Let's start at the very beginning ...

... a very good place to start.

I was not exactly having a high point in my life when FOTR came out in 2001.

There was a rather large shakeup at my company and a lot of the middle and upper management got replaced. After surviving two previous shakeups AND a merger, my number came up and I was "downsized." The good news was I got 15 months of severance. The bad news was looking for work after a long time - and the job market in NYC after 9/11 was not exactly booming.

I saw the movie with my very first boss and his family - I've known Alex since I was 16 years old when I was doing signal dispersion programming on geostationary satellites for him (this just screams "GEEK" doesn't it?) Anyway, I couldn't believe how well Peter Jackson cast everyone. Strider immediately became a favorite character. Something in the scruffy-looking, serious Ranger with hidden depths struck a chord with me. I was waiting to see how PJ would portray Faramir since he was actually my favorite character in the books.

After a rather nasty period of unemployment, I got a new job working in a related field, with many thanks to a former "C" level executive - I hate to say it, but networking really DOES work!!

It was after The Two Towers that I made the decision to get a Strider costume. I wasn't interested in some cheap Halloween crap - I wanted the real stuff - leather, suede, linen, etc. and I wanted something that would be comfortable to wear and to LAST.

My first stops were eBay and Google. I found some promising sellers with similar items and contacted them regarding shirts and such. The stuff I got was okay - but didn't really have that "suspension of disbelief" reality if you wore them. This was particularly the case with Arms of Valor. This etailer was offering "Ranger" outfits, but it was basically off-the shelf Renfaire stuff that was bundled together. The original Strider gray shirt also turned out to look more like a 17th century dueling shirt than anything else.

I wasn't happy, but I found that there were a LOT of people that weren't as picky as me (but with the same obsession) on eBay so off the stuff went. At times, I even got more than I paid for, thanks to some really great copy on the eBay auctions themselves.

I was determined. I would get my Strider outfit no matter what!