Twenty-Five Things about Me That You Might Not Know

This is one of those silly little things that's going around on Facebook this week, and I got tagged by at least four or five people. But I always find everybody else's responses so interesting that I feel obliged to fill out my own. This one is more open-ended than most, it just asks you to write down twenty five things, facts, habits, or goals about yourself.

So here they are, as typed quickly at the end of the workday in no particular order:

1. I have to double-knot the right boot on my favorite pair of hiking boots -- the ones I am wearing right now -- but not the left boot. I have no idea why a regular shoelace knot won't hold on that right boot, and I have genuinely given it a lot of thought over the last eighteen months.

2. I am a federally certified destroyer of Canada goose nests, a Shiva of the waterfowl crowd.

3. I have absolutely no idea what I would be doing professionally if I hadn't accidentally stumbled into indexing.

4. My football and rugby injuries over the years include assorted bruises and scrapes of all degree over my entire body; multiple sprained ankles; multiple concussions, including at least one fairly serious one; a likely fracture in my right forearm that I didn't get x-rayed because I wanted to keep playing; battered fingers and hands, including a torn tendon in my pinkie and a misshapen thumb joint; dislocated shoulder (ouch!); plantar fasciitis; a pulled muscle in my neck; a bulging disk in my lower back; multiple sprained knees; a torn meniscus and sprained medial collateral ligament in my left knee; osteoarthritis in my left knee; and probably at least ten others that I can't remember (blame it on the concussions.) And yet the worst injury I have ever suffered was the time I shattered two bones and a knuckle in my right ring finger while playing *flag* football. Sheesh. Flag football.

5. I always buckle my safety belt in the car.

6. I am continually astonished at how lucky I am to have met Monique.

7. I don't read nearly as many books as I used to, but I probably still knock off forty or fifty each year, about a dozen of which are old favorites that I decide to read again. Yet I still probably have a hundred books sitting around the house that I want to read but haven't gotten to yet.

8. I like to improvise when I cook. It's an artform that's entirely ephemeral, a zen sand garden that you can eat.

9. I can type about 80 words per minute, and it is the one skill that I could always rely upon for work during my unemployed days.

10. Between my work e-mail and my Yahoo e-mail where personal and village stuff arrives I generally get around a hundred e-mails a day, not including spam. Despite the aforementioned typing speed I usually can only manage to write a dozen or fifteen replies per day. Don't feel bad if you sometimes only get a one-sentence or one-word reply from me, or sometimes no reply at all. It's the sheer volume, not that I don't care.

11. I first retired from rugby at the age of 26 because my body was too worn down from years of collision sports. I am inordinately proud of having won three Detroit RFC Old Boy of the Year awards since starting up again at the age of 35 because it would have been really easy to stay retired.

12. I love beer. (Oh wait, this was supposed to be things you might *not* know about me. Let's try again. In addition to drinking beer, I really enjoy brewing it, though I don't brew as often as I'd like. I think I made four batches early last year, but haven't done a new batch in about nine months.)

13. I am a professionally published poet, though I haven't submitted a poem for publication in at least a dozen years.

14. I still read quite a few comic books, probably three or four per week, plus the occasional graphic novel or collection. My favorite is my good buddy Spider-Man, whose comic I have been reading for something like thirty years now.

15. I really like to drive, but I hate traffic. I have seen so much crappy wintertime driving since I moved to Detroit that I now try to work from home if even an inch of snow falls.

16. For the first couple of months after I moved to California I slept in my tent in the backyard of some friends in San Diego, until the fateful day when their dog ate my tent.

17. I started collecting original comic-book art pages a few years ago after reading an article about it. Before then it had never occurred to me that you even *could* buy this stuff, much less that a lot of it was pretty cheap on e-Bay. One of the things I really like about it is that it's production art that was created for a purpose, not just to be a piece of art. There's a usefulness about it that appeals to me.

18. I started up a blog this year. I call it "Patio Boat" and it can be found at http://patioboat.blogspot.com/. (Oh wait, if you're reading this here you probably *do* know this! Substitute fact: I dislike canned green beans.)

19. When I was going to school at Cornell I was so broke that I would sometimes walk around for weeks at a time without enough money to buy a postage stamp. When you say that to your classmates at an Ivy League school they usually think it's a metaphor of some sort. It wasn't a metaphor.

20. Our beagle is the cutest beagle in the history of all beagledom, but she has truly awful breath.

21. I really like to fish, but I don't really care all that much whether or not I catch fish.

22. I wish I stayed in better touch with old friends. I'm terrible at it, and there are a lot of people who have meant a lot to me that I'm not in touch with any more.

23. Driving a jet-ski makes me paranoid because I feel as if I should be wearing a helmet.

24. No matter how tired I am, I always have to read for a while before I can fall asleep.

25. I'm a sucker for these assorted questionaire/fun facts things when they go around because I always learn new things about people that I care about.