Hi! I am making all sorts of pretty, smart friends in my little corner of da' Buzz and so I thought I'd better explain who I was before they threw me out of here on my batooshk. Leave it to me to get kicked out out an e-group.

I am someone's mom, three times over. I am someone's wife, just once, so far. I am someone's ex-neighbor, someone's cousin, someone's BFF.

I am an ex-pat. That sounds way harsh, but it just means that I don't live state-side anymore. I still pay Uncle Sam taxes, and so it only seems fair that I could have a gentler name, like pat-in-waiting or paused-pat or international-pat-of-mystery or something. Well, that last one didn't work out so well for Valerie Plame; maybe I'd pass on that. Ex-pat it is.

I was born in Illapelphia in the 70's, which means that I love hip-hop AND hair metal bands, and I go into withdrawls occasionally from the totally lack of anything resembling a proper cheesesteak. It also means I can handle a good bit more pollution in my water/air/soil than you can. This is not something I'm terribly proud of.

I moved to Denver at age 16, and fought it for 15 years. I wanted to go home. I wanted trees in the yard and cheesesteaks around the corner and the shore just up the road a little and dust from the steel factory clogging up the air conditioner every 2 days.

I married a boy that i met at a sad little restaurant in Denver, and we had a litter of children in Denver, and they love it they way I love my place of birth, and then one day we left. We packed up our lives and hopped on a plane and that plane landed in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Now, we're busy getting fat off Tim Horton's, playing hockey with any object that vaguely resembles a ball and a stick, trying to learn to said Zed instead of Z, and secretly praying to go back to Denver as soon as humanly possible.

Don't get me wrong, I LURVE it here. It's quiet and safe and lovely and the people? You Canucks take nice to a whole new level. The food rocks, the dollar is strong, and I'm starting a scrapbook collection of all my Canadian Tire dollars. If I ever had to get stuck in the suburbs somewhere for all eternity, Canada would be the place. The sheer quantity of malls ALONE make it all worth while.

But we realized something, that fateful day when the truck came and took all our stuff, when we had our passports stamped for the very first time...Colorado gets to you. It gets in your veins and under your nails and in your hair and like the girl you tried to dump who just didn't get it, you can leave Colorado but Colorado ain't nevah leaving you.

My blog is not about Colorado, or Canada, or Tim Horton's, but it is about those three people I made along the way, and how ridiculous they are, and what a bumbling idiot they make out of me. It's also about telling you secrets, secrets that would require several shots of tequila to get out of me normally. It's about saying I love yous to the people I love, and about cooking, and about potty training, and about dreaming of life beyond all this.

Basically, I'm just biding my time until I get to be the gramma and completely warp my grandchildren's sweet little minds.

My blogging experience will be posted at my blog, Whiskey in my Sippy Cup [dot] blogspot [dot] com. Don't be afraid to pop in an say hi; the door is never locked and the lights are always on.