My hobbies are painting, crafts, and I like golfing.
One of the things I like best about the Halloween show is that I change outfits about six times in the show. It is a lot of fun to play the different characters.
I get to see the different sides of skating now which involves not only competing, but entertainment.
But after a few minutes of convincing myself that I really wanted to go - telling myself that I love skating and that my coach is there waiting for me - I would get up and go. And my mother would always get up and eat breakfast with me!
Even now I can't describe why I love skating so much.
Even now, my husband Jerry, our son Matthew and I live only five minutes away from my parents home, and my brothers live about ten minutes away. It's been great having such a supportive family.
There is no age, height, or weight requirement to skate. It is good exercise no matter what your age is. If you want to be competitive, most start young. But, I practice with many adult competitors.
I took group lessons at a rink near my home. We first had to learn how to stand up on the ice wearing skates. Eventually we learned to move forward, but soon found out that it was not that easy to stop! So that was our next important lesson.
I think it's a lot harder for the pros to have a long career in ice dance and in pairs. It seems the singles have a little bit of a longer career.
It was always fun to skate with Paul Wylie and Paul Martini.
I was a tomboy who liked to play rough just like my two older brothers. That's probably why I liked the athletic part of skating - especially the jumping!
My parents never pressured me to skate. They always said I could quit if I wanted to. They only expected me to skate when they had already paid for the expensive lessons. But, otherwise they said I could do what I wanted to do.
It wasn't always easy getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go to the rink. Sometimes I wanted to just go back to sleep.
Falling down became second nature and it really didn't bother me.
People would ask me why I was doing what I was doing - but I always told them that I just loved to skate. There was no other explanation.
I worked also, doing things such as our paper route and, later on, waitressing.
My life has been a whirlwind since the '94 Olympics.
