Hi, I'm Mary (hi, Mary!), and one morning I woke up and realized I was addicted. Yes, I said addicted. To the Internet.. I mean, to Farmville... wait, I meant to ATP... no dagnabbit, it's DAYLILIES!
ADDICTED TO DAYLILIES!
And it's all y'alls fault! (oh, wait, I did that post already, didn't I?)
The thread "OK, I'm blaming Calif_Sue for this..." in
Daylilies forum
***clears throat, starts over***
Hi, I'm Mary, and have been an ATP members since about 2 weeks AFTER Dave created the list of charter members (in other words, I ain't one).
It took me a while to wander into the daylily forum though, but am I ever so glad I did. Daylilies are like greyhounds, for me... getting more involved in them has changed the pattern of my life, in a good way. I went from not knowing there was such a thing as a daylily society to belonging to 2 local ones and the big one. Went from thinking the
2-3 dozen I had scattered around my yard were sufficient to realizing that just like greyhounds, there's no such thing as too many daylilies. So now I'm all the way up to
4-5 dozen scattered around my yard.
But this isn't about daylilies...it's about ME. Believe me, I could talk for HOURS on that topic.
Instead, let me just give you the short version, as created for the back cover bio of my book (oh yeah, in my spare time, I write stories).
A once-rolling stone now happily gathering moss, Mary Young is a military veteran who has lived in Ohio, Indiana, Idaho, Belgium and Texas before finally settling on her "little patch of paradise" in northern Georgia. She spends her days teaching computer software, and divides her free time between writing, photography, gardening and spoiling her two retired racing Greyhounds. You can find her online at http://Mary-Young.com.
Let's see, what does that leave out? 51, never married, no kids except my dogs, have worked with computers one way or another since 1985, after blowing off the final exam of the "intro to computers" class I took in college cause I knew I would never work with computers so it didn't really matter. Born and bred in Columbus Ohio during the Woody Hayes years, grand-daughter of coal-miners from southern Ohio, and spent 5yrs in the Army National Guard to help pay for college, then 8 years active duty Air Force after graduation while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Have worked in the computer industry since 1992, 3-4 months after leaving the Air Force.
Never intended to leave San Antonio (I put down roots there for the first time since college), but my job relocated me to the Atlanta area, and then a year later I was laid off. Never intended to stay in Georgia, but moved into this house in 2007 and have no plans to ever leave it. Or as I like to say, they can have my house when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Most of my life since college has been spent in apartments, and when I *did* live in a house in SATX, I had a job with 80% travel, so no plants for the most part..
Started playing with house plants in containers after moving to GA and getting an apartment with an east-facing sunroom, and discovered I could keep them alive. When I moved into a townhome in 2003 with my first greyhound, I started a container flower garden outside my front door. When I started house-hunting in 2007, one of my criteria was a "blank slate," yard-wise. This house is perfect. The lot is almost an acre, with a fenced back yard for the dogs, and a front yard that is 50x150ft (sorry, I don't do metric conversions) of solid lawn. I've been slowly converting it to less lawn and more wildlife-friendly, as well as more shade for me.
Have had lots of fun learning about native plants, benefits of clover lawns, reasons to not kill the weeds in the lawn, etc (dandelions are nitrogen-fixers -- who knew?). And now I'm having fun learning about daylilies, too, and hanging out with all the cool folks here in the DL forum as well as all over ATP.
other hobbies: reading/writing/computers/photography/guns/greyhounds
so that's me in a nutshell... or is it supposed to say "that's me belonging in a nutshell?" I always get those phrases confused.
