Seven Random facts About Me

Apparently there is now Blog Spam. Just like those email chains that go around and I tend to ignore, I have been blog tagged to tell you seven facts about me that you may not know. While I would simply delete this from my email box, I decided to give it a go on the old blog because Google Analytics is telling me that I may have a very small contingent of readers who actually don't know who I am. They may not care, but that's beside the point.

I dedicate this post to Becky Berry. Seven weird things about me:

7. I have never, not once in my life, eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Sorry, but this combination sounds gooey and disgusting. Maybe on toast it would be OK, but on just plain old bread? Nasty. I won't even eat peanut butter alone on untoasted bread, and I love peanut butter - but you have to have a crunchy surface to put it on. And mixing fruit flavors with my peanut butter, well, that is just uncalled for. This idea is only made more unappealing by the thought of putting it in a plastic bag and letting it sit for several hours in a desk drawer or refrigerator before consuming.

6. The sight of baby food makes me gag.
I'm sorry, friends of mine with mini-mes, but baby food is probably the most disgusting "food" substance on earth, followed closely by the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just the thought of pureed meats and vegetables makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth. I seriously can not look at baby food without gagging. Not metaphorically gagging; physically gagging. I don't know why; canned cat food and dog food don't bother me at all, but show me a can of pureed bananas and I am running for the nearest garbage can.

5. When I bowl, I have to take my fingers in and out of the ball several times every time I go up to make sure my hand will actually release it.
I am sure it looks like I am doing some weird ritual, and in a way I am. I have an innate fear of my hand getting stuck in the bowling ball (even though I have my own ball custom-drilled to fit my fingers). I am quite sure that if my hand gets stuck in the ball I will fall down, or drop the ball on my foot, or pull my arm out of the socket...you see the potential for injury and embarrassment here. Therefore, I have to test the release capability any time I prepare to throw a bowling ball.

4. I had my own snowmobile when I was eight years old.
I am not talking about one of those kid snowmobiles, either - I had one of those when I was five. By the time I was seven, I inherited the old Bombardier. Since you don't have foot brakes in snowmobiling, I guess the fact that my feet barely reached the runners was of minor concern. I drove this hand-me-down snowmobile for two years, until dad went all out and bought me and Kristen our Arctic Cat Lynx, which was brand new and had pink and purple decals.

3. When I was in middle school and Kristen in elementary school, the school bus dropped us off a bar.
Kristen and I went to this terrible little Catholic school in Belleville called St. Anthony's. Mom and dad worked until four or five. How were we to get back to Ypsilanti? Mom's solution - convince the bus driver (we shared buses with the public high school next door to St. Anthony) to drop us off at the family bar, which was right on the county line. Every day, the bus would pull up at the bar, Kris and I would walk through, say hello to Uncle Dick (our senior-citizen relative tending bar) and the regulars, get some pop from the soda fountain and go do our homework in the back. Or play skeeball, if our homework was done. And people wonder why I like dive bars so much...

2. I love the book Hearts in Atlantis so much that I can not bear to read any other Stephen King books.
HIA is probably my favorite book of all time. I think Stephen King is actually a spectacular writer. However, I have not read any other book by him. Not a single one. And I don't ever plan to. Most of the summaries on the backs of his books just don't sound like anything I am remotely interested in reading, and I have a completely irrational fear that giving one of these books a chance and not liking it would diminish my love for HIA. Seriously. I honestly believe that. So I will continue to list Stephen King amongst my favorite writers although I have only read one of his books.

1. I met Neil Patrick Harris at a boy scout disaster convention when I was eight or nine years old.
Sad to say, I was not impressed. I thought Doogie Howser was a stupid, boring show. So when Uncle Tom's old girlfriend Mary Beth took Kristen and I to this simulated disaster thing the boy scouts were throwing (MB worked for the scouts) and Doogie showed up, I was kind of like "ehhh." He even autographed a napkin for me, which I promptly lost about three days later. Given how hilarious NPH has proven to be these days on How I Met Your Mother, I wish I had gotten a picture or at least hung on to the napkin. But alas, I did not.

So there you go. Seven completely random facts about me. Is your curiosity satisfied? Did you learn something new? Or do you wish that spammers would leave the blogosphere alone?

(Feel free to consider yourself "tagged" by the way.)