8 Things

Amy tagged me to come up with 8 things about myself. Here goes...

1) I can write backwards. It's pretty freaky. My cursive handwriting is actually better backward than it is forward. If I were to write something backwards on a piece of paper and you held it up to the light, you'd be able to read it with no problem. Also, I can write backwards with my left hand while simultaneously writing (the same thing) forward with my right. A sign of insanity? Surely.

2) I tried to convince my husband to change his last name when we got married. His last name is a lovely name, and it's fairly Irish which I really like. (My Mom is 100% Irish and my Dad is mostly German.) But I loved the name I had when we got married -- O'Hara. It just smacked of Irish. Sadly, Kevin said no way. Not because he's not a liberated guy or anything. Mostly because O'Hara was my first husband's last name. :-)

3) I know every word to every song on the entire Born.to.Run album by Bruce.Springsteen. I could probably sit down right now and write out, in correct order, the song list and then fill it out with all the words for each of them. This is because my sister, who is 6 years older than me, was obsessed with Bruce Springsteen and forced me to listen to him over and over and over again. Unbelievably, I'm also sad to say that I'm also somewhat of a Peter.Frampton and Blue.Oyster.Cult aficionado -- courtesy of my older brothers. As for me, I mostly like Country these days but also went through my Rock, Rap and Gospel phases.

4) I remember nearly every word to every song that my Mom sang me as a child. This comes in handy when trying to make up stuff to sing to Megan when she's in flip-out tantrum mode, but is also a curse because I get a form of children's song-Tourettes when someone else mentions anything related to one of them. I bust into a full rendition of these outrageously embarrassing songs and simply cannot stop. The worst part? I'm an incredibly bad singer. I mean really, really bad. I lip sync Happy Birthday at parties. But get me started on a children's song and I'm oblivious to my obvious dearth of talent.

5) I wanted to be an English teacher. I love writing (obviously, since most of my posts are waaaaaaay longer than they need to be) and have a knack for spelling and grammar. I'm far from perfect on that so don't hack up my grammatical skills, but I seem to have an innate sense for when to use who or whom, their or they're or there, stuff like that. Too bad I really like money, and don't want to worry about getting shot every day when I went to school -- these are major bummers about being a teacher. (Sorry Sunny, I promise that I don't mean to disrespect your admirable profession AT ALL!!)

6) Instead, I'm an IT dork. I was a computer programmer for a long time, then a database administrator, then lots of other stuff that's related which is boring to most people. Among other things, I was a Program Manager for a $200M Defense contract which was great but burned me out working 80+ hours a week for over three years straight. Then I worked at an Internet startup and got promoted to CIO before I quit and declared that Hell on Earth. Now, I work in the IT department of a Catholic hospital and I love it. I mean I really, really love it. I've been here for 5 years and I hope I'm here for a long time.

7) I met the President. Even though he's not my favorite one (by a long stretch, but this is no place for politics), I shook hands and spoke to George.W.Bush on the lawn of The.White.House. I have a lovely picture of him holding Megan when she was a couple of months old. He was genuinely excited to hold her (he asked, I didn't offer) and was very personable. As I said, I don't have any love lost for him in particular, but it is quite cool to have a picture of the current President holding your baby.

8) I hate elevators. I will ride them, it's not like I'm completely phobic or anything. It's just that I'm always irrationally afraid the cable is going to snap and I'm going to plummet to my death. I have many dreams of this happening (not the "to my death" part, of course) and never, ever enter an elevator without considering the possibility that this could happen. As much as this sucks, I'm glad I didn't get my sister's phobia... she's afraid of water towers. You know those big, giant tanks that hold a city's water supply? She's scared that they are all going to burst one day and flood the Earth. You would NEVER believe this if you knew her as she is amazingly smart and well-adjusted.

Hope you found them mildly amusing. Now I tag my buddies JJ, Portia, Erin, and TeamWinks. I'm sure these folks have already been tagged, but it's surely been a while so go ahead and play along anyway, okay? :-)