1. I have 5 tattoos and 10 piercings (6 of those are in my ears). I have plans for at least four other tattoos. My sister once said to me, "Tattoos and piercings? Where did we go wrong?"
2. I am a jump-in-at-the-deep-end kind of hobbyist. When choosing a knitting pattern, "does it have elements (stitches, techniques) I've never done before?" is a major criterion. How useful the end product might be is rather less so, although how attractive it might be is very important.
3. I've been to (at least driven through) all 48 contiguous states but I've never been to Alaska or Hawaii.
4. I have been to 16 countries besides the US: Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Spain, Portugal, Japan, China, [Hong Kong and Macao were not part of China when I visited them but I won't count them as countries], Thailand, the UK [England and Wales], France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Canada, and Mexico.
5. One of my proudest moments was coming back into Japan from China, chatting to the customs inspector in Japanese and having him stamp my US passport 'returning Japanese citizen'. Corrected afterward, obviously, but still gratifying. Sadly, my Japanese is so now rusty it's no longer street legal.
6. I once flew Iraqi Airways (from Tokyo to Bangkok—the flight continued to Baghdad but I got off). Used to get a lot of mileage out of the story of how passengers were frisked and each individual carry-on was searched before anyone was allowed to get on the plane. Rather less impressive now.
7. My best time in Minesweeper Expert is 71 seconds. I once got 35 seconds but I think there had been some kind of weird bug with the program so I reset the scores. I can pretty reliably get between 75 and 80 seconds so I figure the 71 is valid.
8. I hate peanut butter and peanuts but occasionally (on the order of once a quarter or so) enjoy a Reese's or a peanut butter cookie. Enough sugar makes it palatable, apparently.
9. If I stand up too fast I often have a momentary dizzy spell and have to grab a nearby piece of furniture or a wall.
10. I grew up in a household without any televisions. One of my earliest memories is going to the neighbors' house to watch President Nixon resign. Everyone in my birth family now has at least one television in their house. I still generally don't think of watching TV as a default activity and I dislike using it for background noise.
11. I like to say my favorite season is 'whatever comes next'. I think I would be unhappy living somewhere that did not have seasons. I really enjoy the changing of the weather and the way the world looks around me, and the anticipation of those changes is part of the pleasure.
12. I have no living grandparents.
13. I believe in the Oxford comma, unless its presence causes more ambiguity than removing it and the ambiguity cannot be removed by rewriting the sentence.
14. A fair percentage of my daily speech is in LOLCAT, but I get highly annoyed by people who attempt Elizabethan English and fail dismally. –st is the second person familiar conjugation, thank you; it doesn't just stick onto anything.
15. I have a chameleon accent: put me somewhere or with someone with any accent-not-mine for more than an hour or three, and I'll start to sound like them. I worry that people think I'm taking the piss—one really awful example was when I was visiting my Byelorussian friend who's married to a Scot—OMG that combination did weird things to my speech—but I can't really help it. I lived in Dorset, England for 22 months in the early 90s, and after six months people were asking me how I'd met and married an American. But chameleon accent notwithstanding, I can't "do" accents even for places I've lived for a long while if I'm not surrounded by them.
16. I have really fragile fingernails. They peel backward and break at the least provocation. All the same, I enjoy painting them. I very rarely use red or pink; usually green or orange or blue.
17. I've never had a true one-night-stand. Tried a couple times in college: ended up lasting a couple days and about a week, respectively.
18. I'm very much a cat person but my household also has two dogs and I've been walking the bigger one most evenings.
19. I have a minor phone phobia that makes it really difficult for me to initiate phone calls especially to people I don't know such as businesses and doctors. The advent of online chat for inquiries to the insurance and cable companies etc makes me very happy.
20. I miss Amber gaming. I really have to make it to a convention next year.
Have a link to the
blog challenge graphic; I'm not going to redisplay it every day.
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