Born and raised in Alaska, the author learned to speak in the third person at an early age. This fact has less to do with the northern latitude of her upbringing, and more to do with her involvement in community theater, wherein actors write their own biographies for the program and pretend it was written by a professional. Perhaps this is what lead the author to Linfield College, where she studied mass communication. This degree served to legitimize her early tendencies toward third person communication, but explains little else about her life.  Her time in the Willamette valley resulted in a deep and abiding dislike of rain and gray squirrels; the latter developing after narrowly escaping being brained by a pine cone thrown by one of the despicable rodents.