Erm, Hello!

Hi there.

Introducing myself by telling you what I do would take up an incredible amount of your time, best summarized by saying I am a serial hobbyist. My wife (@devierue) joins me in making soap, painting miniatures, minor woodworking, and working on the eccentricities of our fixer-upper house (built in 1947, before indoor plumbing had come to the area). We've made homemade soda, are accomplished cooks, play video games as well as board games and RPGs, and have generally dabbled in just about every form of art you can think of.

My father builds dioramas professionally, including a massive installation in the belly of the S.S. Nenana, a two hundred and thirty-seven foot Sternwheeler. The diorama depicts the fifteen or so villages the boat stopped at while traveling the Alaskan interior. I spent a good deal of my childhood playing with modelling materials and helping my father on his projects.

For the last few years my wife and I have attended Pax South, the fourth such Pax convention, joining West (Prime) in Seattle, East in Boston, and Pax Aus, in Melbourne. Pax South happens in San Antonio, Texas, at the end of January each year and is dedicated to all things gaming.

We run the Wildlings house for the Game of Thrones themed charity pub crawl that takes place the night before Pax. In this, we corral the drunken revelers to and from each bar to meet their competitors in battle, all while convincing them to buy art and gifts to raise funds for Child's Play.

Child's Play provides games and helps build play rooms for children in hospitals and has grown from a garage full of toys that a handful of people handed out at Christmas, to generating over twenty million dollars since.

For our part, the six houses and 300 attendees of the pub crawl raised over $7000 last year, the standing record for all the Pax pub crawls, and while the Wildlings were strictly middle of the pack, we're still quite proud of it.

For that pub crawl my wife and I spent several months working on an in theme coloring book to sell. She also made several paintings with Game of Thrones themes, which went for quite a bit of money to one particular fan.

This year I want to make resin toys to sell. Like I said, serial hobbyist.

I'm 31 years old and have worked retail as the "day job" for most of my adult life, while pursuing an impossibly wide array of creative endeavors in my free time. I've spent time as a freelance writer, which is probably the most standout example of my efforts. I made the mistake of writing copy for too little money, and have since been working on my novels while dabbling on Fiverr.

I've always wanted to work from home and abandon the retail industry for good, and have been making baby steps towards that. I'm hoping the steemit platform might help with that down the road.

Well that's who I am, anyone have a strange or interesting hobby I might not have tried? I'm always looking for something new. :)