"Tag, Justin is it!"..."where did he go?"..."oh, there he is."

Hey, Justin here:

I didn’t know we were playing a game.

I feel like the kid who is in the field checking out some cool ant colony and all the other kids are playing tag and all of a sudden someone hits me on the back and yells “TAG YOU’RE IT” and I’m like, “Hey you almost stepped on this ant hill!” and that guy is like, “You’re IT man, stop looking at those bugs and play” and I’m like, “But I like ants and it’s sunny out and…I had…peanut butter for lunch…and that always makes me tired…and… (my voice is trailing off)” and that kid looks at me like I’m from space then he runs off to play with the kids that have already started again without him and I’m like, “hey…hey…I can play too” but they are gone and the peanut butter is making me tired again and I go back to watching my ants...

Thank you Dan for tagging me and making me feel included in this exclusive game.

Four things I was doing 10 years ago (not blogging on my wife’s blog site that’s for sure).

1. Digging myself out of an academic hole. My freshmen year of college was not my most productive year. I did poorly my first quarter (0.6 GPA) and the following 11 quarters were up hill the whole way. Ten years ago exactly, I was starting my junior year and loving my newly declared major (Psychology). I made it out in four years with a degree and a wife! Now that is some hard work, let me tell you.
2. Dating the hottest girl on campus. You know the type. The deep, artsy chick that cooks gourmet food, hangs out in cemeteries and won’t let you touch her pencils. Yeah, we were close. Btw: I ended up marring her and having 4 kids, but that is another story.
3. Eating dinner. “College Budget” dinner: Top Ramen, canned chili and Costco hotdogs almost every night. I know, gross. The only time, in my adult life, that I have put on any weight was in college. I gained 10 pounds (and then promptly lost it all my first year of marrige because we were dirt poor and I was unemployed and stressed out).
4. Playing video games. I lived in an apartment off campus with two roommates who had the TV on ALL the time. They were either watching MTV or playing video games every moment they were not in class. I joined in, often.

Four things on my “To-do-List” today:

1. Feed the chickens
2. Kiss my wife
3. Go to work
4. Play with my sons

Four random things I love about my wife:

1. She can make me laugh. I have a strange sense of humor. I usually only laugh when I see someone fall down or fall off of something or hit themselves with something. I don’t respond to stand-up comedy or “funny” movies (unless it is about people falling down). I don’t laugh at jokes or clever anecdotes. Kim can make me laugh (without falling down) on a regular basis. She has to catch me by surprise and she does. No one else can do that.
2. She can’t stand mold, spiders or wet cheese. So when those evil, menacing items of ugliness rear their awful heads I am called upon to dispose of them. I look like the “hero of the world” without much effort. It is like she is serving me up a huge slow soft ball that I can hit out of the park every time. The ego boost is nice. We haven’t ever had a moldy, wet piece of cheese shaped like a spider, but when that day comes, look out, cause I’ll win the day and get the girl.
3. She plays video games (I know I have already mentioned video games in this post. I enjoy responsibly. No, I do, really). She is a contender. When she was pregnant with our first child (Cole), she played through and beat The Legend of Zelda. As I am writing she is playing the LEGO Indiana Jones game with amazing speed and skill. It is nice to have an ally.
4. She tells me all the time that she would follow me anywhere. I believe her. She LOVES the Pacific Northwest and if I moved her anywhere else she would be miserable. I recognize the sacrifice she is willing to make. She loves me without any reservation.

Four jobs I have had:

1. Aluminum recycling. I worked at a recycling station in Kenmore every Saturday for a year and a half. I came home smelling like rotten beer and the bottom of my shoes were sticky.
2. Caddy. When I was 12 I was a caddy at a local country club in Cincinnati, Ohio. I learned what club to offer the golfers and how to wash a golf ball and where to walk on the green. The other caddies and I would drink soda and watch a black and white TV in a swelteringly hot caddy shack until we were called up.
3. Port of Anacortes maintenance worker. I worked at the Port of Anacortes for a summer in college. I was the lowest man on the ladder. I had to perform such duties as sanding and staining 1.5 miles of marina railing, cutting down acres of wetland at the airport and removing bloated seal carcasses from public beaches. That was pobably the pinacle of my working career.
4. Property Manager. In a tough financial time Kim and I were given an opportunity to manage a rental home. She did all the money stuff, and I did all the fixing stuff. I am glad we don’t have to do that any more. Cleaning dead cats out of the basement and evicting people are not high on my list of things I like to do, even for money.

Four movies I have watched more than once:

1. Good Will Hunting, because I feel like Will sometimes, not so much in the "genius" way, but in the “selling yourself short when God has something bigger and better” way.
2. Serenity, because I loved the TV show and the movie was like one big 2-hour last episode.
3. 12 Monkeys, because I like Sci-Fi and the concept of time travel and apocalyptic event scenarios.
4. Nacho Libre, mostly because my boys LOVE it and I love to watch it with them and pretend to be Luchadores with them.

Four places I have lived:

1. Medford, OR – It was where I was born and lived for the first year and a half of my life.
2. Cincinnati, OH – My family moved there in 86’ and I had to uproot and move for the first time in my life. Our first house was a hotel (3 months) then we moved to a 100 year old stone house on a highway across from a biker bar and finally to a house in the suburbs.
3. Seattle, WA – Well, not really Seattle, more like the surrounding areas. First to a tiny house in Lynnwood, then to a bigger house in Bothell and then to an apartment in Woodinville.
4. Portland, OR – After Medford my family moved to a white house in Portland then we moved to a cul-de-sac in Beaverton.

Four places I have been:

1. South Dakota, to see Mt. Rushmore.
2. The United Kingdom - Just me and a bicycle for one month in 96’.
3. Tennessee – To a lake called Lake Cumberland for a family vacation.
4. So-Cal – Kim kidnapped me and flew us to San Diego for a long weekend.
(to name a few)

Four places I want to visit:

1. Maine, for the weather.
2. Australia, for the water.
3. France, for the food.
4. New York, for the…atmosphere, I guess

Four TV shows I watch (on DVD):

1. The Office – kinda funny
2. Battlestar Galactica – Any show where there are robots taking over the planet, I’m in to.
3. Planet Earth – Not as good as the real thing but more of the earth than I will ever see in my lifetime.
4. Firefly – Cowboy Sci-fi with an Asian twist. Oh – yeah.

Four things you might not know about me:

1. I love sweeping. You heard me right. Give me a broom and a dirty floor and I am in heaven. My idea of a retirement job is an empty warehouse that needs to be swept every day. I love sweeping because I have all the time in the world to think. Sweeping in and of itself takes very little brainpower and leaves my mind free to explore.
2. I am an INTJ. Look up the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment and you will find out what that means. I don’t put a lot of faith in these tests because I believe we are more than a list of questions and can’t be quantified by a matrix of attributes, but it is the closest thing I have found to an explanation of my personality. But know this, I am deeper than those four letters!
3. Silence is golden. I need silence. I could be deaf and happy. I don’t like loud noises at all. I don’t usually listen to the radio in the car or at work. I am trying to teach my sons the value of quiet times.
4. I had (still have, I think) a Cabbage Patch doll when I was a kid. It wasn’t your normal Cabbage Patch. It was the knock-off brand that you could by at the fabric store where you would buy the “head” and use a pattern to make the body. My sisters were excited to go “pick out their head” and have my mom make the body. I went along with it and “picked out” my own head. It had green eyes and brown hair like me and I named him Oliver David. I dressed “Ollie” in my old baby cloths and he sat on my bed for 6 years and then he sat in my closet for 6 years and has been in a box for the last 12 years. What a life.

I don’t know anyone in Blogland who has not been tagged already, but here is my list.
1. Link (from The Legend of Zelda)
2. Al Gore (because he invented the Internet)
3. The state of Utah (it would be interesting to read what Utah was doing ten years ago)
4. Oliver David (I would like to make contact with my estranged son, so Ollie if you have access to a computer look me up, what are you like 24 now, man I wasted those last 18 years, maybe we can go an have a beer, you are old enough now, daddy loves you son.)