About Me

Hi! I'm Summer, your host here at An Eclectic World. This site is my "portal", if you will, to centralize access to my wide-ranging Internet presence and my three databases of books, movies, and video games. From all the blogging I do, you can probably guess I tend to be a fairly open and verbose person. Despite that, I tend to suck at this About Me pages as I'm never really sure what all to say here versus what you can find out just browsing around. But they are still nice to read on sites, to here is my newest attempt at one.

I live in the Bryan-College Station region area of Texas with my three girls: Blue (border collie/Aussie mix), Yuki (Border Collie mix), and Fusion (a domestic medium hair cat). We live in a house that I bought in 2009 and have been "renovating" ever seen. I also share my life with the most awesome boyfriend in the world, Alan, who is smart, funny, hot, and an awesome photographer. Seriously, go check out his stuff.

Career wise, I'm a web application developer for Texas A&M AgriLife's Information Technology unit, crafting kick butt sites with my partner in crime, like AgriLife People and the AgriLife Bookstore. Most of our newer apps are built with a MySQL database, while older sites and this site utilize PostgreSQL. I'm an Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Expert and have graduated from Blinn College with an Associates of Applied Science in Computer Science degree. I really enjoy web development as it fits well with the way I think and most of the time is interesting, hence my having a whole blog dedicated to it.

Hobby wise, I love to read (hence the more than 1,000 books in my library). I especially enjoy reading manga, as well as watching manga, so I have a second blog all about those topics. I enjoy gardening, but I'm lazy about it so I have fun shopping for plants, sticking them in the ground, then they pretty much end up on their own other than basic watering.  Despite this I've managed to produce a few fruits and veggies from my gardens.  There is something awesome about eating food harvested from your own garden.

I will randomly get into the mood to sling some oil paint against a canvas, love to play video games, and am a collector of Hello Kitty items and Trail of the Painted Ponies figurines. I also love photography, shooting with a Canon T1i dSLR. You can find over 5,000 of my photos over my Flickr Pro account, which feeds the box over to the right there and the ones on the Home and My Girls pages. I want to learn Japanese though I have yet to open the Rosetta Stone package I bought 3 years ago, and I love to travel though Alan and I don't get to go as often as I'd like just yet.

Since middle school, I've been a "struggling" writer, penning a few bad poems and making many attempts at writing novels. While I had loads of great ideas, IMHO, it wasn't until 2006 that I wrote any significant number of words thanks to signing up and participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). That first year, I didn't "win", but I did write just under 25,000 words of a novel, the most ever! As a participant in 2008, I finally finished a completely novel, though it came in just under 50,000 words. I had my first NaNo win in 2009 and I've won every year since. I now have three four completed novels, so I guess I'm more of a struggling editor at this point.  I do hope to publish one (or all) some day, I just need to finish editing them for submission.  I love NaNo so much that in 2011 I also became our area's municipal liaison! It is stressful, but fun and I love seeing other folks reaching that goal along with me.

That's just a little bit about me. If you made it to the end of this "brief" overview, congrats! I hope you enjoy visiting the rest of the site and my other sites.