Hello ... New here!!!

Hello y'all. I'm new here, but I am discussion forum junkie. When I was a wee lad, about Hobbit sized, I can remember being taken to a Tolkien Convention on the back of my fave uncles Triumph chopper. My uncle always had a LOTR calendar (they still make those???) hanging on his wall. He also used to collect & paint Hobbit and Dwarf 'statuettes'. I can also remember his pit-bull named 'Frodo'.

Ahhh... If we could all have role models such as he...

Anyways.... I read the Hobbit & LOTR years ago, and recently stumbled across the Silmarillion at a discount bookstore so I grabbed it. I painstakingly read the work, sometimes rereading pages 2-3x's overs The Sil is not "easy-reading".... but my appetite was stimulated. I recently went to Mom's house and dug through the garage until I finally located my tattered copies of LOTR. I am now about 100 pages into the 'Fellowship', and I am rediscovering the joy(s) of Middle Earth.

BTW, my handle comes from the fact that I attended and graduated from University of California, Irvine (UCI Anteaters). As you may know, half of the residence halls are Tolkien-themed with most of the 'dorms' and facilities named after places, people, and things in Middle Earth. Actually, "Middle Earth" is the name of the community. My first dorm was "Aldor", the gym was called "Helm's Deep", and we ate at "Pippin Commons".

Cool, huh???


Regards,


E.J. Montelongo