Day 8 Blogging Challenge

Day 08 – 10 things we don’t know about you

Uggg…

I’m not sure which is harder, coming up with 10 things you don’t know about me, or coming up with ONLY 10 things you don’t know about me.

1. I *really* wish, and I mean *really* wish, that I could draw worth a damn. Every now and again I can produce something passable as art, but not that I’ve drawn. I can SEE it in my head… PENCIL Y U NO COOPERATE?!?!?!
2. I’m a chocolate purist. With few exceptions (Crunch and KitKat bars most notably) I do not want ANYTHING else in or near my chocolate. No nuts, no fruits, no syrups, nothing. Leave my goddamn chocolate alone. I prefer dark chocolate to milk.
3. Very briefly, in a time when I was going to college full time and balancing 2-3 jobs at any given time, one of those jobs was child care in a skeezy bowling alley. As far as I know, all the children survived but I cannot vouch for a lack of emotional trauma.
4. I have won a blue ribbon at a county fair. For counted cross stitch (a type of needlework). I didn’t even know I had been entered for judging.
5. I took several years of French in elementary school and high school. No, I cannot speak French. I took a semester and a half of Spanish in college in an attempt to understand what was being said to me (or about me) by the family of the guy I was dating at the time. No, I cannot speak Spanish. I can insult your mother and I might be able to convince you that I need to find a restroom. Or a library.
6. This one will be really funny for people that have watched me walk across a room and trip over absolutely nothing – I took ballet, jazz, and tap dancing as a kid. My feet didn’t stop growing in time for me to make it to point for ballet and I hated tap. I was decently good at jazz and even managed to pull off a cartwheel during a recital – after spending months with the choreographer pulling out her hair and finally replacing that portion of the routine since I always faceplanted trying to do it in the studio. I was so stunned on stage I couldn’t remember the next part of the routine. The song was Love Rollercoaster, the one redone by Red Hot Chili Peppers years later. We won’t say how many years.
7. Growing up I wanted to be a paleontologist. And by “growing up” I mean I had that figured out by the time I was 3 or 4. My room was full of dinosaurs, books on dinosaurs, my sheets were even covered in dinosaurs (on the Strawberry Shortcake canopy bed my mother picked out for me). Eventually I realized that my constitution (pale as fuck and prone to sunburns if the sun even blinks at me, with the occasional heatstroke thrown in) was completely unsuited to field work, which is what I wanted to do.
8. I think pink plastic flamingos are fucking awesome. Apparently this is a trait I shared with my granddad.
9. I can’t swim. Large bodies of water freak me right the fuck out. I am prone to panicking if there are other people in a pool with me (I’ve nearly drowned a couple times due to the idiocy of others around me, including some ass STANDING on me). I’m perfectly fine sitting on the edge of the pool while everyone else splashes about. Sort of goes along with my prone to sunburn and heatstroke thing any way.
10. My first job was at the microbiology lab of the community college I was attending. (Funny, I could get a job in a lab at 16 working with hazardous materials and I couldn’t work at the arcade until I was 18.) Since so many people would mangle the pronunciation of my name, I changed my name tag to read “Lab Rat.” I used to make ramen in a beaker on the heated stir plate in the lab. (Starving college student and all).