10 Interesting Things About Me*

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*6 of them weird

I was tagged by Laura to cite 10 interesting things about me (or, in two instances, people closely related to me) and Jessica for six weird things. I’d done the weird list before, but it’s fun to come up with more items and I love to play along with these memes. It just took longer than expected to respond this time. Without further ado, here you go.

1. I was born with purple eyes, not blue like other newborns. I now have the darkest black-brown eye color of any Caucasian I know.
2. My last name means “stingy person” in Finnish, “flower about to bloom” in Japanese, something altogether unrelated in Italian and something funny in Greek. I am none of those ethnicities.
3. My earliest memory is of evil people trying to kidnap me when I was 4. At least one of them went to prison. I clearly remember her screaming in the courtroom.
4. I like the taste of Tums.
5. I still dislike chocolate.
6. My nerdy dad made it to the Connecticut State Bowling Championship in the early 1970s. I can’t remember if he won or not, but I do remember the press he received the first time he bowled a perfect 300 game.
7. The same man accompanied a co-worker to the memorial for Sublime lead singer Brad Nowell in Long Beach about 10 years ago and reported to the family that he wasn’t sure who the dead guy was but that he might have owned a tattoo parlor because everyone in attendance had a lot of tattoos.
8. I once taught a quiet Athabascan kid who turned out to have murdered several people that same semester.
9. I’ve been told by my children that I have a tendency to not finish a story when I get excited, switching thoughts mid-sentence and forgetting the original thread. Be grateful this blog doesn't include audio files.
10. I have an uncommon skin disease called DSAP, for which numerous cancer and non-cancer treatments have not been able to stop its spread. Mine is not genetic; it’s likely from a damaged immune system when I suffered Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever as a teenager.

I’ll have to think about who else to tag next since so many people have already done these.

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