fred67

An actual about me:

Computer Programmer, working for a television production company (so I actually do a lot of R&D into new equipment and graphics technologies, not much programming).

Married, two kids (who are both over the LEGO age at the moment, although my daughter will still build with me on occasion).

Live in Georgia; originally from New York, lived in Nevada for a while. My wife is from Brazil and I speak a little Portuguese.

I got back into LEGO as an adult around 1998 when I was getting into N-Scale trains and bought a tub of LEGO to "prototype" bridges, over/unders, etc.. It didn't work well. The next year my mom, seeing that I had LEGO, and knowing I'm a big Star Wars fan, gave me the ATST set with Chewbacca. It still didn't catch on with me... until I discovered the Railway Express set (possibly the worst 9V set ever) on sale at a local warehouse club. I didn't even know LEGO did "real" model trains, and not knowing I could even buy accessories elsewhere, I bought two.

After discovering I lived near one of the few LEGO Stores (at the time), my train collection grew to include the BNSF, a bunch of cars, a handful of MOT sets, and eventually I won a Santa Fe Superchief (non limited) on a bricklink auction (when they still did auctions).

My collection grew, and my interest in other themes began... Star Wars, Harry Potter, Fantasy Castle...

I wanted to like LOTR, but find them too much to be "play" sets. Right now I really like CMFs, Modulars, and a few related Creator sets that I can use in my eventual city layout.