Tagged, and ‘taggering to the post

I was tagged a while back: “… write a blog with 10 weird, random, facts, habits or goals about yourself ….” Twice. I even jotted down some notes but it has taken too dang long for them to find electricity. Here goes:

 

1.  On those aptitude tests they give you in grade school, I tested very high for mechanical reasoning. If there were three connected gears with 42, 17, and 24 teeth each and you spun one gear three times then gave me multiple options for how many times the other gear spun around, I could usually, by the process of elimination, sort it out.

 

Yet I still can barely tie my shoes.

 

2.  I am left-handed, colorblind, myopic, and presbyopic. As a kid, my dust, pollen, and dander allergies surprised even the allergists. I took part in a study and had the second highest reaction to tobacco they had ever seen. Only a woman in Virginia who touched tobacco and her hand broke out had tested higher.

 

3.  I’m usually ready to try odd combinations of food. When we have ripe fruit and I’m going to blend a smoothie, I’ll toss cherries, peaches, bananas in, with maybe cranberry/raspberry or blueberry/pomegranate juice. This makes my wife shudder. But she thinks different foods shouldn’t touch. That, for her, is pollution. She builds a little moat in her mashed potatoes to keep gravy from leaking out and touching anything else. She thinks even banana/strawberry is weird, while I think it is a culinarily recognized flavor.

 

4.  Other than stitching up the routine accidents of childhood, the only surgery I’ve had was for Schatzki’s ring.

 

5  I love baseball. I hardly ever go to the game any more. I listen on the radio or watch on TV while doing something else (often at this keyboard).  Back when I used to go to a lot of games, I often got restless in the late innings. Now, when the game ends, I am not miles away in a stadium, trudging out with thousands of others, waiting for a train or the Alameda ferry or driving out of post-game traffic. Now, I just get up and switch the game off and go right to sleep. I love that.

 

6.  I think most of my better posts are lost. It’s probably because they never get written down, so I never have to deal with any of their issues. I have insomnia and invariably, between the hours of two and four, wake up and write in my head for a while, only occasionally rousting to go tap a keyboard.

 

For a week or so I’ll have the notion in the back of my head, I liked that idea, accompanied by its twin thought: how did it all go again?

 

7.  I’m a slow learner. Thorough. But slow. Often when entering a new school my grades were C’s. Then I did better, getting B’s, until I’d been in that school system for a while and got the hang of it, and got B’s and A’s. I’m still not clear on why that was.

 

To some extent, it has happened in jobs, as well. I tend to interview well. I envision that as almost a left brain / right brain thing. I listen hard to what the interviewers say, can synthesize it and get it, answer honestly and try to ask good questions, and connect with people. (As the reluctant job-hopper, with numerous jobs shot out from under me and moved out of state, the skill helped.) But when it comes time for me to rapidly absorb a lot of new procedures and approaches and systems and techniques, I really struggled.

 

8.  I throw buckets of gray water off my back deck on a regular basis.

 

9. My digerati friend Jules has me on his blogroll as Viking Twin in Frisco, which I’m not keen on. I’m not even sure why. It’s his dang blogroll. I guess part of it is the thing San Franciscans have about not calling their home Frisco. I did not grow up there, and no longer even live there, but understand that those from there don’t call it that. Plus, I’m only nominally a football fan any more, so don’t think of myself much re the Vikes.  What do I care? But still. I see it, and kind of wince. Should I say something? Have I now, already?

 

 10  I’ve never lost my amazement at birds flying. I don’t care how commonplace it is. I still stand out along the shoreline watching pelicans or terns or loons and think, they can fly. How cool is that? They can fly.

 

As I have had a couple bad experiences with these tagging things, I’m not going to tag anyone else — unless anyone volunteers …