The Wonder That is Ayse

I grew up in Ithaca, New York, moved around a bit in college, then basically settled in the San Francisco Bay area.

Yes, I know what my name means. Thank you to all you wonderful people who feel the need to educate me on the subject. No, it's not a "chosen" name; it was my great-grandmother's name. I get an outstanding volume of spam in Turkish just because of my name. Mostly selling porn videotapes (see, spam is the same all around the world). Some complaining about those pesky Armenians. I also seem to get spontaneously added to new Yahoo groups about Turkish crap all the time. If you're wondering: no, I am not interested.

I currently split my time between a collapsing Victorian wreck in lovely Alameda, California, and a tiny studio apartment in San Luis Obispo, California, where I am going to architecture school. In Alameda, I share my house with the spousal unit, our two dogs, our two cats, and a roommate.

To make money, I do, well, nothing at all. I'm currently a student, and on occasion I work as an intern at an architectural office, tutor other students, and so forth. I have worked as a writer, editor, and computer programmer.

For fun, I read quite a bit, I write fiction and essays, I do some smallish art projects, and I play in the garden. I also spend a lot of time renovating my house. Before we bought the house, we used to travel quite a bit, but that's been curtailed with all our free money going to things like foundations and some incredibly stinky processes involved in lead remediation.

If this brief profile is not enough, I've added a whole host of information about myself.

• My geek code
• A list of my favourite things
• My Amazon.com profile page

You can also see what's going on in my mind on a more ongoing basis in The One Truth For All.