8 Random Facts About Me

Thanks, Rudy, for the invite to the “8 Random Facts About Me” meme. I enjoyed shaking some weird facts out of my cluttered brain, but I’ll have to pass on tapping someone else, at least for now. The last meme I did got lackluster response, so I’m reluctant to flip through my address book again for a while. So I think I’ll pass this one on as an open invitation instead.

I invite anyone who’s reading to join in and leave a comment that you blogged your own 8 randoms factoids; I’ll be glad to visit your blog to read the details!

Here go mine:

1. My mom was a nurse and briefly thought I might have Down syndrome when I was born because I had some of the physical characteristics — upward slanting eyes that are unusual for my ethnic group, a big tongue, larger space between the big toes and other toes than usual, crooked little fingers, etc.

2. I’m an only child, and my parents were married for 10 years before they had me.

3. I’ve never had a nickname. Although I *have* heard “Smartass” a few times in my life. I’m sure they were talking about someone else. :o)

4. I do a GREAT job of painting a straight line on the wood trim in a room. Unfortunately, I’ve done so much of it over the years wherever I’ve lived that I totally hate to do it now. (Guess whose foyer, dining room, and living room need painting?)

5. I was almost named Margaret. That’s a funny fact to know about yourself — what you could have been named. Every time I hear it now, I think about how that could have been me, and I try the name on for size. Nope, still doesn’t fit.

6. For two weeks in 1983, I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. Not the world’s most rousing success as a sales professional — zero sales. So to say I “sold vacuums” is incorrect; to be precise, I “lugged them around.”

7. I was a precocious reader. I used to sneak my mother’s nursing textbooks to my room and read through them when I was elementary school age. (The male anatomy section was very, very interesting; the catheterization pictures of a nurse holding a tube in one hand and a limp penis in the other hand, like a dead mouse, were very, very icky.) At my Aunt Doris’ house, I would drag out her books on mythology and Edgar Allen Poe and classic American poetry from her shelves. She was stocked on reading material for the English and Latin classes she taught.

8. Don’t think I classed up the joint too much with the scientific, academic, and literary reading, though. I also survived on reams and reams of cheap comic books made for little kids. None of the cool ones that are collectibles now. We’re talking Little Lulu, Dot, and the Archies, at a whopping 15 cents a pop — six of them for a dollar. If I wheedled a little at the store, I also could get a little pack of the wax Coca-Cola-shaped bottles filled with sweet colored water. I’d nip the wax tops off and drink the little bottles while I read my new books, then chew the bottles until my jaw ached.

What are YOUR 8 random facts?

Photo credit: Ron Richardson

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