Thanks everyone!   

Hello from a new member! My name is Jana and I'm from the USA. Currently living in Ohio, but originally from Washington state. I've also lived in a few different countries, mainly Japan, Taiwan, and France. I speak fluent Japanese and am a Japanese-English interpreter. I can also get by on the basic conversational level in a few other languages. I was really into languages for a while, but I've moved onto other things now. Mainly ponies! Haha.

As for my pony story, I was born in the 80's and had a good sized G1 collection (around 200 ponies) as a child, but only just recently rediscovered my love for them as an adult. I think it's a common story among collectors, but basically I decided to take my old ponies out of my parents' attic and clean them up to sell one day, and ended up getting way more into it than I expected. I thought I would spend a month or two cleaning up and selling my old ponies, make a little extra cash and be done with it, but I was having so much fun with the whole process that I didn't want to stop! Then I noticed there were quite a few people on eBay who had lots of ponies to sell, but didn't want to bother cleaning them all up. These people were just selling big lots of dirty, stained, frizzy-haired ponies that often went for a pretty low price per pony. I started buying those lots with the intention of fixing them up to resell. I wasn't really even sure if it would work, but it was like I couldn't help myself! So I've pretty much spent all the money I've made selling my childhood ponies on buying more ponies lol. Since I can't seem to stop buying them, I pretty much have to resell most of them to at least break even, so I've somehow ended up with a little side business. A pony-flipping business? I never would have imagined doing such a thing, but I'm absolutely obsessed with it! It's all I want to do anymore, honestly. I'm not sure yet if it's possible, and it might sound a little crazy, but I've even been dreaming about eventually quitting my job and doing this full time. It just brings me so much joy to make old things beautiful again and send them off to people who will love them, and I haven't gotten so much fulfillment from anything in a while.

I'm also an artist and enjoy all kinds of crafts. I haven't done many art projects lately, but eventually I plan to get into creating pony-themed artwork and customs! I'm focusing on basic cleaning and restoration techniques for now though. I only started doing this a little over a month ago, so I'm pretty new and finding there's a lot to learn.

Of course, I couldn't quite bear to sell all of my childhood ponies, so I have kept a few of them, and will probably keep a few favorites from the lots I've bought too. I think I'm going to keep my personal collection relatively small because I don't want a crowded display and would rather show off the individual ponies. I'm also really more into the process of restoration than anything, so I'm happy to sell most of the ponies that come my way to new homes.

I never got into any other generations except G1, although I have recently started watching the "Friendship is Magic" show and think it's really cute! My collection is all G1 currently though. BTW, I think my personality is about 80% Twilight, 20% Rarity!

I'm happy to be here, and excited to learn from and share with you all!