Born and raised in Tennessee, I spent the better part of my youth tromping around in the tiny hamlet of Harrison, a slice of life portion of southern metropolis Chattanooga (Tennessee's fourth largest city, may I boast).

My first merit badge was a C+ in conduct in first grade at Harrison Elementary School, where I could not keep my mouth shut.  To the most wary of my friends, for better or for worse, that said not-able-to-keep-mouth-shut-ness has matured into seasoned long-windedness.  

My parents immigrated from Taiwan in the 1970s, initially to Connecticut.  The lure of opportunity brought them to Chattanooga, Tennessee where they worked in the kitchen and dining rooms of now non-existent Peking Chinese Restaurant, in the Chattanooga suburb of Hixson.  After I was born, they tried their hand entrepreneurially by moving to Atlanta, Georgia suburb Forest Park, where they took over another restaurant, New Shanghai.  There, we lived in Apartment A-1 of a Forest Park complex that was upstairs from a couple who owned a cigarette smoking, lock-picking orangutan named Suzy.  

A big monkey, that Suzy.

Money was hard to come by but one of my favorite memories was walking to the nearby supermarket with my mother and finding an owner-less toy-truck in the parking lot.  When we got home, my mother and I  painted it with her red nail polish and it soon became the automobile which won all of the races in my late night Hot Wheels rallies on the floor of my bedroom.  

I went to school for one year at Brown Middle School and then in seventh grade, transferred to McCallie School in downtown Chattanooga, in the shadow of Missionary Ridge.  I attended university in Baltimore, Maryland, romped around Washington, DC and Northern Virginia in my free time, and graduated in 1999 with a degree in chemical engineering.  After working for about 6 months with a former professor in a process controls lab, I accepted a full-time position near Atlanta, Georgia and once again, it was time to head back to the southlands.  I lived in Atlanta until early 2006, at which point I joined the corporate group of my company and moved, for the first time in my life, north of the Mason-Dixon line.  Good times.

I currently reside near the Connecticut-New York border, about an hour from Manhattan.

Nowadays when it gets cold in Connecticut, ironically I think of an old ice skating rink that used to be in Chattanooga when I was in elementary school.  The place is long gone now, but that's where I learned to skate (somewhat), first on my hands and knees and intimate physical encounters with the ground, and then eventually on two feet, where I was the fastest 2nd grader you ever did see.  

No Olympic aspirations for me in the skating-on-ice department (as 2nd grade was likely the last time I ever wore ice-skates), but if scraping ice off one's car were to ever become an Olympic sport, I think I would at least have a shot at the qualifiers.

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