Geek2Nurse

Geek2Nurse, formerly known as LadyLong, began her career as an electrical/software engineer, and has always had a passion for breeding small cute furry things. She first discovered Creatures 1 in 1997, when she was working from her home in the Pacific NW USA as an interactive Web application and database developer for a company in California. This happy arrangement gave her the luxury of working in her pajamas, and also allowed her to indulge her love for norns, letting them play in the background while she worked to the cheerful sounds of their bibbling, and occasionally checked in to see that everything was going okay.

By the time Creatures 2 came out, she was managing a team of developers and working 80-hour weeks keeping her employees supplied with caffienated beverages and Nerf machine guns, while trying (rather unsuccessfully) to thwart upper management's constant insistence on eliminating any possibility of actual productivity by demanding detailed daily updates from each developer on what they were currently working on. Which primarily consisted of writing detailed daily updates to satisfy upper management's micromanagement tendencies, and then taking out their frustrations by shooting each other with Nerf machine guns, a fact which they prudently refrained from mentioning in their detailed daily updates.

Meanwhile, the shiny new Creatures 2 software gifted her by her son languished unopened on a shelf in her computer room. She completely missed the advent of Creatures 3.

LadyLong and her team were all laid off during the tech market downturn after 9/11, and went their separate ways, although remaining good friends. One became a construction contractor, another became a forest ranger, and one moved to Denmark. The rest eventually found new jobs in the tech industry. LadyLong, however, both unemployed and in the throes of "empty nest syndrome," as her 3 children had now all reached adulthood, decided it was to try something new. She dabbled for a while in graphic design, but discovered that the categories "things that are fun to do" and "things people will pay for" had very little in common. So she decided to be a flight attendant, but that plan never made it off the ground (*ahem*), as it turned out she was too tall to qualify. Finally, she started over from scratch, went to college all over again, earned a second BS exactly 25 years after her first one, changed her alias to Geek2Nurse, and became a psychiatric nurse.

She and her husband moved several times during those years, and the Creatures 2 box continued to languish, now lost somewhere in the stacks of moving boxes that somehow never all got unpacked.

In her first nursing job interview, Geek2Nurse was asked if she had any psychiatric experience. She replied, "I've worked a lot with programmers." She got the job. Then, somehow feeling she had not yet endured enough trauma, she decided to go to graduate school. She finished in the summer of 2011, becoming a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and was now faced with the daunting task of trying to remember what people actually DO who don't have to spend every waking moment studying. That was when she remembered her norns, and was struck with a compelling need to return to Albia. Thanks to the magic of Amazon Prime, she was able to quickly gain possession of C3/DS. Then she spent several frustrating days making it run on her computer. And finally, she found the thriving online Creatures community and began lurking and learning to manage these new norns.

Now she is happily spending her days off making up for all the years she missed playing Creatures, and is rediscovering her engineer self as she learns CAOS and dabbles in making agents. Her husband is quite okay with this pastime, as norns do not require trips to the feed store, have cages that need cleaning, or take up extra space in their home.

Her Creatures 1 CD turned up in her daughter's software collection, but her Creatures 2 software is still lost in the garage somewhere. She still dreams of someday finding it and *finally* breaking the seal.

Geek2Nurse's agents can be found at Creatures Caves, and on her own Creatures website, Adventures in Nornia.