Meme of Eight

Hmm, this is a first for me as a blogger. I've seen memes on other blogs, of course, and always thought that they were a little bit too chain-lettery for my taste. But recently I have begun see the utility behind them--they help to weave new threads throughout the blogosphere, and generally they do provide bloggers a chance to reveal information that they probably otherwise wouldn't. And now Sean Ferrell has tagged me with the "Meme of Eight," so here goes.

The rules for this meme are simple:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their 8 things and post these rules.
3. At the end choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.

Here are my 8 things:

1. My wife and I have three cats: Annalise, Elwyn, and Perry. We had a fourth, Morgan, but he died of leukemia this past December. He was still just a kitten, barely 14 months old.
2. I usually have trouble sitting down to write before 8 or 9 PM, but I'm very productive after that point. I don't know why.
3. In high school I took double the normal load of English/Writing classes, as I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but when I went to college I decided to get my degree in Computer Science instead. I needed to have a steady day job until the writing started to pay off.
4. I took five years of Latin, two of them college-level, but I still can't speak a bit of it and my vocabulary is pretty poor. But I'm pretty good with Latin grammar and analyzing poetry if I have my Latin-English dictionary with me.
5. I'm fairly picky about the TV I watch. For a large number of years, I didn't watch any at all. Now it's mostly older episodes of E.R..
6. My favorite dinosaur has been the velociraptor ever since I was a kid. I have several models of them even now.
7. I love the old Super Mario Bros. comics that were published by Valiant back in the 80's. The general consensus seems to be that they were very strange, but I grew up with them and so they don't seem that way to me.
8. I'm terrified of roller coasters, no matter how kids-oriented they are.

Here is my list of tags: Karen Mahoney, Colleen G., Chandra Rooney, Jason Pinter, Jamie Boud, Jeaniene Frost, Rachel Vincent, and Missy. A couple of these bloggers probably don't even know who I am, but I'm tagging them anyway because these are all blogs that you should definitely check out (although it looks like Missy's "The Incurable Disease Of Writing" is down at the moment, having been hacked. You can access her rss here).