Happy thoughts

I need a palate cleanser from that last post.  Other people making horrible life choices is just depressing.

I’m stealing something from Dogs are not Kids:

50 things you didn’t know about me (happy edition):

1.) My puppy greets me when I come home from work with her ears back and her tail wagging so hard her whole body wiggles.

2.) I went from being considered potentially mentally/learning disabled to being considered the most gifted in my class in mathematics as a child.

3.) I’ve only been hospitalized once, and never had surgery.

4.) Now you’ve seen the only topless photo of me that exists online. (my parents took some bathtime pictures of me as a baby, but those are not online.)

5.) When I was a kid, I thought my mom’s singing was the best singing ever. On a related note, my wife has discovered that I’m mildly tone deaf (my dad is complete tone deaf).

6.) My best friend when I was a kid was my dog, Heidi (picture coming later).

7.) Heidi was a rottweiler who hated men that weren’t my dad (and sometimes my dad anyway).

8.) My brother hated my dad as a baby, he would cry if my dad tried to pick him up. They still have a strained relationship, but for more solid reasons now.

9.) I can always tell when my period is coming just by gauging how much I think public bathrooms smell (right now they’re unbearable).

10.) Also, right before shark week is the only time I like salt (normally I can’t tolerate salty food).

11.) My grandmother was a Texan who fell in love with a Minnesotan during WWII. How she met my grandfather was one of the last stories she would tell while dementia was destroying her brain. The love and respect they demonstrated for each other is something I’ve always wanted to emulate in my own marriage.

12.) My grandmother converted to Catholicism because “Catholics don’t divorce” and my grandfather was Catholic.

13.) My grandfather was my hero when I was a kid. He served in the Navy during WWII and became a professor with help from the GI Bill. He and my grandmother raised 7 kids.

14.) Both of my parents came from Catholic families with 7 children.

15.) My wife and I waited about four years to change our last names thanks to confusing laws.

16.) Neither of us actually kept our birth last names. She shortened hers, and I took my mom’s maiden name.

17.) On my mom’s side of the family only my female cousins have my mother’s maiden name. (This is one big reason why I took it, so it’ll be passed on to another generation)

17.) Next August we’ll have been married FIVE years. It both feels like it’s been forever and like we just got married.

18.) Our wedding happened on the hottest day of the year in Iowa.

19.) We have a “favorite” rest-stop in Iowa that we visit every time we go there.

20.) We are huge dorks when we get into a happy mood together and don’t care. 🙂

21.) Writing code for a living (which is what I do) is basically my dream job.

22.)  When I was doing my undergraduate I was obsessed with gaming and invented a programming language to handle animation of sprites.

23.) My favorite Final Fantasy is FFVI.

24.) I love some songs that are trite and cheesy.

25.) Before I met Latte I mostly knew David Bowie (her all time favorite musician) from the Labyrinth. I mean, I knew he did other stuff, but 1970s music has never been my thing.

26.) I introduced Latte to both The Labyrinth and The Princess Bride.

27.) The one giftcard I’ve ever won online was used to purchase a DVD of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. It was a wise choice.

28.) I didn’t come out of the closet as a lesbian until I was 24 years old.

29.) I identified as a bisexual when I was a teenager, until I came out as just being a lesbian.

30.) I did not get my driver’s license until I was 18.

31.) I didn’t have texting on my cell phone until 2011.

32.) I’ve never been ticketed for speeding.

33. ) I built a computer by myself as a teenager.

34.) I moderated a Pokemon message board as a teen.

35.) I also had a stalker then, a boy we kept banning because he’d spam stupid stuff.

36.) He was ten so it was more funny than anything else.

37.) I still keep in contact with some of the old members of that board.

38.) I know how to do most anything in commandline or at least without a mouse.

39.) The game MYST impacted me greatly. If I get a tattoo it will contain imagery from that series.

40.) If I’m told I can’t do something, I will find a way to do it.

41.) This lead to me winning the award for “best programmer” at a computer camp I went to as a young teen.

42.) When I was a kid, I’d spend summers doing various classes, often I’d be the only girl in the class (rocket building/comic-ing), but other times I’d be in a class full of girls (fashion/makeup).

43.) I’ve retained exactly nothing from the makeup class, I generally just use chapstick.

44.) I’ve worked in a place where all my immediate coworkers belonged to the same church, and that church audited their members’ financial records and practiced shunning(creepy).

45.) For our first date, Latte and I went bowling.

46.) Neither of us remember who won. 🙂 I like to think we both did.

47.) I spent my study hall in high school hacking out CGI perl code, and it was awesome.

48.) As a boy, my old boss had a pet camel named Moses.

49.) On our first date I told Latte about that.

50.) She’s been amused by me ever since.