Four things you probably didn't know about me.

1. I learned how to gut a fish when I was 11 years old. The rule was, "You catch it, you gut it." What I did NOT have to do, however, was catch my own grasshoppers and put them on the hook. My daddy made my brothers do that for me. I just couldn't bring myself to stick a hook through a living insect with its little legs kicking. So why was it so easy to slit the fish and pull its guts out? I have no idea, but in my twisted young mind it was a completely different issue.

2. When I was in high school I refused to wear skirts or dresses. I wore jeans and that's all. I think I remember wearing a skirt one time, and then only because I had to when I was being inducted into the National Honor Society. Proms don't count because it goes without saying you're going to wear a dress, but if I could have gotten away with pants, I would have. Now I love dresses. Again with the twisted young mind.

3. My first real job was bussing tables in a seafood restaurant in the resort town I grew up in on the Jersey shore. I got the job because my mother went to church with the restaurant's owner. My first day of work I was carrying a tray of glasses to the front of the restaurant where we kept the stuff needed to set tables after they were cleared. I balanced the tray between my hip and the edge of the sideboard and was putting the glasses on the sideboard. I don't have to tell you what happened. Physics took over and half the glasses went crashing to the floor. Miraculously, I still had a job the next day and went on to work there another five summers. By the end of the first year, I could stack a tray with 9 dinners and carry it on one arm over my head.

4. I have never been a football fan. I liked the Steelers when I was in high school (back when Terry Bradshaw had hair) and went to all the high school games, but it was a social thing, not because I was any kind of sports fanatic. So when it was announced in my senior year that we would be playing co-ed touch football in gym, I was apathetic. The coach got us out in the parking lot (our football field was at the elementary school across town), picked teams, and assigned positions. He clapped his hands and said, "Okay. First and ten!" and I asked, "First and ten what?" He looked at me funny and said slowly, "First down, ten yards to go." And I asked, "What's a down?" He dropped his whistle and buried his face in his hands. I was the physics teacher's daughter. What did he expect?

Be thankful ~