After a month or two of lessons I was starting to feel pretty comfortable dancing. Then, one night, I met the woman that was to become my wife. We were dancing in Roanoke Rapids that night. I was a little late and when I walked in I noticed this really pretty new girl. I was real shy then and wouldn’t have said a word to her. But when it was time for the couple’s dances, the woman I was with went and got this new girl and sent her out to dance with me. After that we started dancing almost every night. We had lessons three times a week and would go out on the weekend and dance some more.

I taught her to dance and she taught me to enjoy the water. Her parents lived on Lake Gaston, and every weekend we ended up there, riding on their jet ski or in their boat. Even though I had played in the water all my life I had never learned to swim and never felt comfortable in deep water. After watching all of them swimming and playing in the water I was determined to learn to swim too. So Renea and I spent a lot of time alone with me making a fool of myself flailing trying to swim. It didn’t take long for me to get it. From there I learned to ski, that first summer I learned to ski on the set of skis they had, and last year I managed to slalom ski for the first time. Not too bad going from not knowing how to swim to slalom skiing in just two years.

As you can probably tell my latest hobby is making web pages. We have been working on it for 3 months now, but I think it is finally starting to look good. I do all the work and Renea does all the writing. Maybe one of these days I will be able to get a job working on web pages like my sister-in-law Tracy. She is a webmaster for a real estate company in Richmond. Check out her web page for more about her. I learned all I know about web pages from a $20 dollar book from Waldens, who needs expensive college classes. Now I am working on learning Java and DHTML.

I guess my longest lasting and favorite hobby is photography. I love taking pictures! I got my camera, a Minolta 7000I, back in 1992 and have taken hundreds of rolls of film since then. I hope that you will enjoy looking at my photo gallery as much as I enjoyed taking the pictures.

My newest hobby? Well that would be being a husband and father. I think I got the husband thing down pretty good, at least till Renea changes the rules again. The dad part, that is a little harder. When Renea told me she was pregnant, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a baby. It was rough for a while but now my favorite thing is seeing my baby grow and learn new things. I can’t wait to see her walk, which shouldn’t be much longer I hope. I just hope I can be a good dad for her and give her all the love she needs.

Well I hope you have enjoyed reading all about me. I know I got a little (lot) long-winded, guess it runs in the family. Please check back for updates on us. There probably won’t be much on Renea or I but I am sure Rachel will have all kinds of adventures to tell you about. And please e-mail us with any thoughts or Ideas you have about our page or just to let us know you visited. I have been working on a guest book but it is not quite ready yet.