25 Random Things…

a semi-fun game currently spreading like the plague through Facebook networks the world over. I’ll play along. My middle name is random, don’cha know! (can you hear me saying that in my facetious minnesotan accent???)

So here we go – 25 Random Things that either annoy the ever-loving piss outta me, or that make me happy

1.) I HATE HATE HATE people who do’nt “anticipate the green”. PAY ATTENTION to the lights around you and be READY to step on that gas pedal the millisecond the light turns, especially if we’re at a left arrow, cause I will BE all up in ya grill if you are not prepared. Ben has joked about getting me a bugshield for the Denali that has “Anticipate the Green” printed backwards on it so that the poor idiots who get in front of me at a light can look in their mirrors, read my helpful sign, and be ready to go when the light turns green. People who waste precious seconds of my life lolly-gagging at stoplights annoy me.

2.)Grammatical Errors. I mean honestly people, did you not pay attention in 2nd grade grammar AT ALL?!?! i am all for poetic license, but seriously. Learn where your commas and periods are supposed to fall, and for the love of all things holy, PLEASE have a copy editor go over your work if you are a professional publication!!!

3.) in a similar vein – I HATE when people misuse common phrases. It’s “calm and collected” not “calm and collective”. Hearing things like that, or seeing them in print, literally makes the skin on the back of my neck crawl. Worse than nails on a chalkboard I tell ya.

4.) On a happier note, I always cry at the end of the movie “Babe”. Yes I realize the cute little pig is saved from becoming bacon and it is a happy ending, but something about the way the Farmer says “Tha’ll do pig, Tha’ll do” in his adorable Welsh accent just starts the waterworks. I am tearing up just thinking about it.

5.) This is going to be an extremely long 25 random things note if i don’t figure out a way to shorten up my random facts. Just thought I’d throw that random fact in there for ya.

6.) Ok just something random – I only have about 5 adult teeth. I was gypped by the tooth fairy. My adult teeth just never grew, so I never lost my baby teeth. I become like a freak show at the circus whenever I go to a new dentist – they have to call all their techs and other docs over to view my anomalistic X-rays. I should rent my teeth out for scientific study or something. Except I hate the dentist worse than I hate grammatical errors so that probably wouldn’t be a quick path to happiness.

7.)I am a spelling bee champion. Took 5th place in the national spelling bee when i was in 8th grade. This is probably where my extensive vocab comes from because as a stalling technique (consider it like an offensive play in the wide world of spelling bee sports) – i would ask for the meaning of the word and for it to be used in a sentence.

8.) My senior “prediction” in the yearbook was that i would one day tour the country with my 8 kids on the back of my husband’s motorcycle. Oddly enough, that prediction is in danger of being almost true…i never thought I would have four kids! when did I get this old???

9.) I pick the skin off my lips when i am deep in thought. It’s always a dead giveaway to Ben that something is turning in my brain. I would suck at the WSOP for this very reason.

10.) I once won $1200 on a penny slot machine in Vegas. Closest i have ever come to literally pooping my pants. i thought i’d broken the machine or that it was a practical joke. Thank God this was in the days of paper ticket payouts. I imagine that 120000 pennies would weigh a lot.

11.) I once tried to jerry rig the lights in my bosses office to flicker when he turned them on. This was at FedEx. The electricity required to run 5 miles of high-speed package sorting belts was still on. I stuck a screwdriver into a live socket and experienced the literal buzz of my life. I couldn’t feel my arms for about three hours and was scared that they had actually fallen off. I was mad then that my friends were laughing at me instead of helping me put my arms back on.

12.) I made a promise to my dad that I would be “Sweet 16 and never been kissed”. And i kept it. DANG that was hard. Good thing I was a rebel in high school who wore combat boots and dyed my hair green. The boys didn’t want to get too close anyways.

13.) I once squirted creamer from those little packets onto the then starting 1st baseman for the Yankees, Kevin Maas. He came to breakfast with a friend of my dad’s who was a pitcher for the Yankees when they were in town to play the Brewers, back in the good ol’ days when Bernie Brewer would slide down the slide into the beer mug and they were an American League team. Frickin’ sellouts. Anyways. I was deeply in love/crush with the guy and was MORTIFIED that I had squirted creamer all over him.

14.) I took piano lessons from the age of 4 through 9th grade. And I can probably only play one song now – “Waiting For You” by Richard Marx. Never heard it? listen to Delilah at nite on the Lite – you’ll hear it being dedicated to someone at some point.

15.) I also briefly played the bass violin from 11th grade through sophomore year of college. I was practicing one day, borrowing the school’s bass, and i broke the G string and had to call a bunch of stores to find a G string because they had an orchestra concert that nite. Sadly enough, i had no idea what a G string ALSO meant at the time and couldn’t figure out why all the store owners thought it was funny that I was calling to ask for a G string. Google bots are going to have a heyday with this one!

16.) Oh this one will make my brother laugh. I once drove a casket delivery truck (think large box truck, half a semi size) through the Tacoma Police Station parking garage. This wouldn’t be that funny except that the parking garage clearance was about 9 feet and my truck was about 12 feet. I ripped the entire roof of the truck off like a peeled back sardine can, pulled the sprinkler head out at the entrance to the garage so I left a trail of leaking sprinklers behind me, eventually flooding the entire first floor of the garage, and ripped out about 8 flourescent light fixtures that were oddly enough all akimbo in the back of the truck when i stopped to make my next delivery. I had to peel wires and metal and glass off all the caskets before i could offload them. Then I broke down in tears and made my brother, who was helping me that day, swear to not tell our parents. He didn’t. But that nite watching the news a story about “a freak accident involving an unknown truck flooding the police station and doing thousands of dollars of damage” at dinner made me start crying again and my parents put two and two together. Thank God for wonderful bosses who don’t dock your pay and tell you “hey, that’s what insurance is for, right???” Right-o!

17.) I am apparently highly allergic to guinea pigs. Who would have thought???

18.) I have broken three bones in my life, one of them twice. First time – shoulder blade, cracked the bottom almost in two in a bus accident coming home from softball practice. A drunk driver hit our bus and i just happened to be sitting in such a way that all the force of that impact basically hit the back corner, threw me against the window frame and there you have it. Second bone – my wrist, when i was “cracked” off the end of the “whip” by the football team at college during some freakish form of Minnesotan fun at the roller rink. Third bone – same shoulder blade, but this time I cracked the top of it off when the fire safety doors slammed shut on me when i got in the doorway during an earthquake in Seattle in 2000. Totally and completely RANDOM.

19.) In spite of my efforts to the contrary, all four of my births have been drug-free. Au naturel baby! Karissa was actually a waterbirth which some people think is weird. I guess some of my California granola-ness was still ingrained at that point.

20.)Back to things that irk me – people who are too stupid to understand how LINES work at the store when things are busy. GET IN A LINE, and you will be helped eventually. You aren’t ANY more special than anyone else who has been waiting in line like a normal person. You especially do not want to cut me off in a line if i am tired, low on blood sugars, or pregnant. Consider yourself warned.

21.) People who don’t have their order ready at the fast food drive thru. i mean come on people,  choose fatty combo #1, 2 or 3. If you CANNOT make this decision, get your butt inside. If you have to make more than one or two special requests for your order, get your butt inside. If you cannot go with the flow of humanity and learn to pull UP so that the cars behind you can actually place their order at the speaker, get your butt inside. That is all.

22.)I call my mom Mary Jane. That is her name, but I do not know why I don’t call her mommy or mom. I started when I was 14 and it just stuck. To this day I refer to my parents as “Daddy and Mary Jane”. I confuse a lot of people who think she is my stepmom. Nope. Just my mom who i call by her first name.

23.) I live in fear of a random attack by deer. i hate deer. we had them all the frick over the place in CA including  a huge buck who thought our front door was his domain. I wasted more than enough gallons of gas driving around waiting for him to leave the front door so I could go inside. Deer do not fascinate me, they actually scare the piss out of me. They are wild animals who are poised to attack humans with their paws at any given moment. They might even bite. i haven’t gotten close enough to test this theory, but i am sure its true.

24.) My alltime favorite movie/screenplay/book is The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. I love the line where Andy Dufresne writes to Red and says “Hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things.” And then at the end Red finally finds his hope as he hopes the Pacific Ocean is as blue as it has been in his dreams. It is wonderfully written and scripted and of course it makes me cry every time I hear it.

25.) i can oddly enough quote a good majority of The Godfather 1 and 2. i love those movies. I have no idea why.  Just random I guess.

 

Hope you enjoyed!

 

terra