For those who don't know me, here are the basics:

I grew up in the small town of Weed, California. The town is approximately 45 minutes south of the Oregon/California border and has a population of 3,000, with an additional 1,500 people in outlying areas. My high school had a grand total of 200 students, and it didn't even have a cafeteria. I lived there for 18 years and never knew what real traffic sounded like. The fact that I could see the 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta out my window every single day was a matter of course.

And then I got a full-ride scholarship, moved three hours south to a large city and enrolled at the University of California, Davis, as a Human Development major headed into the teaching field. After a year and a half, I made some life-changing decisions and transferred to California State University, Sacramento, changing my major in the process. I became involved with my school newspaper, where I realized that news reporting is my style of writing. After two years in the college journalism world -- the second of which I spent as Editor in Chief of The State Hornet newspaper -- I knew I wanted to do more in that field.

In May 2002, I landed a summer internship at a daily newspaper called the Lodi News-Sentinel, and then the police and courts reporter suddenly gave notice that he was leaving to work for a large paper in Southern California. That was the exact area I'd wanted to cover for a long time, and I managed to get the job. The day after I was hired, Lodi had its first double homicide. I'm still learning new things every day, and I can still say that I love my job.

As for the Web site itself, I purchased the domain name in January 2002. I've had several Web pages in the past, all hosted on free servers or on an ISP's site. theSmudge.com is similar to Layla Land, my previous site, but I've incorporated more coding in an attempt to make my life easier. Sometimes I accomplish that, and sometimes I do not.