Of all of the roles I fill in this world, the most important to me is Dad.  All of the defining moments in my life are far in the hazy background of the day I got married and the day my first child was born.  No matter what else I do with my life, I will be a dad first.

When I was 4 years old, my older brother caught a California Racerunner, which is a small lizard native to Utah, where I lived at the time.  It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and while it's hard sometimes to identify the true origins of our worldviews, I think it spawned two lifelong pursuits: 1. Be like my older brother and 2. Catch and observe reptiles.

Shortly after the legendary capture of what sounded to me like the world's fastest animal, our family moved a few blocks away to a small rental home adjacent to a vacant field and across a busy street from a large horse pasture.  We soon discovered that each of these was a sort of garter snake mecca, and I would spend countless hours there over the next few years, catching snakes by the bucketful.  We were often bitten, and would hold the snakes by the end of the tail, spinning them around to keep them from bending their muscular bodies up to have a go at our hands.  This would occasionally result in the snakes regurgitating its last meal (which invariably looked like slugs, but could have been anything else wrapped in snake stomach slime).

I was home-schooled during fourth through sixth grades (a period of my life affectionately referred to as my nerdhood).  I owned iguanas during this time, and it was my dream to be a herpetologist.

I forgot my dream until I found a cope's gray treefrog in the yard.  I brought it inside to look it up, and it was jumping everywhere and sticking to and climbing on everything.  My boyhood fascination was revived.  Thus began this quest.