Where?

Being a Very Frequently Asked Question

Right now, I am somewhere in this general vicinity. That's the Hollywood neighborhood of College Park, and a rather nice neighborhood it is. You can actually see the stars at night, and it's much safer than my paranoid housemate likes to think. Plus there's a stream! See it? It's off to the right there, bisecting that green diagonal stripe. In Walsh Park, which is my fictionalized version of College Park, Sam Key lives in a neighborhood called "Vinewood". She likes it too.

This is Jiménez Hall, and that is Marie Mount. (They are properly pronounced ['ʤɪ.mɪ.ˌnɛz] and ['mɛ.ɹi.ˌmãu̯t̚] respectively.) I've spent far too much of my time at UMD in one of those two buildings. At some point, I need to sit down and figure out exactly how many of my 171 credit hours I spent in each. I'm sure Jiménez alone is a good hundred credits.

Here is a lovely picture of my first home, Matilda House. Just down the street from the Tower, see? Then, when I was two, I went from East London to East Baltimore, a mere block north of Patterson Park, which is indeed awesome enough to have its own Wikipedia article. This neighborhood is the setting for Fear Sweeney, though Jal et al. live on the west side of the park, whereas I grew up on the north. Man, Baltimore rowhouses look pretty silly from above, don't they? They look kind of silly from ground level too, to be honest, especially if you don't share my irrational fondness for Formstone.

I lived in Harford County for four years, too. But we won't talk about that.

Hey, look! It's actually possible to fit basically every single building on the St John's Annapolis campus into the frame at the second-highest zoom level! George Washington danced in that little blurry smudge in the middle, you know. I did too, though it's quite likely he was better at it. (I've been told I'm a disappointing waltzer. Ouch. And I can't Johnny-swing to save my life, though I can do it to risk my partner's.) I lived for a year in an apartment building at 8 Maryland Avenue, right next door to the Naval Academy. I believe the building has burned down now—properties belonging to my former landlords, who shall remain unnamed, have something of a history of spontaneous combustion—but I'm told it did have a brief cameo in Patriot Games, so its memory will live on.