Shari - Everett, WA is the correct locale. She and her daughter were living there. When I got to know her she WAS in Seattle. You do know she was raised in Anchorage, AK, right?
Anyone reading this ... Wisty especially.
I know Lea and I joked about things but ... we first met online in a chat world on CompuServe - WorldsAway (or Kymer). We hit it off so well, we were actually "married" in there. When there was a live meet of avatars in Harrisburg, PA she, myself and perhaps 30 other folks had a massive party in my room. Jolly good fun, Security was very nice about things. This was maybe 1993 - 1995 timeframe for Kymer.
Sidebar to Harrisburg: Did you know that 13 people can fit into a Holiday Inn bathtub? The only rule was clothes had to remain ON!!! There were avatars at the meet that were under-age.
Part of that world was a forum on CompuServe where there were trolls and the usual stuff. For an April Fools joke I wrote up a scenario involving the most contentious of the avies and posted it. It took off and 3-4 dozen of us RP'd stuff along the storyline in the forums as well as some inworld.
Then AOL took over, we all really got into surfing the Web then Lea, myself and 8 others started a MUCK - text based RP (1994) - based on the joke and the stories we had RP'd. In its prime we had a couple hundred members from all over the world, playing about 1,000 different characters. Lea & I were WizOps (MUCK version of GMs) as well as having RP characters.
Then it was time to move on ... Lea and I went into a game called Empiriana. Between the two of us, we made some really tight friendships with some of the players - several of which were from Kymer, of all places!
In 1997 I spent a week with her in Seattle and we traveled all over the peninsula area west of Puget Sound. Damn, but that's pretty country! We hit Mt. Ranier, Pike Street and all the big touristy places. I met her sister at that time ... her daughter was living elsewhere so I missed meeting her.
Early 1998 we both dropped from the MUCK and devoted ourselves to mastering the dungeons of Empiriana. Late 1998, she emailed me about this wierd game that was so damn much fun that I absolutely needed to try it. It was called Ultima Online. Several of our friends from Empiriana joined us and for about a year on Pac, the bunch of us tromped throughout Sosaria in search of death-robes. Eventually it was just the 2 of us as the others moved on to The 4th Coming and other "new" games in that time.
Spiels and Rants here was our hangout with the likes of Marikus, Solarm and a host of others. Annnndddd I think you all can take it from there. She & I go a decent amount of time back.
Sooo, ya see ... there IS just a tad of attachment. Good times, bad times ... but a good friend through all of it.