Despite the unusual name, I don’t think I am an especially unusual person. But I suppose you’ll have to decide that for yourself.

I’m a real life, middle-aged, middle-income middle manager who was raised in the Midwestern US. Now I live in Southern California. I have a husband, two sons who are young adults, two dogs, a cat, and … well, the fish died so I guess that’s it, as far as the immediate family goes.

So why would such a tediously ordinary person want to write a blog?

I’ve always wanted to write, but I never knew the answer to the question — what to write about? It turns out, it doesn’t matter what you write about. The ideas don’t come first, necessarily. Once I got started, I’ve found it’s hard to stop, and I often have new ideas. I just needed to get started, and I guess I needed Celera to do that.

Some time ago, like about nine million other people, I got to playing an online game called World of Warcraft. For those who don’t know about this sort of thing, you create an avatar or character that represents you in a sort of virtual world, and then you get together with other people (or their avatars) and kill dragons or gather magic herbs and that sort of thing. I got to know some folks who were fun to hang out with, but to officially join their group you had to write the story of your avatar.

And that is how Celera was born. She started off as just an image, in a game — a tall elf with green hair and a pet wolf. She took on a sort of life of her own, with her own history, personality, and friends. And then, she became sort of an online alter-ego for me, a digital nom de plume.

The cabin is a “real” place in the World of Warcraft game world. It is little more than a hut, in a remote, snowy region. But it is there for Celera and any of her friends who need to rest, warm up, perhaps meet each other and talk over a fire and bit of roast raptor and spice cake, or a cup of goldthorn tea.

This is just a test.