Q:  Where are you from? A:  All over really, but the San Francisco Bay Area has been my home for the past several years. I was raised in a family of . . . well . . . gypsies, for lack of a better term. We moved around a lot. We didn't have a brightly colored wooden trailer with horses like they do in the movies, and I never once wore a pair of lederhosen. We really were quite normal, lived in houses and wore pants like other families. Some of my earliest memories are not so much of places we lived but adventures in between. We moved between the East coast and California three times prior to my sixth birthday, then roamed around the state of California. The saving grace was that we had a very close family, and that made all the difference in the world, no matter how much the world changed around us. text and illustrations copyright © 2005 by James Stimson