Officially introducing myself: wiser is now on Steemit!

Hello Steemit Community!

I've been hanging out here for a month and figured it was high time I introduced myself properly. My name is Fernanda Powers and I live in Colorful Colorado. The above selfie was taken from a recent camping trip I took with my family. Here's the breathtaking view I got to enjoy for a couple days:

Faith, family and what I do at home

I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, wife, mother of five. My husband Erik and I homeschool our children. I also work part time for my parish as the director of religious education. There are few things I enjoy more than sharing truths about God and the Catholic faith to my children and people who attend my theology classes. 

When I'm at home I enjoy prepping wholesome meals for my family ahead of time, and then pulling them out of the freezer and throwing them into the crock pot to get a wonderful meal on those days I don't have the time... Yes, there is such a thing as make-ahead frozen crock pot meals. I'm getting back into making sourdough bread again after a rather long hiatus. So much better than the bread you buy at the store. I like doing things the natural way.

I'm also very much into cryptocurrencies and using technology to make things easier. One time I was in a writer's group and we were all challenged to come up with a six word story or phrase that described us. Mine was "all natural mom addicted to technology."

The cryptocurrency connection

One day I walked into my friend's store and he said something about Bitcoin. I was intrigued. When I got home I hit Google and the rest is history. That was in March of 2013. That year I saw the price of Bitcoin go from $90 to over $1200. I remember checking the price daily on Mt. Gox. Those were the days. I started off by using my spare change to purchase Bitcoin. Then I discovered the ways you could get it from faucets or earn it doing mundane tasks on the Internet. Finally, I got involved in writing for the Devtome, which is a predecessor to Steemit. Publishing my content there allowed me to earn Devcoins, which I then traded for Bitcoins. I used those Bitcoins to explore and play. I got burned by a few scams as well as legitimate sites which got hacked, but I also did quite well. We were able to make a down payment on a new vehicle with funds I'd gained from my crypto hobby. Since then I've been slowly building up my holdings in a few altcoins and other things which have done quite well. I'm not rich on crypto by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have an outlet to truly invest, and feel like I have a much brighter financial future than I otherwise would.

What's in a moniker?

I first found the Bitcoin Forum after getting burned by a mining scam. I searched out the "company" which had pulled the typical disappearing act and found a thread about it composed of people commiserating with each other over their losses interspersed with decidedly unsympathetic and more experienced crypto-enthusiasts saying "I told you so" in about a hundred different ways. I decided I wanted to share my tragic tale, so I registered an account. I chose the moniker "wiser" because having just been scammed out of my first couple tenths of a Bitcoin, I hoped that I'd learned my lesson and was now wiser. I've stuck to that moniker in every crypto community, including this one. Eventually I decided I needed a profile picture to go with it, and what better one than the Ty brand graduation owl. 

It turns out that the choice of moniker was a fortunate one. When I got involved, the cryptospace was (and still is) heavily male dominated and unfortunately not always kind to women. Having a neutral moniker meant most people I interacted with simply assumed I was another guy, most likely some computer geek, an assumption I left largely uncorrected. Then the coin DNotes came on the scene, and its development team made it a priority goal to educate and engage more women in cryptocurrencies, even setting up their own rather feminine themed forum.   Then being a woman in crypto was rather cool.

And now Steemit...

Six weeks ago I was trying to either buy or sell some XEM and just happened to notice people in the Poloniex troll box discussing Steem. At the time, Steem was having quite the run up. I wouldn't have given Steem another thought, except that a couple weeks later I came across an article explaining what Steemit was and saying that it would soon be closed to new accounts. I decided I'd better set up an account right away, so I wouldn't miss the opportunity. I think by the time I registered, the plan to close off the site to new registrations was no longer in force, but I didn't know. I got my account. Then I got on the site and poked around, made my very crude first introduction post, and since then learned that there is a right and a wrong way to introduce yourself on Steemit. So here I am making my grand introduction the right way, complete with verification.

OK, so it's sideways. SteemIMG is not accepting new uploads at the moment, and the simple service I'm using in the mean time apparently doesn't take vertical images. Details...

I think Steemit is a really neat block chain concept, and I'm excited to be a part of this experiment. I'll be contributing my thoughts on cryptocurrencies, philosophy, theology, politics, and life in general, not necessarily in that order. I also read and comment a fair amount here. I've found some of the discussions to be very friendly and civil, even when the topic has been controversial. This is way better than Facebook in that regard. I'm looking forward to continuing to expand my horizons.