I was born on September 1^st, 1982 as the second offspring for Ronald and Gale Frassetto. My parents hail from Long Island and still connect with our many New Yorker relatives. My old man is 2^nd generation Italian and we have relatives who swear in the old language, although they are now expiring due to a life-long excessive enjoyment of food and drink. Mom is strictly Heinz 57 with too many Eastern European roots to count. We tried. They moved to Floriduh (I encourage this spelling because of my outright derision for the region) in 1980 with my big sister Kendra, now a pharmacist by week and world traveler by weekend. I spent my first 18 years in St. Petersburg where, like in the rest of Florida, northerners retire to run down the clock. Despite being raised as a Floridian I never took to the beach, palm trees, Disney, Elian Gonzalez, The Golden Girls, hanging chads, invasive pythons or any bizarre quality associated with the "Sunshine State". It's not a terrible place to visit but, as 2004's 1-2-3 hurricane bonanza showed, there is an immediate and staggering downside to actually living there. 

My old haunt of Central Florida does possess a few nice perks. If you enjoy the beach, Ft. DeSoto is one of the best in the country. The sports teams are all entertaining, The Buccaneers reached the height of success in 2002 before retrograding into another twenty year shame spiral. I love baseball and as a long-suffering Rays fan, I am absolutely ecstatic that they tearing everyone in the American League a new one, especially the hated Yankees and Red Sox. Beyond that, the Tampa Bay Lightning ironically kept the NHL's Stanley Cup Trophy in Florida for two whole years thanks to the strike! Last but not least, don't forget the sweet, opiate-like qualities of a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice.

Even well-scrubbed, hustling rubes quickly notice that I'm quite the dork. I've always been a math and science aficionado, but a few key experiences helped mold me into my current status as a turbo-nerd seismologist. First, the parents realized that my destiny was neither star-athlete nor, thankfully, unskilled laborer, so they fed my appetite for learning about earth science and spending time outdoors, taking us on trips to Hawaii, Yellowstone, California, Alaska, and Washington. Nothing will ever beat the awe of seeing molten rock pour into the ocean from Kilauea. Second, I went to the CAT magnet program with plenty of advanced science, math, and computer classes. As an added bonus, CAT is attached to Lakewood, arguably the worst high school in the region. Each day my regular school classes consisted of finding a creative way to avoid being the victim of blind racial hatred. Third, after high school I found myself primed to escape FL and meet new people! I quite literally pieced together my separate loves of geology and physics and discovered that the University of South Carolina had a charmingly straight-forward geophysics major along with the country's finest, or at least best advertised, Honors College.

U.S.C. is located in Columbia, SC, a town which lost some of its prestige of being the country's second planned city when "Sherman's March" led to its near total annihilation. Carolina's mascot "COCKY" resembles an innocuously cartoonish version of a rooster on amphetamines. Controversy surrounds "COCKY" and what he/she(scandal: most mascot performers are female!)/it represents (a soft anthropomorphic animal or the scourge of cockfighting), which somehow boils down to Wilford Brimley vs. PETA. Mascot strife aside, the college experience proved to be even more profound than Saved By The Bell: The College Years. I made some great friends, switched from conservative to liberal, religious to non-religious, and involved myself in some exciting  shenanigans (yes that really is Queen Amidala) when not buried class-work. A true voyage of self discovery!

I also found time to do a ton of both theoretical and practical research! When I arrived on campus in August 2000, Dr. Tom Owens took me under his wing. As my academic and research advisor, Tom plugged me into the world of seismology and provided the awesome opportunity to run the SCEPP Seismic Network and take many technical geophysics classes (Tectonophysics and Elastic Waves anyone?). I served as Vice-President with the school's geology club and visited Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, and Carlsbad Caverns and Death Valley-Owens Valley during my spring breaks of 2003 and 2004. I also worked on field projects in New Mexico, Arizona, and Romania (see the field adventures section for my vivid memory of that country) with Drs. Jim and Camelia Knapp.  Overall my undergraduate career was the best four years of my life, although possibly tied with the Nickelodeon years.

The next 60 years or so should be equally fun and interesting, provided of course that the 700 club is wrong and the rapture is delayed.