About The Vixen

My name's Amanda and I am a Vermont native. I'm currently 29 years old and reside in sunny south Florida. I have lived here most of my life, with the exception of two years in Michigan and two years in Vermont. I really do not care for Florida much, especially during hurricane season (or "him-icanes" as my friend Biggston would call them... where ARE you, Biggie?). I adore the fine sport of hockey and my heart belongs to two teams. The Dallas Stars in the west and the Florida Panthers here in the east.

I got to watch Ray Whitney lift the Stanley Cup for the first time in his NHL career in June of 2006. It was really an exciting series to watch overall and I'm so very happy for him as well as the rest of the Carolina Hurricanes team. He has been one of my favorite players since he set foot in South Florida (the above picture was taken right after his first practice as a Panther) and I've continued to watch his career since he left, although I haven't been able to watch very closely until the playoffs this season.

With this stuff said, you can bet that I love to attend the games and especially the practices. This ritual was brought on by my ex-boyfriend Eric. Since we met, I've grown to consider him one of my very best friends. I will forever be in his debt for getting me into going to the practices and enjoying sitting out in the hot sun for hours at a time to get autographs from the guys as well as photographs with them. The entire time I was in Michigan, this is what I missed the most, because the Red Wings aren't as readily accessible as the Panthers are. This custom spilled over into my LA trip back in March of this year. The above (beloved prize of a) photo with Dallas Stars captain Mike Modano is proof of that. I actually have my close friend Rosalyn to thank for the above picture.

I got into computers because of my grandfather. In fact, he bought me my first computer, a Tandy 1000 and it cost him $2,000.00! I loved that thing until it crashed and burned on me. But my grandfather used to clean banks for a career and they'd tend to throw their old ones away. I remember him bringing me into his office and sitting me down in front of this ancient EPSON computer he'd gotten from one of the banks, plopping the manuals down in front of me and saying, "You're going to need to know this one day. I want you to sit here, read these books and then I want you to show me what you've learned." I must have looked at him like he was on some really dynomite drug, because he had to have been nuts. As soon as he left the office, I tossed the manuals aside and proceeded to tinker around with the machine. I loved the way it would make graphs (especially pie charts!) and the word processor was pretty cool. It really didn't have much to it because it was old and not graphics-based like Windows and Mac.

I got into website design on my own in 1998. Of course, had it not been for my wonderful teacher at college, Mr. A., I probably wouldn't know Dreamweaver as intricately as I do. But because I was panic-stricken and needed to get my Deadmarsh website up and on its own domain (it was getting looked at so much, the bandwidth was going down), he loaned me a book and a copy of the program and I went ahead and learned it in such a way that when we finally got to the Dreamweaver part of the course, I had already known what all he was teaching and then some! LOL

I thoroughly enjoy designing websites as you can see if you click here. If you are interested in having me design a website for you, please read here and then feel free to contact me and we'll talk about pricing and specifics. Thanks!

Enjoy the rest of the site and thanks for visiting The Vixen's Lair!