A Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen random things about me. . .

1. I was in two separate bookstores last weekend and I didn't buy anything for myself either time. I did buy books for a baby shower, however.

2. The books I took with me to Utah:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Warlock
Indiana

3. My eyes are free agents and don't work in conjunction with one another. I find this a highly efficient system since I'm near-sighted in one and far-sighted in the other, but I evidently don't have as much depth perception as it takes to do those Magic Eye puzzles that get published with the Sunday comics.

4. When I was in high school I wore one contact lens.

5. I was taught to play clarinet in elementary school by a former Our Gang star. (Greenbriar wrote recently of Priscilla Calls' steadfast determination not to talk about it with her students.) Most of my friends in high school were in band and we were total snobs about it.

6. Part of me was relieved when my daughter, a trumpet player, decided not to be in high school band. The band at her school did not use the glide step and it would have been painful for me to be subjected to any other marching style (I did not tell her this at the time).

6. I was editor of the high school newspaper for two years. This gave me license to skip class--a lot--to go to the newspaper office in town where I worked as a stringer.

7. The first money I ever had I spent on two Johnny Cash albums.

8. The first book I ever read on my own was Green Eggs and Ham.

9. I don't have any wisdom teeth.

10. I met my husband in a bar in my hometown the summer after my freshman year at college. Among other things, I liked the fact that he wasn't from my hometown. But. . . it turned out that my mother's best friend/our next door neighbor had dated L.'s father in high school (last girlfriend before he met L.'s mother in college) and the publishers at the newspaper where I worked had played football with his dad in high school. I almost didn't go out with him because of the chorus of people telling me I should!

11. My son was Oberon in a fifth grade production of Midsummer's Night Dream. He was adorable.

12. For several years I had the idea that Dwight Yoakam was a Ray Stevens/Jerry Crowder type--more comedian than singer. In my defense, I was terribly sleep-deprived after R. was born (the year Dwight's first single hit the radio), I listened to the radio only in the car, and the announcers always did say his name as if there was a joke involved. I didn't become an obsessed fan until well after his fourth album was out, when I stumbled upon a Just Lookin' For a Hit tape in Brendles and realized the error of my ways.

13. I quit listening to country radio a good decade ago. My favorite radio station is WNCW, out of Isothermal Community College in Spindale.