| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | Every summer my siblings and I traveled by an 80's Chevy van to grandma and granddaddy's home in North Carolina. While my parents worked multiple jobs around dad's graduate school schedule, we kids spent the summer playing with our cousins in grandma's sixty acres of woods. The most vivid memory of my childhood is the first time I caught a lightning bug. Of course, I eventually let it go. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | A year after joining the Marine Corps, my brother decided to enlist and join me. As luck would have it, we were assigned to the same platoon, and a few years later sent off to war together. For seven months we exercised together, cleaned weapons together and discussed the future together. I left with a brother and came home with a best friend. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I enjoy being around people who are both adventurous and careful. While they are up for all kinds of unusual and spontaneous activities, you can be fairly confident that they have at least halfway thought through the consequences. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | As a young teenager, I was obsessed with Star Trek novels. I spent hours at the public library walking the fiction stacks looking for the 'next one.' This is really only funny to me now. At the time it was very serious business. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | I would love to circumnavigate the globe on a sailboat. There is an Around the World Sailing race that I occasionally obsess over, charting out my would-be route from exotic port to exotic port. Being 'trapped' in the middle of an ocean for weeks at a time with only your skill and prior planning to get you through is the perfect blend of my most admired character traits: adventurous and careful. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I hope my children respect others. I want to let someone show me who they are through their actions, without muddying it all up with any of my own preconceived notions. |
