25 Random Things

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this , go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click post.

PS: If you’re reading this on my blog, this is a Facebook thing, but I thought it might make a fun blog post.

1. I am an unashamed Mac snob, but that’s mostly because I know Windows so well.
2. I’ve known my wife Jen since eighth grade Spanish class, where she couldn’t pronounce her Spanish name well at all. For years after, she thought my name was Nacho. I love her more than anything in this world. We’ve been married since 1994, just before our senior year in college.
3. I adopted a son in 2008. His name is Jonathan and he’s five years old going on four. I was a foster parent to five other children before that.
4. I’m a worship leader at my church. I’ve been involved in leading worship since college, when I helped out at Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.
5. I named my daughter Grace because she is a gift from God.
6. I was in a Christian rock band called Anonymous Joe for two years in the ’90s. I sang and played guitar. My wife played bass.
7. I wrote a complete student information system using REALbasic and PostgreSQL. It was called Kodiak and it will be retired this summer.
8. Watership Down is probably my favorite novel.
9. For years I was obsessed with The Kinks. I still think they were one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time.
10. I can’t tolerate corduroy and I don’t like to wear navy blue pants.
11. My dog and my son both have reactive attachment disorder. It’s funny in the dog. Not so much for my son.
12. Music is an extremely important part of my life. I almost always have music going, whether I’m at my desk or in the car. I don’t understand people who crave silence.
13. I went years without really watching television, aside from whatever children’s shows my daughter was watching (I loved Bear In The Big Blue House and pre-Joe Blue’s Clues). But lately I’ve been into Battlestar Galactica, Chuck, Dexter, LOST, Heroes, and The Big Bang Theory.
14. Jen and I lost our first son on October 31, 2000. He was stillborn. To this day, I hate Halloween. His name was Robert, in honor of my maternal grandfather, who is one of the greatest men I know.
15. I have owned six guitars. I currently own two, a Parkwood H4 and an Alvarez White Fusion.
16. I may have mild OCD.
17. The first concert I ever attended was INXS in Philadelphia in 1989, part of their Calling All Nations Tour. The opening act was Ziggy Marley. I later learned that my friend Tim was there, but we never met until 2005 or so, when he started going to my church and joined the worship team with me. The last concert I went to (as of this writing) was Chris Tomlin in Hershey, part of his Hello Love tour.
18. Speaking of INXS, Anonymous Joe played a show at Javacasa the night that Michael Hutchence took his own life. It was one of our best shows ever.
19. I have a BSE in English and I’m a certified English teacher. I’ve been working in technology since 1992.
20. My middle name is Russell, which is my father’s first name. My son’s middle name is Russell, in honor of my father.
21. I bought my first television in 2008. Actually, two of them. Up until then, I’d never paid for one. I only got hand-me-downs from relatives and friends.
22. I have a tie clip made from the battery of Dwight Eisenhower’s watch.
23. I don’t pay much attention to money. I go to work and money shows up in my account. Jen handles almost all of the finances, because if I did it, we’d be homeless.
24. I am starting a new band called Superficial Charm. I sing and play guitar. My wife plays bass. My good friend Tom plays lead guitar.
25. I am saved by grace alone.

Colon


You Are a Colon


You are very orderly and fact driven.
You aren’t concerned much with theories or dreams… only what’s true or untrue.

You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched.
You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren’t subject to whim or emotions.

Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice.
(But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!)

You excel in: Leadership positions

You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

A Long December

“A long December and there’s reason to believe that this year will be better than the last.”
— Counting Crows

In 2008, I:
– adopted a son
– started using Twitter
– started a new band with Tom
– bought a house
– sold a house
– paid off my car
– said goodbye to David, at least as a co-worker/boss
– didn’t get the promotion I applied for, but…
– got a new boss
– started using an iPod Touch
– set up a home media server with one terabyte of storage
– switched to DSL and satellite TV, dumping Comcast
– bought two televisions, one LCD and one plasma (I had never paid for a television before 2008)
– watched all episodes to date of LOST, Battlestar Galactica, and Dexter (currently working on Heroes)
– bought some new music (I heart Weezer)
– bought some old music (and rediscovered the magic that is Brian Setzer)
– bought a couple DVDs (Cloverfield really kinda sucked, but Charlie Bartlett was cool)
– got a sweet Danelectro vibe pedal
– found a great used tube amp
– really got sucked into Facebook
– became an uncle for the fourth time
– found out my cousins-in-law are having a baby
– helped my wife’s sister and her husband move
– went to Fenwick Island, DE
– went to Ocean City, NJ
– went to Austin, TX
– moved to Columbia, PA
– helped with renovations at my church
– started a website about worship issues
– played Warfish… a lot
– drank way too much caffeine, particularly in the form of Diet Cherry Vanilla Doctor Pepper
– got a coupon for a free Doctor Pepper
– found a new pizza shop
– installed Linux a couple times, OS X a bunch of times, and Windows way too many times
– played at the Art & Soul Cafe four times (I think)
– hacked two Linksys routers to enable bridge mode

How about you?

The Bacon Cheeseburger Project

Wow. That was probably the most satisfying sandwich I’ve ever had.

Or maybe I should say sandwiches.

click for bigger image

Yes, that was my lunch. A gigantic bacon cheeseburger. And the astute gourmet will notice that instead of a single hamburger bun, we’ve substituted two grilled cheese sandwiches. We made six of these bad boys today, and almost everybody in my department ate one. I opted for onions, peppers, and pickles on mine as well.

I am stuffed. I think I’ll just have a salad for supper.

Malfunction

I’m pretty sure I have mild OCD. Nothing severe. I’m not compulsively drawn to light switches or anything like that, but I do have some personality “quirks” that are getting harder to hide as time goes by. My co-workers have been discovering some of my “issues” and showing absolutely no mercy. So I figured, why not take the bull by the horns and show everyone just how deep the rabbit hole goes?

When I eat sausage or hot dogs, I always cut them into an even number of pieces, which are eaten in twos. I save the end pieces for last. No exceptions, unless eating them in a bun.

I chew gum in pairs. You will rarely see me bum of a stick of gum off of someone because I’d feel like a moocher taking two pieces. Exceptions can be made on airplanes and in cases of very bad breath.

If I step on a sidewalk crack or even a seam in a tile floor with one foot, I strive to get the other foot onto a seam or crack of similar depth as soon as possible. The longer it takes, the smaller the second crack or seam needs to be to even out the sensation, although it never goes away entirely on its own. It has a half-life or something.

My favorite pretzels are Herr’s Sourdough Nuggets. I eat them in pairs, one on each side of my mouth, in order to keep the saltiness on my tongue relatively balanced. This requires examining the pretzels as I remove them from the bag in order to pair up nuggets of roughly equal saltiness. Exceptions can be made only in two cases: extreme hunger and lack of beverage, in which case pretzels may be consumed one at a time.

I sort crackers by saltiness before eating them. My daughter has not only started doing the same, but she recently actually solicited my input on how well hers were sorted, because independent verification can be valuable. I’m pleased to say that she sorted them well.

As for colorful candies, like M&M’s, well, conjure up a picture in your head, and it’s probably spot on.

I get these sugar free wafers at Darrenkamps or Stauffers sometimes. To eat them, I remove the top wafer from two of them and then combine the remains to make a double stuff. Bonus points for when I have a box of chocolate flavored wafers and vanilla flavored wafers, which can be combined into a multi-flavor double stuff. Exceptions can be made when there’s a troublesome top that doesn’t want to come off, in which case a one-point-five stuff will work.

I count syllables. I count them as I speak or think phrases, and I count them when other people speak. I prefer even numbers of syllables that are multiples of three. Six is good. Eighteen is best. I don’t know why. Even though they’re odd numbers, five and seventeen are okay. Twelve is good, but not eleven. And no, I will not do it for your entertainment, so don’t ask. Yes, I’m doing it anyway, but no, not for you.

I’ve also recently started, when typing titles, to capitalize articles, prepositions, and other words that should not be capitalized according to the rules of proper grammar. It pains me to do so, because I was an English major and my grammar is otherwise relatively flawless, but I simply can’t stand how unbalanced the lower case words look.

If you look at my hand when playing Uno, you’ll find that my cards are sorted first by color, then by point value. In other cards games, they’re sorted by suit then value. I thought everybody did this until we got the version of Uno where you swap hands with each other. I saw some horrifying things.

Maybe this is why I’m drawn to databases and programming, where traits like this actually come in fairly handy. One thing’s for sure: I can’t help any of it.