Freelance medical writer by day, blogger by night, book artist by baptism of desire. Born in same month that Sputnik was launched; named after Irishman who discoverd America. Passions: Spouse and Child, cats, baking, gardening, letterpress, nature in the city, ballet, greenmarkets, G.K. Chesterton, Bruce, paleoconservatism, pipe organs, Brooklyn, Catholicism, respect for human life from conception through natural death. Secret desire: to be described someday in a magazine profile as being "like an unholy spawn of Fran Lebowitz and William F. Buckley Jr." Obsessed with pine trees; talk to them but don't hug them (sap makes them sticky).