Six Random Things

Kyla tagged me for this, WEEKS ago, but I moved and had no internet and then went away, and ... you know, life.

Here's the meme:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

1. I'm in the Starbucks near to daycare, and as I look up from reading a story online about the smartphone market, the founder and head guy at RIM--you know, that makes Blackberry phones--is standing next to me waiting for his cup of coffee. Hope he didn't see that 23% of smartphones will likely be Linux-driven by 2013.

2. Munchkin has been saying weird stuff: in the car on Sunday, she told me that "[Munchkin] is using the deer carcass." Yes, I confirmed with her. And she's been saying it a lot. I'm going to assume it's something from a book. Gulp.

3. In the past month, I have been carded TWICE at booze retail outlets, once at the Beer Store in a nearby town, as we were picking up a six pack of Alberta-brewed Big Rock Traditional for a barbecue. Then, about a week after that, when I popped into the giant LCBO near to my house to stock up on our house red, carded again! Dudes, I'm 35. I was wearing the same lime green sweater both times ... hold on, I'll find a photo. I wear it a LOT.

(this is October 2005--I'm about eight weeks pregnant, and making a face because everyone is drinking wine except me at Thanksgiving dinner)

4. Here are some appliances that are in my house but not functioning, because they need to be hooked up or retrofitted or replaced: furnace, stove, air conditioner, dishwasher, hot water tank, Munchkin's (new) ceiling fan. It's like camping, but in a giant, brick, expensive tent, in the middle of the city.

5. I'm reading a book called The Dirt on Clean, by Katherine Ashenberg--I expected to really like it, but I'm 50 pages in and getting annoyed. The text of the book is all blinged out with visual hoo-ha that you usually only see in magazines: pull quotes, side bar text, big shaded boxes with trivia lists in them, illustrations embedded willy-nilly. I like my magazines flashy, sure, but I like my books text-heavy and linear. I'm distracted and bothered to have to interrupt my reading of the main text to look at all the stuff all over the page above, under, and around the main text. Does the publisher think the book is just not interesting enough to merit reading in the old-fashioned way? Or am I over-reacting?

6. Evil, evil credit cards: we got the cheque for the profit on the old house yesterday, and last night, Pynchon and I ceremoniously paid off the credit card debt we dragged here from our Alberta student days, and lovingly nurtured through several moves and a wedding and a new baby and various financial derailments: card A? a little more than $12K (about 3K of that, I must say, was from this move, and another 2K is from my work). Card B? a little less than $9K. How did that happen to us? Never again. And it's paid.


Who am I going to link to? Patti, Cloud, Dawn, Cheryl, Naomicatgirl, and ManagerMom, because I don't know them very well, and how better than through random-fact memes?

Random fact 7: now that we have internet and I'm actually home, I discover that I have over 300 unread posts in my Bloglines. So I'm going to close my eyes, mark all as read, and start over. Forgive me if I missed something big: I'll try to catch up. I've missed this, by the way ...