About Toastie

While I often question the wisdom of maintaining this blog, it remains my repository for just about everything I feel compelled to share with the world. While I began Toastiest in February 2007, I have since imported entries from a LiveJournal account dating back to 2003. Before that, I had been private journaling for a couple of decades. Sharing thoughts about my personal life, politics, entertainment, and miscellany fulfills my need to feel that the byproducts of my mind are not vanishing into a void. I’m usually not fishing for feedback. I’m almost never searching for debate. I don’t know why those who read my blog are reading it. My posts are rarely well-written. My thoughts are rarely profound. And, frankly, I come across as a type of person you don’t need making an appearance in your day. I think some people may just like the pet photos.

I’m a progressive-minded, sensitive, introverted aspiring optimist, out-of-touch with my generation and all generations. I love to laugh, too, but you had better say or do something pretty damn funny if you want a reaction from me. I cam be a bit of a grump.

Some people swear that I’m kind, caring, generous, hilarious, and tenacious. (Now I’m just using a manipulative Fox News trick. I mean, who are “some people”, after all?)

I live in a disheveled bungalow near downtown Durham, North Carolina, with my two geriatric cats and misunderstood old mutt-of-a-dog. You will see lots and lots of pictures of them, which I use to try to convince readers that I have a heart.

I do, indeed, have a heart. However, until recently, I lacked a working kidney. My kidneys failed over time due to the hereditary condition PKD, or Polycystic Kidney Disease. I was on hemodialysis for a couple of years until I got a call on June 27, 2011 that a kidney from deceased donor awaited me. I wrote a lot about my dialysis treatment, and how much it royally sucked, and I write about the aftermath of my kidney transplant, not to be a benevolent educator, but because I often need to vent. It is wonderful to have a new kidney, but I can’t sugarcoat it; it’s not a cure, but merely a treatment. Of course, I hope it is a successful long-term treatment.

I do have a profession that I had some role in choosing at some point in time long ago. I work in IT, with varying job titles depending on my position. I am currently an “IT Engineer”, though I am not quite sure what an engineer does. I help improve software that helps other people do their jobs better, or something like that. It pays most of the bills.

Finally, the moniker Toastie has nothing to do with illegal substances or smoking anything. I never felt I needed to explain this as, in my naiveté, I wasn’t familiar with all of the slang for derivations of the word toast. I only realized in recent years that such a common conclusion could have been frequently arrived at. Sadly, there is no known origin of my nickname. It was given to me my freshman year in college for reasons that had nothing to do with pot or related elements but were otherwise completely random.

This site would be toastie.com, but that was a non-descript site I sold around 2002 for modest monetary gain. When I went looking for a domain for a new blog, I got all creative and grabbed a .ST domain from São Tomé and Príncipe, the Portuguese-speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. This sounds exotic, but I have never left the United States with the exception of a brief childhood trip to Ontario. (I sometimes try to count Kaua’i.)

Just dive in anywhere, and you likely to learn far more about me than you had every anticipated…for better or for worse…

For better, I hope…