Trivia

"So you're from Dixie.  My wife and I use your cups all the time."

- Ted Baxter (The Mary Tyler Moore Show)

Born and raised in South Carolina (you know you're from SC when...click here), youngest of 3 children. Westernmost member of the clan. Father is a retired high school football coach and athletic director, mother is a retired teacher/secretary; they live near Asheville, NC. Older of two elder brothers is a retired Air Force colonel, currently working in aeronautics in VA. Other brother teaches high school English and coaches football in NC. Best friend is the principal of Crestwood High School in SC.

I've been an academic gypsy, so I've lived in both Carolinas, Georgia, Colorado, Arizona, and Texas.  I've lived in Lubbock and been on the faculty of TTU since 2000.  I've traveled throughout the continental U.S. and have also been to Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, The Netherlands, and France. 

Interests and activities (in no particular order):

· Playing piano

· Listening to music - various genres

· Sports - watching college and pro football, hockey, and baseball

· Downhill skiing

· Hiking

· Birding

· Cooking - some of my favorite recipes:

§ Ancho-glazed BBQ chicken

§ The best salsa ever

§ The easiest molé roja ever

§ BBQ baby-back ribs

§ Fajita steak

§ Lavender crème brûlée

· Reading

Read in 2009:

§ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris) – an earlier collection, not quite as funny as When You Are Engulfed in Flames or Holidays on Ice, but still containing some gems

§ Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience (J. Mynott) – sometimes charming, sometimes prolix series of essays about birds

§ When You Are Engulfed in Flames (David Sedaris) – another hilarious series of essays

§ Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper (C.M. Marchese) – interesting, but error-riddled (some typographical, others errors of fact)

§ Great Plains (M. Forsberg) – coffee-table book about the prairies from Canada to Mexico

§ Alex and Me (Irene Pepperberg) – about Alex, the famous African Gray Parrot who taught us that “bird-brained” should be considered a compliment

§ Fireflies, Honey, and Silk (G. Waldbauer) – essays about insects

§ Laws, Theories, and Patterns in Ecology (Walter K. Dodds) – a summary of concepts that Dodds proposes as ecological laws and theories

§ Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body (Lewis Held) – an examination of how the oddities of the human body are indicators of the process of evolution

§ When We Were Wolves (Jon Billman) – short stories set mostly in the fictional Wyoming town of Hams Fork, centered around people who are never quite successful

§ The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (N. Pick and M. Sloan) – a sort of coffee-table book with photos of some of the most unique specimens in the MCZ

§ Alzheimer’s Early Stages: First Steps for Family, Friends, and Caregivers (D. Kuhn) – MUCH more useful than Alzheimer’s for Dummies

§ Lone Star Wildflowers (L.J. Nieland and W.F. Finley) – field guide to flowering plants in Texas, with decent photographs (although not all photos of a given species are grouped together)

§ The Horizontal World (D. Marquart) – autobiographical account of growing up in small-town North Dakota

§ Tacos (Mark Miller) – cookbook (not for beginner chefs!) by the chef-owner of The Coyote Café in Santa Fe

§ Alzheimer’s for Dummies (P.B. Smith et al.) – tips on how to deal with that awful disease

§ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows) – novel about the German occupation of the British island of Guernsey during WWII

§ The Cloudspotter’s Guide (G. Pretor-Pinney) – charming book about the different types of clouds, filled with interesting asides and anecdotes

§ Prairie Spring (Pete Dunne) – first of a series of four books about the seasons on my favorite biome

§ The Ecology of Fragmented Landscapes (S.K. Collinge) – rather good text that covers a lot of important topics in landscape and community ecology

§ Postcards (Annie Proulx) – her incandescent first novel

§ Spice: The History of a Temptation (Jack Turner) – rather dry non-fiction work about the importance of spices in history and culture

§ The Language of Bees (Laurie R. King) – the 9^th novel in a mystery series

§ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) – a delightful nonfiction book about her family’s attempts to eat locally for a year, but try being a locavore in Lubbock…

§ Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business (Dolly Parton) – a side-splitting autobiography from a really classy lady

§ More Tales from the Big Bend (Elton Miles) – series of folk tales and biographies from the trans-Pecos region of Texas

§ Mapp & Lucia (E.F. Benson) – being re-read for the zillionth time, in anticipation of a July trip to “Tilling” (Rye) in the U.K.

§ Where the Wild Things Were (William Stolzenburg) – about how the declines and extinctions of large predators has had myriad ecological effects

§ The Wild Prairie: A Natural History of the Western Plains (Tim Fitzharris) – a coffee-table book of photos of the northern Great Plains

§ Caprock Canyonlands (Dan Flores) – I’m re-reading this account of my regional landscape after initially reading it shortly after moving here in 2000

§ Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-deficit Disorder (R. Louv) – about how our modern society discourages and prevents children from connecting with nature, and what to do about it

§ Dragonflies (P. Corbet and S. Brooks) – an updated version of the original in the “New Naturalist” series, this book focuses on species in the UK; however, it is so clear and thorough that it contains much relevant information for North America, too

§ Dragonflies and Damselflies: Model Organisms for Ecological and Evolutionary Research (A. Cordoba-Aguilar, ed.) – a synthesis work from many of the major odonatologists in the world

§ Dragonflies & Damselflies of the Southwest (R.A. Behrstock) – a remarkably unsuccessful field guide to some species odonates of the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico; most of the photos are extremely small, and some species have photos of only one sex displayed

§ Land Circle (Linda Hasselstrom) – series of essays and poems about living on the prairie from a rancher in South Dakota

§ Xerophilia (Tom Lynch) – nonfiction, and not what I was expecting: from reading the jacket cover, I figured this would be a regional collection of essays, a compilation of works from other authors, such as Susan Tweit, Edward Abbey, etc., but it turned out to be a single-author work that is a very thought-provoking, bioregional examination of life in the southwest (and much better than the usual post-colonial ecocriticism)

§ Half in Love (Maile Meloy) – short stories

§ Rock Springs (Richard Ford) – short stores, mostly set in modern-day Montana and many with a dark theme

§ The Hopes of Snakes (Lisa Couturier) – one of the most thought-provoking series of nature essays that I’ve ever read; nature essays tend to be a dime a dozen, but this collection is unique and a delight to read

§ Holidays on Ice (David Sedaris) – series of mostly funny short stories about Christmas; the first, “Santaland Diaries,” is absolutely hilarious (about being a department-store elf)

§ The Lives of Rocks (Rick Bass) – uneven series of short stories

§ Drinking Dry Clouds (Gretel Ehrlich) – stories by one of my favorite authors, mostly set during WWII around a fictional Japanese internment camp

The "horizontal yellow" landscape (Dan Flores' term) of the Texas Panhandle