About Cyn

Posted by Cyn

Cyn­thia Armis­tead is Katie’s mother, a dis­abled per­son, an activist on many fronts, a writer, and an unabashed geek. Katie and Cyn­thia enjoyed a home­school­ing adven­ture until Katie entered col­lege, and they still feel a close affin­ity for home educators.

She inher­ited her dis­taste for all things that don’t work well from her father, Bill Rober­son. In her, it has grown into a habit of impos­ing order on her envi­ron­ment, stop­ping the spread of entropy when­ever pos­si­ble and set­ting up sys­tems to spread seren­ity. Thus, she became the Enemy of Entropy. She thanks her mother, Dianna Rober­son (née Goss), for intro­duc­ing her to the world of let­ters, words, and books. Cyn is also the Slayer of Red Tape Drag­ons, THE Mommy, and She Who Says What Must Be Said (espe­cially when peo­ple don’t want, but need, to hear it).

She enjoys design­ing and stitch­ing counted-​​thread needle­work, read­ing, singing, col­or­ing, live acoustic music, sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy, and table­top role­play­ing games. She misses danc­ing and other, more active pur­suits, but is work­ing her way back to them!

Infor­ma­tion about Cynthia’s work out­side the home may be found on her resume. There are also a few tech­ni­cal writ­ing sam­ples in that sec­tion of the site. (There are, but the Word­Press install is wonky, and the web­mas­ter needs to make time to fix it.)

Some­day she’ll write an actual bio­graph­i­cal entry, but for now she wants to make it eas­ier for old friends to find her by men­tion­ing the names she has lived and worked under through­out her life. Her fam­ily called her Cindy, so really, really old friends know her as Cindy Rober­son (and she doesn’t answer to Cindy oth­er­wise). Her first hus­band was high-​​school sweet­heart Scott Allen Hall, so she was known as Cindy or Cyn­thia Hall for a short time. Hus­band num­ber two and father of her daugh­ter Katie was the late Wayne Armis­tead, from whence came her cur­rent last name. She was briefly mar­ried to Paul Smath­ers, and known dur­ing that time as Cyn­thia Smath­ers or Cyn­thia Armistead-​​Smathers. If she ever changes her sur­name again, it’ll most likely be to some­thing that has noth­ing at all to do with any hus­band or her father. She has lived in Gads­den, Alabama and around Atlanta, Geor­gia for most of her life.

Online, she’s been Tech­noMom since 1995. When she was on AOL, she went by Cyn­thia­Lyn, FlameOpal, or TLA­Cyn (Tech Live Advi­sor Cyn). She also had a screen name for use in the Home­work Help forums, but isn’t absolutely cer­tain of what it was — maybe Prof­Cyn? She’s the same per­son online and offline.

She enjoys hear­ing from friendly peo­ple, so please leave comments!

Permalink | May 8th, 2006

14 Responses to “About Cyn”

  1. Cyndi Says:
    February 21st, 2007 at 12:26 am

    Did you used to be on IRC on irc​.warped​.net?

    I knew a tech­nomom there and was curi­ous if it was you. (I was sim­ply “blue” there…)

  2. cyn Says:
    February 21st, 2007 at 12:38 am

    It sounds sorta famil­iar, but my mem­ory is ter­ri­ble! Any idea as to about what year that would have been? I haven’t done any kind of live chat much in the last decade or so.

    I’ve run into the name “Blueinatl” some­where, I know, and my ex-​​husband had a friend out west who went by Blue :-)

  3. Great Blistering Barnacles Says:
    March 16th, 2007 at 1:20 am

    Hi Cyn.

    Thanks for leav­ing the com­ment on my bog and thanks for read­ing it. It’s nice to get feed­back now and then and to know that it is being read.

    About your ques­tion regard­ing com­bin­ing the two blogs; My expe­ri­ence so far has been that blog­ging, jour­nal­ing, reviews and so on takes up much more time that peo­ple think. It’s not just as sim­ple as sit­ting down for ten min­utes and writ­ing a post for the day, you have to think about what would be inter­est­ing, write it, edit it, rewrite parts that just don’t work and so on. Hav­ing mul­ti­ple blogs doesn’t really help as it just makes it expo­nen­tially worse.

    That is why I, have decided, at least in my case to aban­don mul­ti­ple blogs and con­sol­i­date things into one place. Even then it some­times is a bat­tle for time and energy. I wish I did have more time to spend on it but I have to be happy with going through phases where I can get a lot out and then run dry for a while.

    I’ve added my email addy to this so if you feel like mail­ing me, feel free.

    Till later,
    Johan

  4. alyshia Says:
    March 28th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    Hey there — Fell upon your site and enjoyed my visit very much… I can relate to much of what you’ve writ­ten about. Thanks for shar­ing your life. All the best to you and your family.

  5. Conrad Says:
    June 12th, 2007 at 6:48 pm

    I found your blog through Avanoo. Very inter­est­ing stuff, and I have just read 0.01% of it! Please keep up the qual­ity of your posts. It is so dif­fi­cult to find qual­ity peo­ple and mate­r­ial online.

  6. Cynthia Armistead Says:
    July 9th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Hi my name is Cyn­thia Armis­tead as well. What is your web site all about?

    Lat­ers

  7. Yngona Desmond Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 8:21 am

    Thank you for vist­ing my blog Cyn­thia; like­wise, I have enjoyed read­ing some of your com­ments here. Please feel free to con­tact me directly regard­ing Hea­thenry. Plus, if your pro­file is cor­rect, you live in GA, so please con­sider join­ing the Geor­gia Hea­then Soci­ety at yahoo.

    … Yng­ona
    yngona@yahoo.com

  8. cyn Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    Hi Cyn­thia! This site is about all sorts of things, because I have many dif­fer­ent inter­ests. I’m work­ing on mak­ing it eas­ier to find every­thing, but there’s mate­r­ial here about par­ent­ing, home­school­ing, rela­tion­ships in gen­eral and polyamory in par­tic­u­lar, home­mak­ing, spir­i­tu­al­ity, some of the music I enjoy, some books and tele­vi­sion shows I rec­om­mend to oth­ers, even a few artists I really like. You can also find links to needle­work pieces I’ve stitched, and some that I’ve designed, and some health infor­ma­tion. There are links to my other sites, and my family’s sites, and friends’ sites too.

    Do you have a web site?

  9. cyn Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    Thanks, Yng­ona :-) Yes, I’m in Geor­gia. I found your site because of a post you made on an Atlanta mail­ing list. I’ll con­sider joining.

    I learn best by read­ing, and I am home­bound. Is there a decent book that you rec­om­mend to beginners?

    Thanks :-)
    Cyn

  10. Laura Says:
    October 6th, 2007 at 12:07 am

    A bit ago I found some needle­point designs titled “rain­bow chal­ice”, “queer pride” and “have it all”. But now I can’t find them on your site. Do You still have them? If so can you email them to me or repost them on your site? thanks!

  11. cyn Says:
    October 6th, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    Hi Laura! I moved the pat­terns over to Heart­song Hand­i­crafts a while back. They’re just plopped there at the moment, but I really do mean to set it up more nicely one of these days, and add more pat­terns. I should put more point­ers on this site so that peo­ple can find the pat­terns. Sorry about that!

    If you have an idea for some­thing in par­tic­u­lar that you can find, let me know and I’ll try my hand at design­ing it :-)

    Thanks!
    Cyn

  12. Joe Says:
    September 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Hi!

    I saw that you posted on the “Post Avatar” plug-​​in web­site about a prob­lem you were hav­ing with error mes­sages talk­ing about header issues. I won­der if this was ever resolved? I am hav­ing the same prob­lems at my web­site and would love to hear how you fixed the problem.

    Thanks!
    Joe

  13. cyn Says:
    September 2nd, 2008 at 8:26 pm

    I’m afraid it wasn’t ever resolved. I was able to deal with it until the most recent Word­Press upgrade, but then I started hav­ing error mes­sages all over the site if the plu­gin was enabled. I can only hope that the author will put out a new ver­sion that works with the cur­rent WP release.

  14. Joe Says:
    September 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    What a shame. I might have to dis­able this plug-​​in now. Oh well!