Fun

For me, the two essential ingredients of happiness are to be with family and friends and to frolic outdoors. Folk music is also an important part of my life.

Frolicking outdoors

I love dancing, in-line skating, skiing, playing with kids, sledding, hiking, and the out of doors. I love to just frolic outside -- to run around and play, to chase and wrestle with people, to climb on things, to roll around in a pile of leaves, to have a snowball fight.

Photo by Ruth Anne Johnson

I like oceans, lakes, and rivers. For some reason, when there is a body of water nearby, I feel compelled to approach it. I like being on the water in a boat, but I also like just being near the water. I like to climb around on the rocky shores characteristic of the Maine coast.

Photo by Chia-Ling Tsai

One of the hobbies I spend the most time on is in-line skating, especially in summer. In winter, I may ski instead or skate indoors. If there's not too much snow and ice on the pavement, I sometimes skate outdoors in winter.

Photo by Steven Lindsey

Rest and relaxation

All this makes me sound pretty active, and sometimes I am, but I'm also a quiet, reflective homebody. I tend to spend my vacations doing outdoorsy things with family and friends, but the rest of the year, I have to spend my days earning a living, and by the time I get home from work, I'm not about to scale any mountains. There are lots of things I'd love to be doing, but I don't have the energy to do most of them. I need my share of couch potato time to recover from working, chores and fun adventures. Good sources of entertainment during couch potato time are

• chatting with friends and relatives
• sitting on the porch
• sitting by the ocean, a river, a lake, or a tree
• reading
• writing (letters, e-mails, working on my web site, expressing my beliefs and philosophies)
• making lists (such as my favorite songs, my favorite movies, etc.)
• compiling photos or information (for example about my family history, towns I dream of living in, places I dream of traveling too, colleges that my younger relatives may like to attend, etc.)
• listening to music
• watching TV or movies
.

I enjoy fantasy novels with strong female characters and an idealistic perspective. Examples of authors I've enjoyed include Tamora Pierce, Robin McKinley, Cynthia Voigt, Susan Fletcher, and Frances Hardinge.

I usually like TV more than movies, because I like to follow TV shows with complex stories which evolve over time. Movies are generally one-shot deals, so there is less opportunity for characters and plot to develop over such long periods of time. TV shows I've enjoyed include Boston Legal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Deep Space Nine, Earth 2, EZ Streets, Firefly, Grace Under Fire, Lois and Clark, Mad About You, Popular, Roswell, Under Suspicion, Remington Steele, and Veronica Mars. My favorite movie is Adaptation. Others I've liked include As Good As It Gets, Fierce Creatures, High Fidelity, Moonstruck, Secondhand Lions, Secretary, and the X-Men series.