5 Things You Don’t Know About Me

Just catching up on some blog reading after taking a break from my computer for the holidays, and I noticed I’ve been tagged by Steve. So here it goes.

1. You would never know it now, but I was a very fat child & adolescent. When I entered my sophomore year of high school at 15, I weighed 285 lbs at 5 ft 9 in. I wore a size 38 pant & only those really baggy cut jeans fit me. By the time I turned 16, I weighed 210 at 6 ft 1 in. I hit a growth spurt, played football, and started weight training and they all combined to completely reshape my body. It took many years before I stopped thinking of myself as “the fat kid”. I now weigh even less and a few years ago got down to the lowest weight since 5th grade while training for my first (& only, thus far) marathon.
2. I am very much a cat person and don’t really like dogs all that much. I’ve never owned a dog & maybe one day will, but I’m in no hurry. However, I couldn’t imagine life without cats, and have always missed having them around whenever I didn’t own any cats.
3. I can’t remember ever actually believing in Santa Claus. I figured it out at age 4 after seeing 3-4 mall Santas in one day. I couldn’t figure out which one was the real one and why my parents where trying so hard to find some gifts for my baby sisters that they said Santa was bringing them. I asked my mom point blank and she gave me an honest answer. I then promptly told several of my friends and was on their parents “naughty” list.
4. I have a serious problem with getting addicted to video/computer games. So much so, that I won’t even play minesweeper or solitaire on my computer. If it is a computer based game, no matter how childish, stupid, simple, or boring it is, you can bet that if I start playing it I won’t be able to stop. And if it is even a little bit good, I’ll ignore work, eating and sleeping to play it. I was even addicted to a PC port of some Nintendo based Pokemon trading game in Japanese. I stayed up 3 nights in a row and ignored work for nearly a week to solve that game. Just in case you were wondering, “Yes, I was WAY to old to be interested in Pokemon” and “No, I don’t speak Japanese, and had no idea what any of the characters were saying”. I avoid video games like the plague and that is the only way to handle that problem for me.
5. I am the super “un-handy” man. If you have something that works and you want it broken, just let me work on it a bit. One of the worst jobs of “fixing up” something I ever did is on display in our living room. I was given a small side-table height chest of drawers. It was the perfect size for our TV which was way too big for our old stand. So I though, wouldn’t it be cool if I made the bottom drawer into a VCR/DVD player compartment with a hinged door. That way we could open it when we used it and keep it hidden at other times. Well, that didn’t quite happen…

I’ll pass it on to: Tim (aka Sabin21), Jeff Thurston, Brian Flood