My name is Annie, and as stated above, I usually edit from work (What else is one supposed to do?). I enjoy helping out with patrolling the new pages section as well as finding articles that need to be fixed due to vandalism or typos, or articles that don't belong here. I try not to poke my nose into article subjects that I have no clue about, and tend to stick to things I know about first hand. I don't like to edit things 3, 4, 5 times in a row. If I need to do something, I like to take my time, and hit preview a lot. Sometimes I will spend +15 minutes on one subsection fixing grammar, readability, and flow. Becaue of this, yes... my edit count is artificially low. But ya know? I dont mind so much. ;) The picture above was taken at the University of Virginia in 2006, after my parotidectomy for a tumor in my parotid gland. Its cool... its gone, and it was A-OK... but they had to remove it due to the potential for bad stuff later. I graduated in 2006 with a BA in Environmental Science. My minor was Astronomy, and my concentration in my major was Meteorology. However, I don't use any of that in my daily job. Go figure. Feel free to check out my blog if you would like to see me bloviating about today's issues or just general things. One more thing... I will never, ever run for anything on here. I don't want to; I wouldn't be able to deal with the day to day wikidrama. I also would never want to a) put myself up for public scrutiny (I will only ever answer to myself) or b) clean up other people's messes on a massive "second job" type level. I do this for fun and to help out others.
Dad worked for the State Department, so I tended to move around alot as a kid. Our first country was Costa Rica, but I dont remember any of it. I was too young. Then came Peru, where we lived in Lima. We left Peru for two reasons... first and foremost, families of foreign service officers were being evacuated due to the civil war brewing between the mainstream gov't and Sendero Luminoso. The second reason we left, was because my father was called back to the Marines, stateside, due to the 1990 Gulf War. We arrived just in time to see it end, and lived in Virginia for a year and a half. Then it was off to Belgium, followed by Korea, and then Cairo, Egypt. I've visited far more localities and countries than I can list here. This is the reason for my many interests, and random articles.
Some people have raised an eyebrow or two regarding the name "Queerbubbles". It dates back to a time when waking up at 5am and being at work at 6am seemed like a horrible nightmare rather than an impending reality; highschool. My then best friend and I were wasting yet another hour on the phone together. He was doing his homework, an assignment which now seems ridiculous, in which he was to write a story where the first letter of each new sentence was the next letter in the alphabet. His sentence? "Queer bubbles began floating around me." "Queer bubbles??" I excalimed? I was enamoured with this phrase, and began calling my friend my "Queerbubbles" as he is gay. I dont know when the name flipped, and he began calling me Queerbubbles... but in the end, it continued through high school, into college and now here. I dont mean any harm by the name, and am sorry if you find it offensive, or do not agree with people who are just living their lives like everyone else in the world. No one deserves to be made to feel like less of a person, but that's just my two cents.
It all started with intellipedia. I had to do a thing and needed to learn how to wiki code. I figured the easiest and most pain free way to do that would be to start editing wiki proper. Learn in that space and then take what I'd gleaned and use it for work. Success! But thats not what kept me here. In March of 08 I had a miscarriage, and in order for me to stay, hmm, sane, I decided to start taking pictures around Virginia so I could upload them into various articles that needed some. I needed a purpose, I needed a goal. I needed anything in the world which would take my mind from a dark place to a better one. And it did. From there I began taking pictures for myself, and developing a love of photography. I want to get back into taking pictures for wikipedia articles, so if you see anything on my flickr page that you want the license relaxed for, go right ahead and leave a note on my talk page.
