My friend Mary at BookBlog has tagged me with the "8 Things About Me" meme. I'm supposed to write eight random (or not-so-random) facts about myself and then tag eight other people. However, most of the blogs that I read are the "big boys," and if I was to tag them with something like this, their response would no doubt be "And you are...?" I don't really know that many other people who blog, so I'm going to skip that part.
Enough about you; let's talk about me for a minute:
1. I've lived in more places than I can count. My dad had itchy feet once he escaped the cotton fields, and so we moved continually. I ended up attending three elementary schools, three middle schools/junior high schools and two high schools. This may account for the fact that I'm not particularly sociable. After moving so many times, it didn't really make sense to go to a whole lot of effort to make new friends when I was just going to end up moving away again.
2. That said, I've lived in the same town for the past eighteen years, since I got out of the Army and came to Florida. I had never lived anywhere for even as long as five years before that. I haven't seen snow since 1989, and that suits me just fine.
3. I have become nocturnal by nature because I have worked nights for the Post Office for the past sixteen years. Even on weekends and vacations, I have a hard time staying awake in the afternoons and evening when I usually sleep.
4. As my profile on this page notes, I spray-painted graffiti on the Berlin Wall and also pissed on it as a political statement in January 1989. I was stationed in West Berlin for more than three years, and when the Wall came down in November of '89, I was as surprised as anyone else. It had seemed like it would be there forever. Of course, so did the Soviet Union. After the Wall came down, a local radio station got some pieces of it and gave them away to people who called in and reminisced about their Berlin memories, including me. I have a chunk of concrete about the size of a piece of fudge, and interestingly enough, it came from the district where I lived, Lichterfelde.
5. Having served two tours of duty in Germany (the other was in Augsburg, Bavaria, from 1982-84), I have a taste for imported German beer. After drinking the local brews, I was spoiled forever for most American beers. If I have to drink American beer, it will usually be Sam Adams or a microbrew.
6. Although I grew up as a football fan, my favorite sport is baseball. I had never been exposed to it until we moved to Kansas City in 1973, when I was 13. I started listening to Royals games on the radio and learning about the game, and I was hooked. It was like Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. I finally talked my dad into taking me to a Royals game in 1975 against the White Sox. It was the first of many trips to Royals Stadium for me. I've also seen games in Seattle, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston and St. Petersburg, as well as spring training games here in Fort Myers.
7. I won my middle school's spelling bee in seventh grade (which included the eighth graders), and ended up 11th in the city competition in St. Joseph, Missouri. The word that got me: "bullion." Somebody didn't ask for a definition and spelled "bouillon." Alas, we didn't have ESPN back in the early 1970s to broadcast the spelling bee, so I didn't know how I was supposed to play it.
8. I like live music and have seen some pretty good concerts over the years. I saw the Rolling Stones in Tampa in 1994, because, who knows, "this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don't know." (It wasn't.) I saw Bruce Springsteen twice, once in Tacoma in 1984 for the "Born In The U.S.A." tour, and in Berlin in 1988 for the "Tunnel of Love" tour. I saw E.L.O.'s "Out of the Blue" tour in Kansas City in 1977, and I saw both the first and the last stops of their "Time" tour in 1981 (Boston) and 1982 (Munich). I attended a lot of concerts while in Berlin, including the Bangles, ZZ Top, Huey Lewis & The News (with Melissa Etheridge opening for them) and the big 17th of June (German holiday) annual concerts on the lawn in front of the Reichstag that included David Bowie, Eurythmics, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Genesis... Well, you get the idea. The concert I most regret missing? The Cars in Seattle during the summer of 1984, because I was on a field training exercise in Yakima.
