OK, I'll go first.
Yep, I live in Ohio. Right in the middle. The Capital, even. So, I joined this group. It seemed like a straightforward and simple decision.
I don't remember the path that led me to stumbling onto Linux, but it certainly was not straightforward. It was not simple. I never even learned to type until I was 34, so, as with most of my life, I stumbled around the computer world in spirals until I fell into it.
I am a cook by 'profession.' My wife was a food-service manager for many years, so that led to my exposure to something called the Vax at Wittenberg U. during the '90's, a venerable, old command-line system lying mysteriously beneath the Windows-equipped office desktops. It was intriguing, but not inviting, at least not to me, not at the time. (How little I knew then.)
Now, years later, I'm running Linux Mint on this desktop, and sometimes I use a Puppy CD, especially on other machines. My wife is learning Linux as well, and she is helping me with her typically thorough and difficult questions about how to do a particular task on this machine...helping me, because, usually I don't know the answer and have to research it.
I eventually want to be somewhat wizardly...at least to incline toward the wizardly. For now, I'm stuck at that place where I must learn the command-line...where it is becoming more work, like when the former white belt in martial arts training learns that working through those colored belts is not all fun and games.
I also have some older machines in my basement that I intend to restore to working order using various distros of Linux, and to run some experiments on, away from my main desktop. Not that this is a cutting edge machine: Compaq Presario with an old socket 'A' Athlon XP processor, 1 GB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. But a far cry from the box I started on, an old AT&T 486DX-2 that's sitting in a box somewhere waiting to be rediscovered and newly loved.
Really, all it needs is to be cut some...Slack. ;-)