7 things about me you probably didn't want to know

[Rae Kridel]

Ok, so I got tagged by Erik Deckers, who probably only included me because we had coffee today and he didn't want to hurt my feelings. But he's The Man and he's not to be dissuaded so here I go:

1. I was born in Manteo, NC, a little town on the coast. My dad was in the Navy, stationed at Cape Hatteras, and when my mom went into labor, they couldn't find the base doctor so they had to take the FERRY to the mainland and went to the first clinic they could find. There's a famous black and white striped lighthouse there that my mom used to walk up and down trying to induce labor with me, but I was stubborn so it didn't work. Three and a half months later, he was transferred back to Key West where my mom is from, and where they met.

2. We moved around. A lot. I think my dad just had the navy life in his blood, even though he retired when I was 4. By the time I graduated from high school, I'd lived 18 different places. It's made me fearless of new situations, but wary of forming long-term friendships. One of my greatest wishes is to finally own a house that I can call "home" because everything else is just where your stuff is.

3. I always did really well in school, got great grades, though I didn't try very hard. When I was in 11th grade I heard that the planets in the solar system were going to align and the gravitational pull was going to cause cataclysms on the planet and life as we knew it would end. So, I tried even less hard my last couple of years of high school because I wasn't going to have to go to college. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the world did NOT end and I was graduating with only a 3.1 GPA. At that point, I just decided to go to community college since I didn't have any scholarships or anything. I made up for it later (see #4).

4. I have three degrees (B.S. in Media Production, B.S. in Graphic Arts Technology and M.F.A. in Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts) and part of two doctorates (Art Education and Journalism). I gave up on both of them because I got tired of being a student and hated the research. Remarkably, everything I've studied is media related and I actually use the skills I learned in school in my business. Even weirder, I love it.

5. I have a Celtic knot tattoo on my right upper arm. I got it when I was 31 and had decided that I was going to be alone the rest of my life and just be a bad ass. Now I wish I hadn't gotten it because you never know what life has in store for you. Plus, I'll have to wear a dress with sleeves when I accept my Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and that's SO not the silhouette for the Oscars.

6. I met my husband because my friend Susan in Tallahassee, his old roommate, asked me to "babysit" him after he moved to Bloomington for his doctorate in Religious Studies, because he was a geek and studied all the time. She didn't want him spending all his time in the library. Two weeks later, we'd decided to get married and he moved in with me that night.

7. Ever since our house was broken into May of last year, when I pull up to the house we rent I expect it to be broken into again. Every single time, without fail. No matter that I hit the button on my alarm key fob twice to turn the alarm on, no matter that I checked the locks and garage door when I left, no matter that I checked the block and the bar on the sliding glass door, I still expect to come back and find the front door sitting wide open.

Here are the rules, according to The Man:

Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I'm tagging:

Elizabeth Solchick
Wug Laku
Doug Theis
Andrew Ball
Shoshana Harper
Brian Huff
Cissi Sherlock

[Andrew Ball]

The planets aligned in 1977. But you'll have to read my list of 7 to find out what happened.

[Rae Kridel]

Maybe it was another alignment, because this one was 1980 or 81. And yeah, bejeezus is a good way to put it.

[Erik Deckers]

I remember the planets aligning thing. That was 1988 or something. I remember when I first heard about it, it scared the bejeezus out of me and I couldn't sleep that night. My dad, ever the scientist, reassurred me that it wouldn't happen, as the planets didn't have enough of a gravitational pull to affect us, even if they were lined up.