Denis' Bio:

Denis was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, England in 1949. He joined the Royal Navy at the tender age of 15, which he believes is one of the best things he's ever done. He trained to look after missile and gunnery systems and went around the world twice on HMS Lincoln and then HMS Rhyl. Afterwards he was trained on Inertial Navigation systems and finished his Naval service on Polaris submarines.

The deciding factor in his leaving the Royal Navy was the birth of his daughter, Amanda, in 1980. The idea of being gone four months of every year while she was growing up didn't set well with him at all. He spent one year working for Perkin-Elmer before moving on to Kodak--the company he retired from in 2000. Those last years saw the amicable breakup of his marriage.

They had also seen him interested in golf, then pistol shooting (until the UK government banned handguns), and then motorcycles and computers. During the final stages of his divorce, he was posting in APFPY quite happily when he just happened to get this one line email from some woman in Arizona who called herself Skye....

Skye's Bio:

Skye (who also answers to the name on her birth certificate--Cathy), was born January 24, 1955 (remember that month and day--they show up later) and lived the first eighteen years of her life in a small farm town south of Decatur, Illinois. While going to college in Utah, she happened to travel through Phoenix, Arizona, and fell in love with the city and the Sonoran Desert when it was 110 degrees F. in the shade.

She moved there after graduation and has stayed there ever since. She's worked 19 years for a large American retail chain of stores called Target. Most of those years were spent in customer service management until her skill in diplomacy began to waver a bit...or was it her patience? She decided that being shut up in the vault for a major part of her day to be of benefit to all and sundry.

Having decided ages ago that marriage wasn't anything she was going in search of, she spent off hours filling her house with books (and even reading them), going to nearby movie theatres, avoiding using the kitchen, traveling and watching a seemingly inexhaustible parade of strange wildlife wander through her property.

She bought herself a computer and sometime shortly after APFPY's inception, wandered in where she found many kindred spirits, including this one Englishman who happened to post a question about ICQ one night....

Denis and Skye's Joint Bio:

You reach a point where emails and ICQ chats just don't cut it. Frequent flier miles were racked up by Denis, who discovered that Arizona was just as fascinating as the woman who called herself Skye.

Plans were made, the INS behemoth was prodded into action, and Denis, K-1 Visa in hand, came to Phoenix to live December 5, 2001. They were married on....January 24, 2002.

Denis spent seven months being (as he puts it) a kept man. This actually involved a lot of fixing up of the old ranch house Skye has called home since 1981. He also kept the new family vehicles---a Chevy S-10 Blazer and a Kawasaki Voyager--spotless.

At the end of July, Denis went to work for Target, since he knew how much Skye loved laundering khaki and red. Their off hours are spent going to movies, working on the old ranch house, enticing feathered wildlife to the property, and taking the Blazer out on the Arizona backroads, where they've had many an adventure--with many more to come.