85 Things About Me!

I got to thinking that while lots of you read my blog, you don’t really know that much about me. As a way of introduction, here are 85 things about me that you might find interesting. Or not. Whatever…here they are:

I competed in several regional and state science fairs as a middle schooler. My favorite was the one where a girl in the booth next to me was exhibiting her project on using earthworms as a form of protein. I was so smitten that when she asked me to eat a piece of the cake she had baked with the earthworm flour to show the judges how delicious it was, I did just that. I honestly don’t remember if the cake was any good…but she sure was cute.
I love trying new foods.
I keep a list of books, TV shows, and movies that I want to read or watch. It’s part of my SDMB (Someday Maybe) list in Evernote and Google Sheets. I know I’ll never get through them all…but I’m working on it!
I’ve never been to Australia although I want to go.
The American Museum of Natural History in NYC is one of my favorite history museums along with the Field Museum in Chicago. Someday I hope to get to the British Museum to see how it stacks up.
I have eight kids(you probably knew that)
All my calendars start on Monday. Once I was given a calendar that started on Sunday I went an entire month trying to use it, finally giving up because I couldn’t make the adjustment in my head.
I have never gotten used to humidity. While I lived in the Dallas area I reveled in the low humidity. Kansas has gotten more humid the last couple of years and I’m definitely not enjoying it.
I’m a Type II Diabetic, diagnosed in 2008 (ten years ago). At the time of diagnosis I had a blood glucose of 700. If you don’t know, that’s way high!
I’m 25% German, 25% Polish (both from my Mom’s side) and a mixture of pretty much everything Western European/Canadian/North American Indian (all in varying amounts) from my Dad’s side.
I live in Central Kansas, about an hour from the Geographic and population centers of the United States
When I track my time or categorize things in Evernote or anywhere else, I use a six part framework. Everything falls into the categories: Business, Family, Financial, Household, Personal, or Sleep. I’ve also got those categories color coded across all my systems, so things are easy to locate.
I went to the University of Notre Dame.
We have a rule at Hectic Manor that I will make one special trip to school to drop off a forgotten item per trimester. Sometimes I bend on this rule, but the idea is to teach the kids some level of responsibility for their own stuff. After the first trip, they can pay $2.50 for additional trips (ostensibly for the gas and my time…I think I’m undercharging).
I’ve eaten chocolate covered bugs. Honestly, they weren’t bad.
I worked exactly five years for Texas Instruments, right out of college. Then I retired with a retirement package and everything. I was 28 at the time.
I worked on a top-secret precursor to the iPad, but not at Apple. It predated the iPad by about 10 years and was a really awesome project.
I’m mostly ambidextrous.
I am fluent in English and Sarcasm. I understand just enough Spanish to make a fool of myself.
In college I decided to take French after four years of high school Spanish. On my first college exam my instructor (who was a dual Spanish/French graduate student) failed to notice that I switched from 100% French to 100% Spanish on the 10 page exam. Looking at the exam you can see the progression as an almost smooth curve. It was really weird. I got a 100% on the exam, until I pointed it out to her.
I wanted to be an English teacher when I entered college, but my parents discouraged teaching as a profession.
I was a psychology major for 3 years in college, but then two professors I needed to complete my degree took simultaneous sabbaticals. They offered me a job to work for their startup company, but it would’ve delayed my graduation by a year. So I switched to Econ as my major.
At one point in college I was taking three Econ courses, each on a pre-req for the next. I talked my way into the classes and did just fine…thank you very much!
I graduated college in the (at the time) standard 4 years despite my switching majors during the first five weeks of my senior year.
I love reading science fiction. Right now I’m working my way through the collected Robot, Empire, and Foundation series by Issac Asimov.
I biked across Kansas with one of my daughters in 2014along with a couple hundred other folks. We took the longest possible route, from the SW corner to the NE corner. People say Kansas is flat, which is true. But they don’t mention that it’s also slanted. The entire ride was (1) against the wind and (2) uphill almost the entire way. To our credit, despite not having trained for the event we finished the 10 days of riding, covering over 550 miles.
I have six daughters and two sons. Half are brunette and half are blond.
I take care of my grandson (Hectic Grandson) full-time and have a blast with him. He’s a hoot, although at 4 he’s beginning to get an awfully strong personality. I have no idea where he gets that from…
One of my kids is left-handed.
I’m a techy to the core, loving everything about tech.
I use an iPhone, having switched over from Android around 2014. I will never go back.
My favorite sport is track. For both spectating and when I was competing. My oldest son is a two-time All-American Decathlete in college and I love watching all those events.
I wear glasses for everything, currently living with four pairs (reading, computer, distance, and sunglasses). I hate it, but contacts don’t fit my eyes, no matter how hard I try.
My Dad was my greatest hero when I was growing up.
I played soccer and basketball in high school and also ran track. I was a jumper in track (high jump, long jump, and triple jump). I once told a coach, who had put me into the anchor of the mile relay (the 4x400m to you young ‘uns) that God only intended me to run 96 feet (which was my triple jump approach distance). He told me to shut up and run. Long story short, I didn’t die.
My Mom lives less than two miles from my house. She gets really upset when I decide to walk over there instead of driving. She always tells me, “One of these days I’m going to find you dead on the side of the road”. I guess the parenting thing never really stops.
I love systems and will happily create a system for almost anything I do…or anybody else has to do.
I track all sorts of things in my life. For the past 3+ years I have tracked every minute of my days, including my sleep. I use the data to analyze how I can improve my life and my productivity.
I got married 14 months after graduating college and have been married to Hectic Mom since that time. This year we celebrated 32 years of marriage.
I don’t like cantaloupe, honeydew melon, or lima beans. There isn’t all that much else that I’ve tried that I don’t like.
I strongly prefer pecans to walnuts and constantly swap out walnuts in most of my recipes. To the chagrin of Hectic Mom.
I’m a true productivity nerd, reading all sorts of blogs and listening to podcasts about the subject and trying to incorporate it into my life on a daily basis.
I own over 400 cookbooks, but only paid full retail price for two of them. One was by accident.
We will have celebrated three weddings for three daughters by the time you read this post. Those three weddings happened in the span of 54 weeks. To say it’s been a whirlwind would be an understatement.
At one point a few years ago, I had three daughters living out of the country, one in the UK, one in Argentina, and one in Belize. They were all doing “summer internship” things. Honestly, having them so far away scared the living daylights out of me, but I’m really glad they had the opportunities.
My kids have been involved in competitive sports since our oldest was 4 (back in 1993). They have competed (often on the national level) in swimming, soccer, volleyball, golf, track, gymnastics, basketball, cross country, wrestling, football, tae kwon do, dance, and figure skating.
Four of my kids have been valedictorian of their high school class, at one of the largest schools in Kansas.
We are fiercely competitive family. One time my wife got angry when we were playing soccer in the house over two stories. I disagreed with her anger, saying “we didn’t break anything or anybody”. She was not amused. More importantly, my team won 4-3. Seven of the eight kids were playing, since our youngest wasn’t walking yet.
I’m an early riser and a night owl. If I could successfully sleep from about 2:00-5:00 (both AM and PM) I would be entirely happy with my life. For some reason the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.
I love listening to podcastsfor all sorts of topics. You’d be amazed at the range I listen to.
I love the study of history. I’m currently fascinated with England from about the 4th century through the 1600’s. My favorite podcasts for this time period are The History of England and Tides of History.
Although my love for reading Shakespeare started in middle school, I’m of the opinion that high school students spend too much time studying his work.
I hate the idea that kids specialize in sports so young. All my kids were multi-sport athletes and greatly benefited from that.
I think sports and academics have equal importance for kids. I wish that successful students received as much praise and had as many opportunities as top athletes.
Christmas is my favorite holiday and I do my best to wait until after Halloween to start playing Christmas music. And I’m a sucker for Christmas movies. Don’t worry, my family hates it.
My birthday is one week before Christmas. That was awful as a kid, no matter how hard my parents tried to make it OK.
I love fireworks any time of the year, but especially on the 4th of July.
I will always stand for the national anthem and sing the words. At the NCAA Division II National Indoor Track Championships there is one team from Canada. So we had the opportunity to sing two national anthems. I don’t really know when I learned it, but I know the words to Oh Canada as well as The Star Spangled Banner.
Someday I want to visit Japan, Australia, and England. There are lots of other places, but those three are definitely on my bucket list.
While not quite on Ron Wayne’s level, I passed on an opportunity to buy Apple stock when it was at one of it’s cheapest points. I say “passed”, but it was more a case of not having the money at the time the opportunity arose.
In the Hectic Household our kids get their own phones when they’re in 7th grade. This wasn’t always true, since our oldest didn’t get her own phone until she was a junior in high school. Then again, that was “way back” in the 1990’s, so cell phones weren’t all that common.
Having spent two weeks working in Windows to resurrect my Mom’s computer from a ransomware situation, I’d be happy to never have to work in Windows again. It won’t happen, but I can dream, can’t I?
I don’t think you can ever use too much garlic in a recipe. I honestly have some recipes that call for garlic powder, crushed garlic cloves, and minced garlic. And I usually double the amounts in the recipe.
I love spreadsheets and can do all sorts of crazy things with formulas. It’s actually kind of scary.
Back in the 1980’s I worked on some of the first data CD-ROMs that were created in the U.S. There was a machine about the size of a front-load washing machine that housed the disk drives where you formatted the data. Then we cut tapes from those drives and shipped them off to North Carolina where the CDs were pressed. At the time I told my co-workers that “someday we will press our own CDs right on our desktop computers”. I was told I was an idiot and there would never be demand for that.
I learned Postscript and PCL so I could hand-code images that could be sent to printers. I actually paid for almost half my graduate school doing programming in those two printer languages as a side hustle.
I always use my Keurig K-Cups to make two cups of coffee, partly because I’m cheap and partly because I’m OK with weak coffee.
I will always be a fan of the Chicago Cubs, no matter how old I get or how how little I follow baseball.
Until I was ten I didn’t know any English cuss words. Much to my chagrin I learned that many of the words that I knew in Polish were actually cuss words. I have to thank my grandmother (who I called Nonnie) for teaching them to me and not telling me the actual meaning.
In Captain America: Civil War I strongly identified with Cap and consider myself Team Cap. While I love Iron Man, I honestly think that Tony was on the wrong side.
My all-time favorite knife is my Dalstrong Santoku Gladiator 7” knife. I use it for everything and it’s the one item in my kitchen that is cleaned immediately after use
I like two types of pizza…thin crust and Chicago Style Deep Dish. I figure you’re either going to eat your pizza off a crust the thickness and consistency of a cracker or you better have a pie where one slice is enough to fill you up for days.
I will never put ketchup on a Chicago-Style Hot Dog.
I love to cook, but I’m not really all that good at baking. It’s something I’m working on.
I hate defrosting freezers.
When I was in New York City I walked from the southern tip of Manhattan to the northern end. It also happened to be Harry Potter’s birthday, so I stopped in at several bookstores that were having special events. It was a really great day.
One of my daughters has been to five continents, including Antartica. Twice!
When I was a kid I loved to go to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. One of my favorite spots was the pendulum with the planets listed on the floor. Since it was built before Pluto was discovered I remember reading the plaque that explained (apologized) for the lack of Pluto being there. I wonder if they’ve removed the plaque?
Because a couple of my daughters don’t like ham, my Dad convinced them they were eating ostrich. They still tell the story to this day…and now they do eat ham.
The 1985 Bears will always be my second favorite football team…after Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish.
I regret not learning how to do a headstand when I was younger. I’m still trying to learn, but I haven’t made much progress in the last two years.
In one of the toughest 40 days I’ve ever spent, I went entirely vegetarian during one Lent. I actually had a great time trying out new dishes, but it’s not something that I’ll do full time.
Hectic Manor sits on 14 acres of former horse pasture. When our riding mower broke down last year we couldn’t get it repaired right away. So for a season and a half I have been push mowing 10 of the acres. I claim this is also my daily workout, topping out with 20,000 steps on a very regular daily basis.
I greatly prefer pork to chicken in the white meat category.
In case the dividers didn’t give it away…I love the Minions!