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These posts in teh internets frequently start off with the tired old disclaimer, I normally don’t do these memes, but…. Why should mine be any different? Stephanie a better writer than I (hey, I’m a better engineer than she, so suck it), half-assedly tagged me to share

ten weird little known facts about yourself. … At the end you must choose six people to be tagged….

Inasmuch as I am at the office at 8pm, starving, and fighting off a two-day headache, I can think of nothing I’d rather do more, particularly when the alternative is to build another boundary element model of a NASA crack growth specimen. Though I have to say it’s hard to come up with ten “little known” facts as a blogger; if I haven’t told you about it by now, I ain’t never tellin’ it. Especially since I already spilled the beans on that whole Chip/no middle name debacle.

1. I am having such a time remaining a non-smoker that I can’t believe all the crap I used to do to my mom’s cigarettes (hello dispos-all) when I was a kid because I didn’t like that she smoked. Sorry, Mom.
2. Based on some nightmares I had as a kid [a popular meme theme], I was convinced for a long time that I had once been abducted by aliens. The movie Communion still skeeves me out to no end.
3. I am apparently so averse to gin you might call it allergic. It was only after I shared the funny story about profuse vomiting and loss of motor control on a first date that my mom (hi again!) told me something about her and her siblings and junipers berries and I don’t really know, but we don’t drink gin.
4. I fell off my bike and got a concussion near the end of 3rd grade. I don’t remember much of that day until I remember waking up in the back of the car as my parents were bringing me home from the hospital that night. I’m pretty sure we watched The Blue Lagoon over dinner and I got to sleep in their bed with them.
5. For many years I dealt with a very slight obsessive-compulsive disorder involving even numbers and symmetry, particularly when it came to cracks in the sidewalk. I had such an affinity for the binary rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of the breaks in the sidewalk under my bicycle tires that I really disliked having to make any maneuver that disrupted the pattern. This OCD soon expanded to encompass a desire to step on the same number of sidewalk cracks with each of my left and right feet. (That makes it sound like I have more than one left and right foot, doesn’t it? Oh well.) Or if covered one section of a decorative sidewalk in three steps, I wanted to do the same with the next section: left-right-left, right-left-right; if I had to take a fourth step in that second section, it annoyed me.
   • This all began, as far as I know, with the concussion.
   • Okay, sometimes? I am still keenly aware of the relative balance in pavement features my left and right feet have stepped on. But it’s just a passing thought, and not a compulsion.
6. I won the Computer Science award in high school. Now I can’t even finish building a damn Drupal site.
7. I was married for 36 hours in Vegas once, and yes, Elvis peformed the ceremony.
   • Nah, I’m kidding; just having a damn hard time coming up with ten stupid things I haven’t already blogged about.
8. Speaking of compulsions, I have phrase and/or lesson books for ten different languages on my shelf. I think Irish is the most frustrating.
9. My first concerts ever were the Jackson Five and Wham! (punctuation not mine). I’m surprised I only turned out metrosexual.
   • Well I was when I still had money.
10. I’m an aerospace engineer and I hate flying; I like planes from the outside. I even had to order the extra large beer at the airport bar at 3 in the afternoon before flying out to my first on-scene aircraft accident investigation, raising an eyebrow of the lead investigator. And after spending a lovely, totally unfazing day at the county morgue making sure I had the stomach for a career in accident investigation, the worst part by far of the job as all the damn shots (biohazard and all). Autopsy? No problem. But I hate shots.

So, think I can get the same meme crap out of Christina, curly5, little apple, and Kate? (I’m counting the other Kate and the originally offending Stephanie in the six.)