Penguins

A couple of people have guessed where my 'penguindreams' id comes from, but there's a little more to it.  The obvious part is the collection of Bloom County cartoons which were collected as Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things.  There can be strange things here, so it seemed appropriate.  The penguin part has less to do with Opus, and more to do with a platypus.

The platypus is itself a story.  When I was younger (not that I'm not currently young, but back then I was less practiced at it), my sisters each had an animal they collected.  Somehow it was deemed that I should also have an animal that I should collect.  I didn't want to do so, so I spent some time trying to think up the most unlikely animal possible.  Platypus was what I finally hit on.  That served me well.  No platypi found their way to me until I was well in to college, when my grandmother had found a pattern and made one.

I was safe again until I reached graduate school, when I started working on the Antarctic.  Immediately it was decided that penguins were now my animal.  So I've got quite a few penguins, of one sort and another.  They did give my (now) wife pause back when we were dating and she saw the penguin collection.  Fortunately she believed this story.  And I've grown to like the penguins.