Interesting Facts

Challenged by someone at work to come up with things that people might not necessarily know about me, I came up with the beginning of the following list (and added a few more):

• I know how to play the hammered dulcimer, although I will not be joining a bluegrass band anytime soon. The piano, flute and occasionally the tin whistle round out the instrument list.
• I suffer from mild narcolepsy.
• I purchased my own first computer when I was 11.
• As a child, I was so terrified of black toilet seats that I would scream hysterically when my mother tried to take me to public restrooms.
• I've never broken a bone, but once my brother closed the back of a hatchback station wagon with my head in the way.
• I've only been out of the country once, and just to Mackinaw Island in Canada.
• I was a manager at McDonald's for 3 years, starting the month before I turned 16.
• I dressed up as Grimace one year for a 4th of July parade.
• I have a fear of falling down stairs--not due to heights, but due to coordination deficiency.
• I have a vein on my right inner elbow shaped like the game Hangman.
• My brother and I have semi-matching moles in a triangular formation on our necks.
• I've been told by friends and strangers that I sometimes resemble Geena Davis.
• All my biological grandparents passed away before I was born.
• For over a year in junior high, a friend and I were so enamored with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that we wrote our own stories with the characters, and rarely watched the show because we enjoyed our version so much better.
• I'm so deathly afraid of snakes (and tarantulas) that I can't even look at them in cages at the zoo and avoid touching pictures of them in magazines.
• Two days after I got my first car, I hit a deer on the highway on the way back to college. I was so shocked I was stuttering when calling my dad from the gas station to let him know what happened and ask for advice.
• My reading vocabulary developed much faster than my pronunciation. To this day, I still discover words that I can understand and spell and never realized I didn't know how to say them properly. Examples from the past: chaos, faux, rendezvous, hors d'oevres, and most recently canapes.
• Due to an old fall, I have sensitive nerves in my left knee and can't kneel on it.