I'm Not Crazy, I Swear!

UPDATE: Guess who's now officially Facebook friends?

I debated about admitting what I'm about to admit, but it's just too funny not to. I love "The Deadliest Catch", that show on the Discovery Channel about crab fishermen in Alaska. Maybe it has something to do with my Native roots or maybe I'm just a nerd. Either way, I watch it and love it. But that's not the secret.

The other day I was watching reruns of a past season and I got a little crush on one of the captains. Captain Eric Nyhammer of the fishing vessel Rollo. He is one of the younger, less nicotine- and tobacco-soaked captains. Naturally I wanted to know more...

What does a girl in the 21st century do when she wants to know more about a cute guy? I Googled him, of course! I found a few articles about him and learned: he's 48 (a little old), lives near Seattle (yay!), likes to paint (hmmm), and has 2 sons (double hmmm).

So then I went to facebook. On his facebook page I could only get limited information due to the fact that I'm not his friend--just cyber-stalker. (And no, I haven't sent him a friend request--yet.) I was able to learn that he is single (yay!), not gay (double yay!), and has a funny photo of himself posted (aw, so cute).

Finally, I went to YouTube. And that's when it gets creepy. You thought it was creepy before, but it wasn't. Besides a couple of clips from The Deadliest Catch, there were some videos posted by a woman of her son. And in some of them there was Dad. I was curious to see if Dad was actually my bf Eric. Well, in most of the videos Mom was focusing on filming the little Tike so all you could see of Dad was from the neck down. Not enough to make a positive ID. Until I got to the video of little Tike's first hair cut. And we have a winner--Captain Eric! It was very strange watching what are basically his home videos--baby's first haircut, trip to Disneyland, the petting zoo. Don't worry, I didn't spend my whole day view strangers' home videos. But I couldn't help thinking, that here I was a stranger sitting in my house watching his home videos. Very strange.

The next day I continued my cyber-search. It wasn't that I wanted to know more about my imaginary boyfriend, but I just wanted to see how much more information I could get about one person, for free, using the internet. A technological experiment.

I now know the exact address where Eric lives or at least used to live. And from Google maps I can see an actual photo of the house at said address. Now if I was a real stalker, this would be scary. But never fear, I am not going to drive all the way up to Bothell to drive by his house.
It makes me wonder, how much information would someone be able to get about me from the internet? Hmmm...