As I get more comfortable blogging and begin to open up the topics to include the occasional post outside of training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I’m finding that I just don’t know a lot of things that other bloggers take for granted. I think it has to do with how I came into this entire subculture of blogging. Where most bloggers go into it with the intent of starting a blog, gaining readership and trying to market their blog and, in some cases, make some extra cash, I stumbled into blogging largely by accident. My coach recommended that we all keep a training log and suggested that setting up a blog was really easy. Turns out he was right.
The result is that I sometimes don’t know simple things. Like, what is a meme. What a strange word. Turns out (thanks Google) that meme’s are “a type of Internet meme that requires active participation by the blogger and rarely traces back to an originating source. It’s often a series of questions that a blogger answers to share some personal perspective or experience on random topics.” There ya go.
I try to avoid most of them, but every once in a while, I get tagged to respond to a meme. Honestly, when I don’t want to respond to them, I do what I do in real life and that’s to pretend that I didn’t hear the question (don’t tell my wife). 
But I’m feeling SO much better after getting over this exotic, Canadian cold, so I’m going to take a stab at this one: 7 Random Things About Me. I was tagged by BlackBeltMama over on her blog, even as I learned that her husband too the easy way out and brought back Chocolate from Germany… instead of being bold and bringing back a cuckoo clock or a CD collection of Bavarian Polkas from the Hofbrauhaus!
So, without further ado (or if you’re tired of reading this, adieu), 7 random things about moi.
1: My fingers are double jointed. All of my fingers bend back further than most peoples’. As a kid, when I was more flexible than I am now, I could bend my fingers back so that they were flat against the back of my hand… a neat trick for “grossing out the girls” in elementary school. They’re still more flexible than most, and my pinkies can still make it back to touch the back of my hand. Ewww.
2: I am addicted to Petfinder.com. Petfinder is a tremendous resource for anyone who wants to be a part of the solution for animal overpopulation. We currently have three dogs, all adopted from shelters/rescues. I am a huge fan of adopting dogs from the pound or a rescue rather than from a backyard breeder, or worse, from a pet store. I won’t get into the many reasons that this not the best thing to do, but if you’re interested check out the links or just do some reading.
Duke is a Great Dane/Boxer. I got Duke from the Humane Society in
Bellevue, WA. He was 18 months old and weighed at the time about 85 lbs (he’s a svelte 115 lbs now). Like many of the bigger dogs, Duke was picked up by a family that didn’t think about how big he was going to be when he grew out of his cute puppy stage. He was also an “outside dog” (no such thing, as far as I’m concerned) and wo
uld routinely cruise the neighborhood after jumping their 6′ fence. To their credit, he was well socialized and relatively well trained and is the Best Dog Ever. Duke’s pushing 11 years old now, which is getting up there for a dog his size. He’s slowing down some, but still has plenty of puppy left in him.
We adopted Ajax and Apollo from a shelter in Eastern, WA. It was a drive, but we found them on Petfinder. This particular rescue would pull pregnant dogs from the high kill shelters in the area, whelp the litter, and then after spaying/neutering the lot of them find them all homes. So, we picked these two mutts up that way. We were only going to adopt one, but they were irresistible.
While they’re littermates, we think there must have been two dads in the mix. I guess their mom (who is a sweetie), ran with a pretty bad crowd for a while. Ajax, as best as we can guess, has some Australian Shepherd and Great Pyranees,
along with… some other stuff. These seem to be the dominant breeds, though. The Pyranees has given Ajax a rebellious streak that has earned him the nickname “Devil Dog.”
Apollo is also clearly some Australian Shepherd, and we think Newfoundland. There may be some Chow in there, but I tend to think not. Apollo has a very efficient metabolism. In other words, he’s a wide load. His nickname is “Little Fatty.”
All told, we have about 300 lbs of dog who live with us, and no, they’re not outside dogs.
3: I love to read. I’ve always been an avid reader, and will read just about anything I can get my hands on. I still enjoy Sci-Fi and Fantasy, but not as much as I did when I was a kid. That said, I am a sucker for Robin Hood and King Arthur. I’ve read just about every telling of those stories I can find. I’m currently working through Scarlet, a book by Stephen Lawhead and the second in a trilogy on Robin Hood. Turns out that he’s also written several King Arthur books. Those are on my birthday list.
4: Speaking of birthdays, I was born on my dad’s birthday. Pretty neat. Growing up, my mom was great about baking two cakes, and rather than feeling like I was getting cheated out of my share of the limelight, I always thought it was pretty darned cool. One of my brothers also has a son born on his birthday.
5: I love honey. I have to really be careful, or I’ll gain 30 lbs just from eating too much honey. While living in Boston, MA for three months on a detail for work, I was cursed/blessed to walk past a farmers market daily where fresh honey was sold. Mmmm… quickly regressing into my old bachelor habits, I would stand over the sink and have slices of toast with butter and honey while drinking a beer. Only one dirty dish, and that was a butter knife. I came back after three months weighing in at 225 lbs or so. Dayum.
6: I still play Dungeons and Dragons. That’s right. I admit it. I’ve played them all, from the old Basic set where an Elf was a race and a class, through AD&D, 2nd edition and now D20/3.5. To be honest, it’s more a time to get together with my friends and socialize. We all have kids, and so the kids get together and play video games or outside when the weather’s nice, and we have a good time telling stories and being geeky. I started playing back in the 6th grade. At the time, there was a fervor amongst some insisting that D&D was leading to kids acting out and accidentally killing each other in real life. This is ridiculous, much as we see that video games, rock music and any number of other things are blamed. To my mom’s credit, she never bought into that crap and always encouraged my brother and I to use our imaginations.
7: Joe Biden is my guy in the upcoming elections. I am not interested in getting into any sort of political debates. I realize that he won’t get the Democratic nomination (which irritates me, because I’m not all that keen on Clinton or Obama), but he’s the candidate that best represents my political views… and he has a voting record in congress that demonstrates his willingness to vote according to his beliefs. I think that he’s got the experience and the political savvy to be a great president who just might be able to pull us out of the current… we’ll call it era.
Now, I guess it’s good form to share some of the love. So, I’ll tag my buddies at Brain Cheese, You’re a Fly, and ChattieKat at The Kat House.
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