10 things I've done...

... that you probably haven't. I will keep updating this one too as people send me more links. I am loving them all.

By the way, too bad if you think these things are cheesy, I can't pretend to be any less cheesy than I am. So these links, and my list, are offered in the "getting to know you" and the "everybody has extraordinary moments" vein. True, there may be an obnoxious skew toward one-upmanship, but I liked scouring my feeble memory. First, here are the places I know where you can find these lists. If you made one, let me know and I'll add it to the list.

Loose Leaf
Just Ask Judy who had more to say about it here.
Tvindy
Paul vs. the Squamous Monster
Music and Cats
Striving for Average
Adventures in Applied Math (you get 3-for-1 as there are two more lists in the comment section)
Milkbreath and Me (also a three-fer)
Magnificent Octopus
The Dog's Breakfast
Infected Papercut
Cheeky Prof
Making Peace with Myself
Crazy PhD
Advice at your own risk
Musey
scrivenings
Inside My Head
sbfh
profgrrrrl
jo(e)
pilgrim/heretic
frogblog
Christine


My Ten Things in roughly chronological order:

Apocryphal so it doesn't count: My mother and father used to tell me I dug myself out of their home-made chicken-wire outdoor playpen with a spoon when I was a toddler. There's nobody left who can verify this story.

I hid a pet mouse in my bedroom for two years and even smuggled him on a long car trip and a ten day vacation without his being noticed by my parents or eaten by the cat. Eventually I had to come clean and, to my surprise, my parents got quite accustomed to him (see my mother, left, having quality time with Jules).


I sang Irish songs in a talent contest on an antique cruise ship on the Black Sea en route to Yalta, but I didn't win.

I wrote my senior thesis on "Shamanism in 16th century Siberia" but I don't remember anything at all except the frothing-on-the-ground part. See "Guido's Five-minute University" (that's the movie, here's the transcript).

I sang Balkan music with six other women, all dressed in full Balkan garb, in front of drunken teenagers at a ski lodge, for PAY. In this unrelated picture, we are wearing civilian clothes. Our Soviet-era Balkan garb was unwashable, because it was colored with cheap vegetable dyes, and each precious unwashed item was passed from one member to another over the years, so the authentic garb touched our bodies only when absolutely necessary.

I got hit in the head by a rotating azalea tree while singing Balkan music with that same group of women, one of whom was High Priestess of a coven, inside a shopping mall, while we were standing on mulch behind a white picket fence, while people were walking by with pizza dribbling out of their mouths. To quote my current band-member Ken, "What? And leave show business?"

I built 33 windows for my new house in a carport, using instructions out of a hippy architect's manual. These windows have not yet fallen apart, almost ten years later. My builder was incredulous but said (as he did about the retaining wall I built to put my carport on, which has also not yet fallen apart): "even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while."

I built the foundation walls of that same new house, alone, out of Lite-Form, in the snow, while I had bronchitis, because nobody else was willing to do it. Why did it have to snow, just then? This is North Carolina.

I took my low-life scumball ruffian cat for an emergency operation (for an abscess due to fighting) on the very same day I had JUST spent ten hours in the hospital waiting for my son to come out of brain surgery.


I had a monkey sit on my head eating sugar cane in a Costa Rican rain forest.


I put up a 1500 foot long 7' high deer fence by myself in one day.


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