Voluntary Meme

Shannon put this one out there and left it as a voluntary meme. (Which I truly appreciate.)

Describe 10 "weird or different experiences in your blog,"

1) I grew up living in front of a garbage dump. We had a 1.5 acre piece of land and the dump bordered it on two sides. Some of the happiest memories of my life were created in that place - running free through the hills and valleys, never thinking about the refuse buried beneath me. You see, the land closest to our house was the oldest part of the landfill and they had stopped dumping new garbage there years before. So, to me, it was no big deal. Except on butcher day. God what a smell!

2) I get really really bad deja vu. Knock you to your knees, make you nauseous kind of deja vu. Funny thing is I don't believe in mystical stuff, so the theory I have is that my mind is always thinking through every possible combination of experiences that I'm bound to hit on something similar in reality sooner or later. Knowing this doesn't make the experience any less unnerving though.

3) I once broke the knuckle in my right index finger waving at my friends. It was a big double-handed wave because we were out climbing on a little island and they'd climbed to the top. While I was at the bottom I did the big wave and clod that I am, smashed my hands together accidentally. I heard a sickening crunch and for the next few weeks I had to wear a brace on my hand. It looked like I was perpetually pointing at people.

4) Driving on a back country road in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we came around a corner to find a large porcupine waddling his way down the middle of the road. The road was so narrow, and the trees were so thick to either side, we couldn't pass the little bugger without hitting him. Loathe to do that - both because it would have been mean and because running over a porkie means getting a flat tire - we followed behind him for at least a half mile (or about a half-hour). Always down the middle of the road, never wavering to one side or the other. We honked, and he ignored us - grousing the whole time. Finally, when he was good and ready, he waddled away through the underbrush. Oh, and if you've never heard a porcupine, they sound like grumpy old men.

5) Just outside of Marquette, MI is Mt Sugarloaf (no, not that one). One night I had some friends visiting from back home and we decided to climb Sugarloaf in the dark. It's not particularly hard since there is a groomed trail almost all the way up and the moon was out. When we reached the top, we were just going to hang out and catch up with each other. Just the three of us lounging on top of the mountain, with the lights of Marquette sparkling in the distance and an ore carrier slowly chugging toward the harbors. It was a beautiful night, but we never expected to see a shooting star. While we were exclaiming over the first, another fell. And then another. Out of the blue, we were treated to a meteor shower. It was the second most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. The first was the northern lights from that same location.

6) As near as I can piece together, on January 11th, 1994, I was headed to work an hour early when I ran a red light. My little Chevy Citation was t-boned by an S-10 pickup doing 55 in a 45. From the newspaper photograph, he hit me square at the doors and pushed them in about 8 inches. Serendipity intervened that day. It just so happen that two ambulance drivers had been pulling into a Denny's for lunch when they noticed the parking lot was pretty crowded so they opted for KFC instead. They were just sitting down with their food when someone ran inside shouting that there'd been a terrible accident outside. The response time to my accident was less than five minutes. It intervened again when it turned out that the EMTs were experienced, and they knew that although there was another hospital closer, the best hospital for my types of injuries was only ten minutes farther out. Quick response and quick thinking is probably the best reason for why I'm sitting here right now and why I still have a brain to type these words.

7) Way back when before the internet existed, my friends and I would chat on our university's mainframe computer. There were about 20 computers in the mainframe lab and another half dozen scattered around the campus. Often there would be a core 5 or 6 of us sitting in one room talking to each other on the computer for hours on end. It was during one of these long chat sessions when I made a comment that one of the users down campus in the dorms took the wrong way. He immediately logged off. Ten minutes later, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to step outside. That is probably the closest I've ever come to getting into a fist fight. (He never lived it down either. It wouldn't have been half as embarassing for him if we hadn't already met in person, and he didn't already know I was a girl.)

8) About ten years later, I was a regular AOL chat junkie. In the chat room I frequented, we had one particularly snerty person who would come in and harass us on a regular basis. Once again, I let my fingers get me into trouble, only this time instead of asking me to step outside, the person in question threatened my life. He went into great detail about how he was going to hunt me down and kill me. Kind of an empty threat when you consider he had no idea who I was or where I was from, but still scary to think about.

9) I don't know how weird it is, but I've moved 6 times since June of 2001. Michigan to Florida. Florida to Utah. In Utah, I changed apartments once. Utah to Colorado. In Colorado, I've changed housing twice. Pretty strange when you think about the fact that from 1971 to 1995, I lived in the same house (other than going to away to college - but my legal address was still the same).

10) Being the youngest of five kids, and quite a bit younger than all of them, my siblings delighted in talking me into doing things. The strangest among these were: convincing me to eat dog food, convincing me not to drink root beer (because it was beer, and I wasn't allowed to have beer), wrapping me tightly in a blanket and watching me bounce around the room. If those don't at least amount to one of these ten things, I don't know what does.

Believe it or not, I'm a pretty sedate person. Not many unusual experiences in this life. Coming up with the last 4 were harder than I thought they'd be. So with that in mind, I'll leave the meme up to any of you who want to volunteer.

=oD