25 Things You Might Not Know About Me (By Casey)

Happy December everyone!  Congrats to my wife for keeping the blog going on a daily basis, and for allowing me not to have to spell “NaBloPoMo” even once!  I’ll still be keeping up my much slower, every Saturday pace, even with November having concluded (I should be able to manage 😉 ).

Seeing as how the month of November and Jenn’s recent SYNDICATION ON BLOGHER (congrats, again!) got us a lot of new readers and followers, we both thought it might be a good idea to post 25 random facts about ourselves that you may not know.  Look for Jenn’s, coming soon!  But for now, enjoy mine:

1.  I broke my right collar bone in first grade, when I slipped off my bed with some loose covers (while playing, not sleeping).  My teacher, Miss Irice (now Mrs. Tibbits…I assume, I haven’t talked to her since the mid-to-late 80’s) selected two members of my class to be my “bodyguards” on the playground.  They were a bit overzealous, and went after a kid who was just saying “hi” to me and apparently got too close.

2.  I broke my right collar bone again in second grade, when I slipped in a wooden chair and caught the arm underneath my shoulder.

3. I broke my right pinky toe when I was 10, dancing down the hall and flapping my legs to the “Garfield And Friends” theme song (my toe caught a door frame…OUCH!).

4. When I was 16, I was in a pie-eating contest at our high school.  I came in 4th place out of four, didn’t even finish, and almost hurled.

5. When I was about 15, I drank a glass Pepsi bottle full of curdled milk.  I curdled the milk myself by mixing it with Vinegar, for the sole purpose of drinking it.  Teenage boys are dumb most of the time.  It’s just a fact.

6. I was in the school spelling bee in 4th grade.  I was the top speller in my class, and I amazed my classmates repeatedly with how easily I could spell a lot of the harder words during our practices.  I was eliminated from the spelling bee on my first word.

7. Many of you probably know that Jenn was featured on the Today show and I got to be featured with her.  But one cool thing that I don’t think we’ve mentioned is that we’ve spoken to Al Roker.  Backstage in the green room.  Just casually.  As he came out of his dressing room we said “hi”, and he returned our greeting as he went out a door down a set of stairs.  Then a few seconds later, he popped back in and walked by us, and I said “Welcome back!” and Al, just as jovial as ever said back “Yeah, I like taking short trips!” and trotted off.  And as a bonus, we officially talked to somebody who appeared on “Seinfeld”.

8. I don’t think I’ve blogged about this yet (maybe I will in the future), but I didn’t really learn how to ride a bike without training wheels until I was 29.

9. I know a lot of weird pointless trivia about things like cartoons and comics, and also about candy bars.

10. I HATE eggs.  No, actually, I don’t.  I LOATHE them.  Not things that are made with eggs (i.e. most baked goods), but scrambled, fried, poached, etc….I hate.  When I was little, I couldn’t even be in the same room with one without being sick to my stomach.  Now, I can tolerate them, but I don’t like them.  They’re an unborn chicken.  It’s gross.

11. I also don’t like seafood.  The only fish I eat are the white perch I catch during ice fishing season.  I also enjoy a very occassional swordfish steak.  Kind of weird, being that I’ve lived over three decades in a major seafood capital of the U.S., but I guess I’m prone to being weird.

12. I used to watch the Powerpuff Girls (as an adult), and my favorite is Buttercup.  While, I don’t watch it anymore and I just sold my DVDs, I still respect it, and think it’s a great show.

13. Also along the lines of favorites, my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is Michaelangelo.  That spelling of his name that I just used is how his name was always spelled back when I was a kid (versus the Renaissance artist’s name “Michelangelo”).  In recent years, it’s been officially changed to the same spelling as the artist’s name (with just one “a” and it tweaks me out whenever I read it (much to the annoyance of Jenn).

14.  My handwriting sucks.  It’s always sucked.  When I was in first grade, they gave me a special triangle shaped chunk of plastic to put around my pencil as some sort of helping tool.  Didn’t work.  And now that our society has been taken over by keyboards and touchscreens?  My handwriting sucks even more.  My 9th grade English teacheronce watched me write and told me it was “beautiful”.  He also asked me if I like “Dungeons and Dragons” to which I said “yes”.  I think that pleased him, and I’m pretty sure he had some kind of weird man-crush on me.

15. Speaking of nerdy games, I was a huge Role-Playing Game nerd as a teenager.  For those who don’t know, the original “Role-Playing Games” long predate the popular RPG video games such as “Final Fantasy”, “Kingdom Hearts”, etc. and involved a lot of keeping track of stats, dice rolling, and basically sitting around a table “playing pretend”.  I still think it’s an intriguing concept, although not really my thing today.  Some things never leave my brain though, such as “THAC0” means “To Hit Armor Class Zero”.  I can never truly escape my nerdom.

16. I mentioned in my “Hoarding Horror” post that I was into “Heroclix”, which I’m sure meant nothing to at least 99% of the people who read it.  Heroclix is a game of little collectible superhero (and villian) miniatures (think Superman, Spider-Man, etc.) with little stats printed onto their base.  You make a team of them and try to duke it out on a game board with another player’s team (“duking it out” really means “roll dice a lot”).  There are 44 color-coded superpowers, meaning, for example, that when you see a green box on a certain spot on the base, that character has “Super Strength”, brown means “Hypersonic Speed”, etc.  I know them all, and probably will for the rest of my life.  I also had a room totally devoted to the 2,000 or so Heroclix figures that I owned and displayed them all in seven, wall-mounted plexiglass display cases.  The room has been dismantled as part of our selling efforts, but it still gets refered to as “The Heroclix Room”.  Casey=Mega Nerd.

17. I mastered the art of tying a twizzler into a knot with just my tongue, teeth, and the various surfaces of the inside of my mouth.  I don’t know if I still can, but it was pretty cool.

18. I didn’t go to my first rock concert until June of last year (at age 32).  It was Daughtry, a present from Jenn for my birthday, and it RULED.  Even though my ears were still ringing well into the next afternoon.

19. When I was 17, in the early days of the internet, I decided it would be cool to write my own stories about the characters in my favorite video game at the time, Final Fantasy 3.  They became fairly popular, with hundreds of fellow SNES-nerds downloading each one, and around 100 people “subscribing” to them through e-mail.  I still have them, and I’ve been meaning to go back and read them just to see how bad they were.

20. I only got one detention in the entirety K-12.  I forgot to do my Math homework one night and had to stay in during lunch recess with my head down on a desk.  I was quite the rebellous youth.

21. I love astronomy.  I was REALLY into it, when I was a kid, and I still remember a lot of things about it (although some of it has been proven to be incorrect since then…Pluto isn’t a planet? WTF?).  I also took an astronomy class in college, mostly for fun.

22. I was lactose intolerant from when I was 12, until some point before I was 22 (when I decided to try dairy without medication).  My cousin had the same issue as a teenager.  When it first happened, I missed three weeks of school thinking that I had some kind of nasty flu, and of course, drinking an occassional glass of milk whenever I started to feel better.  I had an actual flu a few months later, which messed with the lactose intolerance, and turned into some sort of digestive disorder (“irritable bowel syndrome”, a term I’m told now by my PCP means “we don’t know”).  I missed a month an a half of school because of that.

23. I have never read any of “The Lord Of The Rings” novels, nor have I ever seen an episode of “Gilligan’s Island” or “I Love Lucy” in its entirety.

24. I had a tinsel obsession as a child, and each year when we decorated the Christmas Tree, I would roll around on the floor playing in it.  I was also keep some in a ziploc bag and add to it each year, refering to it as my pet “Silver”.  I had three sandwich bags stuffed full before I stopped.

25. When I was 8 or so, I decided to “take over the house” the same way my favorite cartoon villians were always trying to take over things.  I tied my parents and sisters wrists behind their back with dental floss and then put them in the bathroom.  The bathroom was to be the “prison” of the new evil fortress that I was attempting to turn the house into.  The door didn’t lock, so I used more floss or something wound around the door knob to somehow keep the door from opening easily (in the many years since my retirement as a supervillian, I’ve forgotten how some of my evil inventions work).  I took scotch tape and spread really long pieces across one of the doorways as a big web, a trap that was sure to ensare intruders and hapless dogooders.  My parents bedroom was to become the meeting room where I would go over my evil plans with my imaginary minions.  Unfortunately, it all fell apart when my family stopped playing along  escaped!

And that’s 25 totally random facts about me.  I hope you found at least some of them to be entertaining!  Please note that you can learn many other things by reading previous posts!

Have a good week, everybody!