Hi, my name is Laurie. I live in Chicago, and have been on here for the past month or so. Thought it would be a great time to introduce myself.
Welcome to the Dope!
Hi…rule: watch your punctuation and spelling. There are harasses here who get really bent about it!
Thanks for the heads up! 
(emphasis added)
Harassers, you mean.
Yeah, welcome to the dope!
Guten tag, laurie.
Glad you joined.
Welcome,
Guten tag auch für dich!
Do you speak German? I was born in Germany in '86, my family moved here when I was 11.
Wir gingen zusammen in den Kindergarten, erinnern uns?
ETA: no, ich spreche kein deutsch. Just joking.
We probably didn’t go to Kindergarten together, lol. 
Thanks for the welcome!
Hi laurieb. You can tell the cool people around here by the lack of capital letters in names. Welcome!
Haha, thanks. 
What does the b stand for?
My middle name.
One dot is a period (or full stop, depending on your location). Three is an ellipse. Two don’t mean anything.
Tsk.
Welcome, welcome!
Would you like some ice cream? It’s fresh!
(Or at least it had better be, because we haven’t had a proper Welcome thread in a while and the last time we had ‘vintage’ ice cream, it wasn’t so much ‘fresh’ as ‘frisky’, and it escaped before we could get the lid back on the container, and last I heard the assistant janitor found it in one of the greenhouses trying to mate with the corpse-flower plant. But that is all in the past now.)
ditto
Wait, they told me extra capitals were the mark of coolness.
And welcome, laurieb.
That’s What I Was Told Too!
Welcome laurieb.
I’ve seen a few of your posts.
I think you’ll fit in here just fine.