Beautiful Blogger Award

As my friend over at Rock 'n' Roll Gourmet has bestowed upon me the Beautiful Blogger Award, as required by the terms of the award I must now reveal seven things about myself. (Btw, her blog has some of the best recipes and cooking tips, check it out)  I'll try to make it "seven little known facts about myself", but that is pretty difficult.  Here it goes...

1.  I almost drowned when I was about three years old.  I don't remember it, but I've heard the story from my family several times.  I was visiting my grandparents and they had a man-made pond across the street from their house.  I went across the street with my grandfather so that he could feed the fish.  Apparently he wasn't very good at watching three year olds because they next thing he heard was a splash.  He turned around only to see my hair floating in the water.  He grabbed my hair and pulled me out.  Great babysitting huh?

2.  I played drums in my high school marching band.  I should warn you now that this is just the first of several nerd facts about myself.  I was in the percussion section in middle school and tried out for marching band in high school and got second chair so I played snare.  My senior year I was drum-line Captain and Band President.  Hey, I may have been a dork but at least I was good at it.

3. At my high school graduation I read "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day as a poem.  I was third in my class, so as a consolation prize for not getting an automatic scholarship I got to read a poem.  Everyone always reads something boring so I read a Green Day song instead.  It was a new song then and so not nearly as dorky a thing to do then as it sounds now. 

4.  I got married at the age of 19 to my high school sweetheart.  Boy was that a mistake.  We got divorced a year and a half later.  He went from being a smart dude to flunking out of college the first semester, getting a good paying job and then quitting because he didn't want to work a lot, and he'd go clubbing with his friends without telling me.  In retrospect I think he was probably doing drugs too but I was too naive back then to be able to tell.  Young people do silly things. 

5.  While in college I worked as a student research assistant at the Archaeology Lab.  It was fun and boring at the same time.  I got a chance to catalogue the remains of Native Americans before the remains were to be returned to the burial sites.  How many people get the chance to work with human remains that are thousands of years old?  But, most of the time my job consisted of the more mundane task of counting pottery shards (pieces of pottery), which by the time I had quit numbered in the tens of thousands of pieces.

6.  While in college I also had to get up early in time to make the doughnuts.  I worked at Dunkin Donuts and later at a bakery preparing and serving donuts.  I actually think that was a fun job, mostly because coffee and doughnuts are two very awesome things.  I probably had the most unhealthy eating habits at that time. While at work I could eat as many doughnuts and drink as much coffee as I wanted.  If I had stuck with that job I'd be as big as a house.

7.  I play WOW.  For those of you who haven't arisen to epic-dork status yet, that means World of Warcraft.  I don't profess to be any good at it, which is even worse if you ask me.  If you're going to be a geek at least do a good job of it.  I haven't played regularly enough to get the experience in yet though.  I've played off and on whenever I've had a good computer and good internet access as well as tons of free time, which you can imagine I didn't have for most of my time in the Army.  Now I've gone back to playing, thanks largely to my new and improved computer and huge monitor.  I've got a Night Elf Hunter named Yusra on the Emerald Dream server, but I'm only level 52 now...I know, I've got work to do.

I realize that most of these facts have to do with things that happened over ten years ago, but most people know about me being in the Army for the past six years, being deployed twice, etc.  Also, I pretty much just started writing things in chronological order and didn't get much further than college.

So, next I must pass on this award to five blogs that I like.  Several of the blogs I like have already received this award, so this will go to those that have yet to get it which only equals three.  Here it goes:
- Cognoramus is a great blog by an Army friend of mine.  He writes on a variety of topics but is particularly knowledgeable when it comes to the Military, financial advice, and politics.  He's an intelligent guy with a lot of insight.
- The Southern Fried Skeptic always has intelligent, insightful, and biting comments on current events, politics, and religion.  Even if you don't agree with him, it's still thought-provoking and he has a lot of valid points.
- That's News to Me! hasn't posted in a while, but when she does it's pretty cool stuff.  She's a writer/journalist type so her writing is top-notch. 

Thanks to everyone that reads my blogs.  If you have a blog that you want me to check out, just let me know.