Ellen tagged me.

She tagged me a long ol’ time ago, but there have been about a zillion and one things going on here, and let’s just say that blogging fell down the priority list in a freefall that most skydivers would envy. :)

So here are the rules, as she put them:

Ellen has tagged me with “8 Very Random Things.”Okay, this is how it works. Once you are tagged, you must:

A) Link to the person who tagged you.

B) Post the rules before your list.

C) List 8 random things about yourself.

D) At the end of the post you must tag and link to 8 other people.

E) Visit their blogs and leave a comment letting them know they’ve are it.

Since I don’t play by the rules, I’m probably not going to tag/link 8 more people.  This makes me a party pooper.  But I think most of the people I would tag have probably already been tagged, and I hate being repetitive.

But eight things — that I can do. :)

1.  I only drink bottled water now that I’m out here in america’s heartland, because our water?  ORANGE.  No, seriously.  I thought water was kind of clear and water-colored, but noooo.  So Aquafina it is.

2.  I still keep an art journal, but rarely these days.

3.  I used to dye my hair.  Then I stopped, and it looked more like I dyed it than when I DID dye it.  (No, seriously.  It comes out dark and goes blonde after a few inches.  It’s just the way it’s always been on my head.  There’s a REASON I gave into the temptation to dye it.)  Of course, now, it’s peppered with more silver than my regular color, so I kind of hate it a little.  Which reminds me, I really should get it dyed again.  Yipes.

4.  I have a lot of books.  And by “a lot of books”, I mean, “about to be crushed by falling stacks” a lot of books.  I tend to not read them, though.  I buy them because I *want* to have time to read, and I *want* to know what’s in them.  Then I forget I have them.  Go figure.

5.  The car accident in 2003 (hit by a drunk driver, nasty head wound) left me with random periods of aphasia, which means that there are times I know what I want to say, but I forget words altogether.  Or they come out garbled.  Not so good for a writer, huh?  If I ever post something that looks just a little like an epileptic gerbil may have just spasmed on the keyboard, that’s probably what it is.

6.  I’m a BPAL freak.  I resisted, but the stinkies, they dragged me in.  My collection is only slightly less obscene than my yarn collection, and that’s even getting closer in obscenity.    But it also means I smell different on any given day.

7.  I used to climb mountains.  I did this because it was Tuesday.  Now, I barely get out of this chair.  Something tells me that way of living was healthier, and I wish we lived close enough that I could do it again.

8.  Someday, I hope to be an amalgam of my mom and my paternal grandmother.  My mom was one of those uber-mom housewives before the days of Flylady and Martha Stewart and soccer moms — she had a day for everything, and the sink was always clean and the beds were always made and she never panicked when someone came over unexpectedly.  My grandmother sewed everything in her house, refinished furniture, gardened with a thumb so green she could bring dead things back to life, and was a master Archer.  And she had the best fruit salad I’ve ever had.

So there we have it.  Eight strange, random things about me.

In other news, I’ve been knitting.  (Duh.)  This is a shot of the koigu Chevron Scarf that I’ve been working on intermittently, taken at the hotel in Bettendorf, IA last weekend when we were there for one of J’s shows:

It’s actually pink and blue and grey and brown, but the hotel lights were kind of off.  For most of the evening pre-show, I sat on the bed and knitted, watching America’s Next Top Model (it was either that or SportsCenter, and I wanted noise, see….).  All in all, a pretty good weekend. :)

I’ll get better pictures sometime soon.