Who is Matt Marine?
By Matt Marine
In the above picture, Matt Marine is COLD!
A few other things about me:
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I LOVE Arizona.
- I enjoy the outdoors.
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I’m an engineer.
- I dabble in lots of things.
- I have MCS and/or mold poisoning
That's me in a nutshell.
Nothing special. I'm not an athlete or a genius. And I don't crave adrenaline. In fact, I lead a fairly boring life (remember that I'm an engineer).
Then what the heck am I doing developing an outdoor adventure site? Good question. Now, go back and read the first two facts about me . I love exploring Arizona's seemingly endless outdoor adventures.
Matt's Other Endeavors
Besides exploring Arizona's outdoors by bike, boot and Jeep, I've been involved in a few other rendezvous that have been fun.
I have published three articles for Arizona Highways magazine.
- The first one was on Geocaching. It took almost three years for that to happen. They were concerned about some of the bad publicity Geocaching was receiving at the time.
- The second was about a four-wheel drive trip (back roads adventure) to Chiva Falls. This also took a few years to publish. They were concerned about having such a difficult trail portrayed in the magazine. Most of their readers are older and they didn't want a bunch of older people getting stuck in their Lexus 4WDs.
- The third was a "Hike of the Month" about hiking Honey Bee Canyon.
I used to be a humor columnist for Irish Dance Magazine
My two daughters used to be heavily involved in Irish dancing (think River Dance). I found that although I loved my daughters and supported them as much as I could, I just couldn't spend 12 hours at an Irish Dance contest listening to the same accordion music over and over just to see my daughters dance for about five minutes. I would stay for an hour before claiming insanity and leaving.
I found that most fathers were in the same boat. I started a humor blog called Feis Dad. A Feis (pronounced "fesh") is an Irish Dance contest and is almost as much fun as having splinters forced under your fingernails.
The blog poked light-hearted fun at Irish Dancing and it became fairly popular so I proposed the idea of a column on the subject to Irish Dance Magazine. To my surprise, they said yes! I thought the magazine's editor was forward thinking for having a monthly article that made fun of what their magazine was about.
Anyway, I went on to publish about six articles in the magazine. Most people really liked them, others didn't (they take their hobby WAY too seriously). A new editor came on board and I was fired. She didn't think my articles portrayed Irish Dancing in the correct light.
Although I've stopped writing this blog, if you're interested in it, you can visit it here.
Comic Book illustrator, writer and publisher
Sort of. Again, to support my daughters' Irish Dancing hobby, I developed comic book characters based on my daughters and their friends. The Celtic Crusader, the world's first Irish Dancing superhero ... saving the world one dance at a time.
I wrote, illustrated and "published" them online. They were light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek stories that the kids really liked.
This also ended when my daughters decided to stop Irish Dancing. Oh well, it was fun. But, hey, no more accordion music. Awesome!
Although the website is shutdown, these stories can be seen at the Celtic Crusader page. I've taken the web pages I created and turned them into PDF files. FYI, the "illustrations" do get better near the end of the adventures - I am not an artist.