7 Random Facts

I've been tagged by Control Freak over at A Life in Progress to share seven random and/or weird facts about myself.

Since I've never actually done one of these "random facts" posts, I figured--what the hell. So now I guess the challenge is to come up with the seven facts. Damn.

1. With the exception of college housing (where I pretty much had no choice), I have never rented. After graduating college, I moved back in with my mom and brothers. I started my first job three weeks later. In April of the following year, Michael and I started house hunting. I had done a lot of research on the things available in our price range, and we had pretty much pinpointed which neighborhood we wanted to live in. One Sunday, we went and looked at three different condos in the development, and when we saw our home, we knew it was the one. We put an offer on it the next day, and we closed in June 2005. I've been a homeowner since I was only 22 years old.

2. I am a picky eater. My husband eats anything and everything. But, he'll actually tell you I'm not that bad. I've come a long way since I was a child. When I was little, I didn't even like pizza. My mom would have to send me to birthday parties with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so that I'd have something to eat. These days, the list of things I *will* eat is much longer than the things I won't, but I do still have finicky tendencies.

3. Senior year of college, I had shingles. I was in the shower one morning when I ran my hands up my back, and noticed a patch of something bumpy. I couldn't see it, so when I got out of the shower, I made one of my roommates look at it for me. She told me it was weird looking, but could be poison ivy.

I have never had poison ivy. I'll go into the same woods as my mom and brothers, they'll come out covered in the rash, and I won't have any problems. (I've suspected that perhaps I'm not even allergic to poison ivy, but who knows. I'm certainly not going to go roll around in the stuff to prove it.) But the bumps were uncomfortable, so I decided to do the unthinkable--visit the college health center.

I went in, the woman took one look at me, and said, "Oh my, you have shingles." She asked me if I had ever had the chicken pox. Yes, when I was 6. She asked me if I had been around old people or small children. Um, no. I'm in college. The only people I've been around are drunk people and professors. The nurse made it out to be some emergency. She told me if we didn't act quickly, it was possible they'd spread over my whole body. I had to come back a couple of hours later to see the doctor and get a prescription for an anti-viral medication (VALTREX, people! The same thing they use for HERPES! I was horrified getting that filled at the pharmacy in a college town.)

The shingles never spread, and mine were not that serious, but they took a while to go away and were amazingly uncomfortable. Discomfort is the only way I can describe it--sort of a cross between itchy and painful. It was uncomfortable to even have a shirt touch it. Shingles also cause nerve damage. To this day, I still have bouts of "phantom shingle pain." Very weird.

4. When I was younger (probably middle school), I wanted to be a pediatrician. Among other things, of course. Let's see... careers I considered throughout my childhood: teacher, pediatrician, psychologist, journalist, lawyer. Funny how that happens, right?

5. Growing up, I spent my summers in Virginia. I was born in Seattle, where my parents lived when they were married. When I was 6 years old, my parents divorced, and my mom took us kids and moved back to where she grew up (New York), and my dad moved back to where he grew up (Virginia). Both had family and friends in their hometowns, so they went back to their roots. We would spend 8 weeks with my dad in the summer, and would also spend a week at Christmas and a week at Easter with him in Virginia.

We had cousins my age, and my dad's girlfriend had a son our age, too. So we always had quite the adventures in good ol' rural Virginia. There was always part of me that wanted to be home, though. All my friends were back in New York and I always wondered what it would be like to spend a summer with them instead.

Funny little subfact: When I was little, I would come back from Virginia with a wicked southern accent. My mom said it was completely bizarre. I would come back and drawl, "Maw-ma! Maw-ma! Mema and Granddad have the cutest little puppy dawg!"

6. I used to absolutely love the soap General Hospital. I started watching it when I was about 9 or 10 years old because my afterschool babysitter (a teenager named Dara) was into it. Once I was hooked, I watched it every day for YEARS. If I wasn't home, I would tape it. I started to fall out of it junior and senior years of college (watched more infrequently), and then it was in the year after college that I stopped watching completely. I don't think I have seen a single episode since.

Something cool, though. The summer after my freshman year of college, my friend Candice from New Jersey flew out to Los Angeles and actually interned with General Hospital. Two other friends and I flew out to visit her for a week or two during that time. It just so happened that our visit coincided with General Hospital's "fan weekend" (I think that's what it was called?), and Candice was required to work at it. They needed extra workers, so Candice volunteered us. We got to meet a TON of the cast members. Some were cool, others were not. Oh, and as much as I was into the show, I never realized how simply CUH-RAZY some people are about their soaps. Holy psycho fans. PSYCHO, I tell you.

7. I can recite all of the Presidents of the United States, in order, in under 20 seconds (using only their last names). Thank you to my third grade teacher, Mrs. Miller, for teaching us a song that became completely ingrained in my brain. Eventually, as time went on, I was able to drop the music and just say the presidents in their order. And as more time went on, I got faster and faster at it.

As an aside, I once had to prove this skill at an employee retreat at my old job. For a quiz show style game we were playing, we had to fill out a questionnaire before we went. They asked for a "hidden talent," and that's what I used. At the time, I claimed I could do it in under 60 seconds. Little did I know that I would completely SHATTER that time. That was when I learned I could do it in under 20. :)

Alrighty, that was kind of hard! So I now have to pass the challenge onto seven others.

I tag:
- My friend (I've known her since elementary school), Lesley
- The lovely Laura Jean at Superhero
- My fellow Obama lover, Jenn, over at Cooking (and Getting in Shape) in the Heartland
- Expectant mommy Rachel (Thoughts from the Mind of Maydaygirl)
- Babbs' Bites
- Saint Richard
- Debbie at A Day in the Life of a Crazy Mom