cute. my right eye is two different colours. i've had braces twice, but i didn't wear my retainer, so my teeth aren't quite perfect. i broke my nose three days before the beginning of ninth grade; i slept on it funny, so it leans a little to one side. it used to be pierced, but i took the hoop out a few years ago and the hole closed up. my favourite thing to do is laugh. my favourite thing to do with someone else is kiss, but i'll settle for laughing if i have to.

my politics are heavily socialist with a little bit of hard-ass thrown in when it comes to kowtowing to the lowest common denominator. i don't believe we should find the cure to cancer; i do believe that birth control should be ubiquitous. i do believe that there are some amazing, talented, wonderful, important persons in this world; i don't believe you'll see many of them on your television or movie screens. i absolutely believe that the trees and animals were here first, so stop hurting them, please.

i work for a company you know the name of if you live in Vancouver, but is kind of hard to explain if you've not been here before. i go to bed early and don't much like getting up at six a.m. i don't yet know what i want to be when i grow up, but i'm petrified of employment uncertainty so i'll probably stay here for the next 30 years until i retire a cranky old lady with 13 cats and a chronic coffee addiction. oh wait, i just need the cats.

i've had a website in some form or another since February 1996. my first weblog entry was August 10, 2000. my domain name, fubsy.net, was registered on August 30, 2000. i've occasionally thought of calling it quits, but i seem to still have things to say. i'll close up shop when i no longer do. until then, expect a post each weekday; weekends are usually quiet. there's something strangely condusive to my process about writing at work, it seems.

what is fubsy? fubsy is an archaic adjective meaning "being chubby and somewhat squat". i first learned the word circa 1995 thanks to the a.word.a.day mailing list i'd subscribed to when i first got on the internet in the summer of 1994. i liked the way it looked, sounded and i thought it was an apt physical description of myself, so i wrote it down for future reference. when it came time to pick myself a domain name, it was my very first choice.

this site layout was implemented using Crimson Editor, CuteFTP and Photoshop CS. the current design was heavily entirely borrowed from a layout expertly crafted with CSS by Paul of twothirty media. the randomly changing background images are mostly thanks to Squidfingers. the header image is a portion of a photo i took in the summer of 2006 using the Holga toy camera my amazing boyfriend bought for me.

the engine which drives this site's content is Moveable Type 3.15 (although i still hold a place in my heart for both Greymatter and Blogger for helping me get started). the archives are dynamically generated, which means i don't have to beg my webhost to not cancel my account when i want to change a link on three-thousand entry pages. i heart dynamic archives. speaking of, i love my webhost, Site5, and my domain registrar, Dotster.

the brain-eating squirrel at the bottom of each page was found with Google's image search, the grass comes standard with PSP7, the perma-link and comment icons were stolen from somewhere out of memory. i will always love Verdana; you should, too.

i love taking photographs. i hope to never stop learning how to take better, more intersting photos. this site is slowly evolving into an incentive to learn faster.

my first "real" camera was a fully manual SLR i don't even remember the brand of. it was bought for me by my mother from a down-on-his-luck photographer friend. it came with four lenses and a dozen specialty filters. i never quite used it to its full potential because i was a stupid teenager with the attention span of a coked-up goldfish. i took a photography class in highschool, loved every second of it, then realized i had no money to buy or process film and promptly lost the habit. after a year of gathering dust, my mom sold the camera. i still miss that fisheye lens.

for the next fifteen years, i made do quite well with various 35mm point-and-shoot, Polaroid and throw-away cameras. i never lost my love of making pictures, i just got side-tracked for a while.

for my 30th birthday, i bought myself my first digital camera: a FujiFilm 2800 Zoom. i haven't looked back since. i'd taken over 5,000 photos with that little, silver digicam when i decided to step it up a notch. i now use a Nikon D70 with the kit 18-70mm AF-S lens which i bought myself when i got a new job in November 2004. for xmas 2005, my best friend bought me the 50mm f1.8 Nikkor lens -- how awesome is she?

thanks to discovering the world of flickr, i've started using film cameras again and amassed a collection of various cameras including the toy, trash and rangefinder varieties. this obsession with collecting new and interesting inexpensive cameras and shooting many different types of film is entirely the influence of my boyfriend who does amazing things with his 100+ cameras. he's inspired me beyond description.

i'm so grateful and thankful to all the people who come to visit my little corner of the web and have so many nice things to say to and about me. i love that i've made something which makes people happy, even if it's only for a moment when they chuckle at something i've written or take an extra moment to look at a photo i've posted. you've made this whole thing very rewarding to me and for that i thank you very much.

love,
heather