25 Things

For some reason I consider my readers here (both of you) to be more friendly than my 'friends' on Facebook. Which is why I won't post my 25 things list on facebook, but I will here. Frankly, I don't really like all those high school friends well enough to want them to know me that well.

1. I write obsessively, probably 5 thousand words a day of poems, short stories, 1-liners, comic strips, NBA rants, and science. Yet the only full-length book I've ever finished was in 7th grade (and I think I lost it).

2. I have always wanted blue hair.

3. I hate to cook anything in a pot or pan that isn't made out of cast iron.

4. Nothing I have ever experienced in life is as fulfilling as dancing in the kitchen with my wife and kid.

5. My favorite TV shows over the last ten years are 30 Rock, Chuck, Firefly, Good Eats, and Iron Chef America. I pretty much gave up on TV after Star Trek: The Next Generation ended.

6. Speaking of Good Eats: I own every episode available to buy and two Alton Brown books (and 8 episodes of Iron Chef America). Yet, I have to admit that I almost always have to 'fix' the recipes to make them work for me.

7. I make a lot of cookies, and I experiment a lot with them. This used to drive my wife nuts, so I started making them the way she wanted them...and now she's turning my son against me to get more! (guess who's getting the all-healthy version next time!)

8. I was involved in every aspect of my church youth group and have probably read the Bible 30 times.

9. I was on the golf team in high school.

10. I was also on the chess team in high school. But I'm actually really good at chess. We won state.

11. The only 'letter' I got in high school was for quiz bowl or knowledge bowl or whatever it was. We won state in that too.

12. I'm pretty sure I skipped the meets where we won state in chess and knowledge bowl.

13. I fell asleep in my Calculus 1 final my Freshman year of College. But I got an A. (I was sick)

14. For 3 semesters I was the editor of our college newspaper...basically by default (nobody else wanted it).

15. As my roommates once discovered to their horror, there is really no level of garlic that I consider "too much".

16. During our Jr and Sr. years at college, my roommates and I confiscated the biology departments seine nets, dip nets, collection jars, etc. and began doing a comprehensive survey of any body of water to which we could get access. Eventually we had fish preserved in jars of formaldehyde in the kitchen, crayfish crawling around the apartment, insects preserved in alcohol on the kitchen table, an 80 gallon plastic bin filled with gar, and the lingering odor of pond-bottom muck.

17. The most hours I've ever been awake in a row is 72 (approximately).

18. I missed my high school graduation.

19. I didn't feel like a real person until after I read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road".

20. The only sports teams I am viscerally connected to are the Kansas University teams.

21. I wasn't really an obsessive NBA fan until Sega released NBA2k1 for the Sega DreamCast.

22. I am not a handyman. I once built a coffee table out of PVC and plywood and everyone who knows me would agree it is the nicest thing I've ever constructed. My wife helped.

23. In 2000, I forgot to register and didn't vote for anyone.

24. My mood is extremely dependent on the amount of sun outside (even if I'm not outside).

25. My uncle asked me which NBA city I would like to live in a few months back, and I've not stopped thinking about it since then. Although OKC is nice, I desperately want to live in Portland, OR.