Sock names, freaky knees, and sniper rifles. Fun!

It seems I've gotten the virtual thwap for the Seven Weird Things meme. The odd thing is, while most folks consider me plenty freaking weird, I feel perfectly normal, so I'm not sure which seven things to single out as being odd. Mother, for example, thinks the simple fact that I knit is weird. This coming from a woman who owns six horses. Anyway, on with the sideshow...

1. If y'all have read this blog for more than five minutes, you'd know this one, but anyway...I name my socks. Not the machine made ones, of course, or the weird kitty socks my mom gave me for Christmas, but the ones I've knit myself. I figure that I spend 12-16 hours with them, personally creating every single one of the ten thousand or more loops that make up their whole existence, and I enjoy the process & the yarn so very much that they become like weird fibery friends. Besides, I've got *lots* (LOTS)(really, you have no idea) of sock yarn, and saying "the Caoimhe socks" is so much nicer than saying "the 342nd pair of blue socks".

2. My knees bend backwards. Yup, they're more or less double jointed, and can bend backwards like the hocks on my cat, though not *quite* as far. Entertaining for me, creepy as heck to most other folks.

3. I've got an unnatural attachment to my books. I'm not at all the type of person to reread books, since I pretty much remember everything (and it's not much fun to know the ending right from the start), but I can't bear to part with them, even though I know I'll probably never pick them up again. They're my friends too, they take me places I've only dreamed of, and I hope that one day they'll take my children for a ride too. In the meantime, I've got many (MANY) hundreds of books in a 900 square foot apartment. Fortunately, my beloved is a patient man.

4. I don't particularly like my food to touch each other. I don't go so far as buying plates with separators in them, but I really prefer to keep things segregated on my plate. The idea of everything smushed up together is nauseating.

5. I took a class at Northern Arizona University when I was fifteen. As a result, I have a boatload of continuing education credits in the field of education that I'll probably never do anything with. Needless to say, I was the youngest person there.

6. I'm a hardcore hermit at heart. If I had a billion dollars, I'd buy a nice huge chunk of land in the middle of nowhere, lease a part of it to farmers so it would be useful, and live in the center with my sweet little family and NO NEIGHBORS. I never used to be this bad...its the idiots who live near me who've caused this extremism. Really. I have wild fantasies of sitting in my bedroom window with a high powered sniper rifle. Heh.

7. Okay, maybe the seventh weird thing is that I can't think of a seventh weird thing! I'm sure those of you that know me can think of a dozen more, but nothing's really standing out as odd to me. Ooh, I just thought of something bizarre...I'm allergic to grass. Yup, regular ol' grass. Actually, I believe it's technically the chlorophyll that I'm allergic to, but whatever. Basically, I break out like crazy on my elbows & knees, and it's kind of itchy, but it's not respiratory, so I more or less ignore it. I've never taken any medication for it, and while it's definitely all kinds of weird looking (I got made fun of like crazy in grade school because of it), at this stage in my life, I just don't give a hoot any more. I'm grateful that that's all it is, rather than some of the awful respiratory allergies I've seen in other folks. I'm also seriously allergic to wasp stings, but since I generally try to avoid those, it isn't really an issue.

Yup, my weirdness seems like a colourful brand of normal to me. I imagine at least a few of you are backing slowly away from your computers by now, but that's okay. I like being me.

*Fyi, a meme, so far as I know it, is a weird internet-based thingy that gets passed around from person to person. Some of them are cheesy or lame, some are really insightful, and some are just plain bizarre. It's usually a questionnaire sort of thing, or a fill-in-the-blanks sort of like, like the above. You post it on your blog, and then tag other people so they'll post it, and their respective answers, on theirs, and so on & so forth. Some folks are downright obnoxious about them, but I try not to be. Um, even though this is the second one in a row...ahem. At any rate, I try not to tag specific people, but for this, Christine, I'm making an exception. Hee! Consider yourself tagged. Now go fly your freak flag, girl. ;-)