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Explain Your Screen Name

My dad would call me "chip" when I was quite young, too. Another somewhat less-endearing, French-Canadian handle: 'ti-boute' which roughly translates to "little nub".
 
It’s the first syllable of my last name. A high school coach was the first to use it on me but I have a long list of cousins and uncles who go by the same moniker. Most of my paddling buddies call me Conk, so I use it here.
 
Bob, Robert named after my uncle Robert, who was my mothers brother. He was a lobster fisher in New Brunswick.
MacDonald was my fathers last name passed down through many generations. My father was not related to my mother, except through marriage.
 
I went to Humboldt State University and graduated with a wildlife management degree in 1989. My graduation study was tied into a nesting density study of Black Shouldered kites in relation to prey base. My portion of the study was focused on the prey base population, Microtus californicus.
 
After Mum and Dad passed away I was cleaning out the old house and found this old deed to our farm located in Fayette County, which is located in SW Penna. about 35 miles from the "forks" latter know as Pittsburgh. Looking very close you can make out the land was transferred in 1790 from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. After the revolution and we became a nation the land owned by William Penn commonly called Penns Woods became the state of Pennsylvania.
It's interesting how the parcel of land was described simply as " a parcel of land North side of Youghiogheny River".
George Washington would have been President in 1790.
So with this little background I choose Penns Woods IMG_1526.JPG
 
"Cloots" is a derivative of my my real last name. D is the first letter of my first name. All of my lifetime friends call me "Cloots". Nothing too tricky here.
 
Aside from the fact that it was a screen name I used on another paddling forum (or was it two?), as an occasional canoe poler I wanted something descriptive of an activity that for me is as close to walking on water that I'll ever get. And although I've canoed plenty of large lakes in my day, I am partial to rivers. And it sounded a lot less creepy than "riverstalker".
 
As much as this forum seems like the last bastion of a sane, reasonable, non-robotized, non-commericalized internet (THANK YOU SITE ADMINS and CT community!), I still never use my real name on forums.

So, being born and raised in the northeast and an ecologist, I cast about for tree names. On other forums, Quercus is often taken, and Acer might leads folks to believe I like laptops. Tsuga was the third tree that came to mind.

8 because it's a nice round number, lucky for some, easily factored for others... I like that if you tip it over it turns into infinity.
 
Mine comes from one of my other hobbies: photography. I have a couple of vintage camera lenses that focus using an unusual sliding mechanism (rather than the typical helicoid or cam mechanism), and when I joined a photography forum and needed a screen name, I was inspired by those lenses to call myself “Sliding Focus.” For consistency (or, perhaps, due to a lack of creativity), I’ve reused that name when I’ve signed up for other fora, even when they aren’t photography-related.
 
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