Author

“Hey, I can do that.”  That’s what I said to myself in 2003 after a few months of reading and commenting on blogs.  So I started ‘baldilocks.’  The nickname comes from an old friend who felt the need to make commentary on my one-eighth inch of hair.  Call it a chronicle of my interests (mostly political), my pet peeves and my rants that had been building up for almost fifty years.

Los Angeles is my hometown and I live there at present.  In between time intervals of LA living, I served twenty-one years in the United States Air Force–thirteen years Active Duty and eight as Reservist—before retiring in 2003.

I am also a part of that great ideological migration: from liberal to conservative.  Looking back, my political evolution can be traced back to Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, which I picked up at an Air Force Base Exchange circa 1990.  The simmering took nine years: take one black female liberal Democrat, mix in constant listening to government-sponsored “progressive” radio, add a conversion to Christianity and spice it up with the constant non-response to the terror of the nineties and Voila! You have that exotic and rare dish known as the black Republican (excuse my French).  The 2000 election marked the first time I had ever voted for a Republican in a general presidential election.

My biological father is Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng and he is as left-wing as they come.  Fortunately (for me), my other immediate family members are all Republicans, so there are few food fights at my mother and step-father’s home (at least about politics).

When I told my step-dad that Tale of the Tigers  was being published, he asked “what took you so long?” He remembered that my never-wavering desire since age eleven was to be a professional writer/novelist.