• The Misty of Chincoteague series by Marguerite Henry: These books were first introduced to me when my family was taking a trip to Chincoteague, VA. This series is about wild horses from Assateague Island, VA. Each year the horses are swum across the river to Chincoteague where they are sold.
• The Adventures of Tintin by Herge: I was tagging along one of my father's business trips to Brussels, Belgium....and fell upon this wonderful comic series by a local author. Tintin, is a reporter who throughout his adventures meets several interesting characters from foreign lands. He solves mysteries with the aid of Captain Haddock, Calculus, and his dog, Snowy.
• Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery: It was a summer trip to Prince Edward Island which inspired the start of my quest to read all the Anne of Green Gables books. The series details the ficticious life of a spunky red headed orphan girl living on Prince Edward Island (beautiful place!).
• The Giver and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry: Two amazing books by one author. My absolute favorite book is The Giver! They both are a must read! The Giver is about a futuristic land in which everyone is protected from everything, but there are no choices. Number the Stars is about two young girls, one Jewish and one not durin World War II.
• I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier: This is another magnificent book, which plays a mind game as the ending. A sad, and slightl scary story, it is still worth your time! This book is about a young boy and how he copes with the loss of his family.
• The Redwall Series by Brian Jacques: A magnificent series concentrating on the lives of talking woodland creatures living in some sort of a cult 'commune'. I enjoyed these books and their vivid imagery, but after awhile I notticed that each book's plot was set up the exact same.

Alright, it's been a few years since I've updated this section. Those books above are all good for kiddies...here's a few of my more current favorites:

• "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow" by Orson Scott Card: They're two books on the same story, just different points of view. "Ender's Game" is sort of like a sci-fi "Harry Potter", but scarier. Children are recruited to a battle school where they play battle games and maybe do some actual school learning. Ender is the prodigy, the one they hope will beat the 'buggers' (aliens) once and for all.
• Dante's "Divine Comedy" - made of "The Inferno", "Purgatory", and "Paradiso", this work of Dante's is a classic. It's really good (...probably why it's a classic). Make sure you get a copy with footnotes, otherwise, you won't recognize any of the people that he places in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
• "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley - Even the perfect world, carefully regulated by officials has problems. In fact, these sort of Utopias always have problems. All babies are born from test tubes and there is no love, etc. etc.
• "The Sandman" - a graphic novel - by Neil Gaiman. Yes, it's basically a bunch of comics placed together...but it's a nice, continuous story, heavily focused around death and horror (the main character is actually "Dream"), but there's lots of allusion.

• Model Horses: Yep, this is what a week of horse back riding summer camp does to you :) For those of you (such as myself) who are incapable of owning a real horses, but still want to keep in touch with the species, collecting model horses is a great thing to begin! Create your own saddles, paint your own horses, or have other people do it for you! Be sure to show your prize models in live model horse shows or photo shows.
• I also design webpages (obviously), but my skills have improved since I first created this site. You just can't tell, because I refuse to do a major update of it. It's more in the design than the coding that I've improved, though I've also recently learned to program in QBASIC, C++, and a little Java (no, not for web design, really, but computer languages are good for lots of other stuff).