All Right All Ready, The 25 Randoms

So I am compelled to do another list as challenged. I'm cheating, though. It's the same one I used after being tagged on CrackBook, oops, I mean FaceBook. 25 Random things about me.

1. I’m a gadget girl, I love macs and ipods and PCs, clock radios that levitate and stereo equipment, (especially cool integrated stereo like Sonos) etc.

2. I love to make things. Paste paper, soul collage, paintings, stories and poems, friends.

3. When I smoked cigarettes, I would smoke outside on my deck in a shower cap and long sleeves so I wouldn’t smell like smoke when I went to work. I don’t think I got away with it. Yoga took care of the cigarettes.

4. When I was 14, I became a thief. I shoplifted my entire record collection (of 45s)

which my brother still has today.

5. My 10 pound dog Punk has had his stomach pumped at the emergency vet twice this summer after his overdoses on my migraine medication

and later in the summer, on my cousin’s anti-depressants. Punk has eaten all of my prescription eye-glasses also. I think “prescription” is the key word here.

6. I’m as content to be thrilled by teenage vampire novels and Harry Potter as I am by Barbara Kingsolver and Walker Percy.

7. My family once had 11 dogs, 2 rabbits and 3 cats all at the same time. Included were a 3 legged dog and a half wolf-half dog dog. Ultimately, in the chaos, 2 rabbits and 2 cats had to be put down by my next door neighbor and his pistol. When I left home, I didn’t even think about having a pet for twenty years. I now have two dogs. I think that’s my limit.

8. My cousin Susan is the closest thing I have to a sister. Growing up we logged incredible hours babysitting our little brothers. Her little brother Jimmy D is autistic. Our adventures in loving him included losing him for two hours in the Citadel mall when he was twelve. The police fed him all of the Orange Julius he could swallow and this made him less disappointed in his recapture.

9. I was hit by a car when I was six. My friends and I were playing in the sprinkler in the front yard when we decided to sneak across the street to see a dead squirrel. I lived.

10. When I was sixteen, my first stepmother enlisted my help in toilet papering a neighbor’s house. She also prank-called my ex-boyfriend’s parents.

11. When I was 17, I won first place in the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s annual competition. I got a check for $15.00.

13. When I was 18, we registered to vote in a bus parked outside our high school. It was 1980, an election year. I voted for Jimmy Carter.

14. I once spent 27 hours in New York City on the way to somewhere else. It was my second trip so I had the lay (lie?) of the land. I saw a Broadway play, an off Broadway play, took a carriage ride in Central Park, ate a gigantic hamburger in Times Square, got kicked out of Virgin Records, and spent 3 hours in the Museum of Natural History. I ate at The Saloon across from Lincoln Center, met some folks at the bar who, the next day, took me on a picnic at the Strawberry Fields Forever part of Central Park. I visited the Barnes and Noble at midnight, and took an hour cab ride around Manhattan for which the cab driver charged me only $25 before dropping me off at Grand Central for the train to Rhinebeck. But not in that order. I also slept about 7 hours at the Central Park West Y.

15. I once sent roses to myself at my place of business to make a boy jealous. It didn’t make him jealous, but it got the attention of another man whom I amicably married. And then amicably divorced.

16. I am secretly fascinated by reality television. Project Runway being the favorite.

17. I jumped out of a plane about 10 years ago. The plane was so rickety, I thought the parachute might be safer.

18. I was practically kidnapped by a forest ranger in Colorado three years ago. He took me off-road in an off-limits area in a national state park. In his National Park Service jeep, he had a huge knife, a 9 mm, and and an M16 strapped to the ceiling. Later, while being interviewed by the Ranger Police investigators, I found out that these weapons became legal and standard equipment for Rangers after 9/11.

19. I once was so frightened of public speaking, my whole body shook like I was dancing a jig when I introduced the next act to the 800 people in the audience.

20. Once, in Blowing Rock, while a camp counselor at a private girl’s camp, I and 3 other counselors got naked and rode the camp’s show horses bareback up the ridge. When they do this in the movies, they make this stunt look a lot more comfortable.

21. I've come to believe animals are of no lesser value than we are.

22. I think we can find humor in most everything and we don’t really have to work too hard to find it.

23. Seven years ago, I thought my job was killing me and that my life’s work should be something more important than selling parking lot lights to shopping malls. I quit my job and moved to my grandmother’s farm in Harmony, NC. I learned that it had been me that was killing me. That no matter what your job is, the way you live your everyday life is your life’s work.

24. I think that every single thing we do and say matters and sends out an irreversible ripple just like skipping a rock.

25. The Well of Mercy and Anne Cowie skipped a rock that changed my life.

Your turn.