Yarochka's introduction

I figure I should introduce myself, don't I. Well the details are pretty straightforward. I was born in Archangelsk in 1974. My mother was a nurse but had been quite the gymnast in her childhood, and always kept up practicing, teaching me all the fun stuff. My father worked for the Forest and Forest Chemistry Institute, and always had an interesting story to tell about a rock, which was never simply a stone, but alexandrite, or aventurine feldspar, and so on for everything a little girl could find when walking hand in hand with her papa.
Whenever we could afford it, we'd have a family vacation in Krasnodar. Once, I must have been seven or so, I got bitten by a snake. Of course I bawled my eyes and heart out, scared that I was poisoned and my death was imminent, but my mother patched me up, all calm and sweet like the excellent nurse she was, and my father's gentle explanation of the how and why of snakes with poisonous bites quickly led me away from my fear. Instead of becoming holy scared from snakes, I was intrigued enough to study Herpetology at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint-Petersburg.
Who else was important in my life? Ah, my deda, my father's father. He used to be high up in the navy. He was very strict, with adults and children alike, but always softened up to me. My nephews would get their ears chewed out, me I got to sit on his lap while he told me stories of the war. He died of cancer when I was 12 or so (I cried for days!), but his mind had left before that, bless him. I remember during the last years, he insisted wearing his uniform whenever he had visitors. The golden belt, the glint of the buttons. How many American jeans could you to buy for that, hey? Not that such things occupied me at that age, except that the uniform became a sort of iconic representation of what Mother Russia once had been. The greatness, the riches.

Well enough of such idiot reminiscences, that's basically all you should know about me:

I love climbing and tumbling and all that.
I like a man in uniform.


And I like snakes.