7 Unusual Things About Me

I've never done one of these posts before (they're sort of like a chain letter for blogging, only less annoying), but Elena aka French Toast Girl tagged me on her blog, which means I'm supposed to come up with 7 unusual things about myself. Here goes:

1) I'm a self-taught fire eater. Seriously. I've never met anyone else who does a fire eating routine, nor anyone else who ever wanted to learn. I think it's a lot of fun to extinguish flaming torches in my mouth and shoot big fireballs out of my mouth. But I only do it once or twice a year.

2) I went to college a year early, to attend a program called The Clarkson School at Clarkson University. It's for advanced high school seniors, and there were 78 of us from around the world (Australia, Africa, etc), all living in the dorms and taking regular freshman-level courses. At the end of the year, we'd graduated from high school and were ready to be Sophomores that fall. It was great.

3) I'm an Eagle Scout. I don't know how unusual that is, because there are a lot of Eagles in my line of work, but in the general population, I guess it is unusual.

4) I was born in Spain. Again, depends on the definition of unusual. Obviously lots of people are born in Spain... but most of them are probably Spaniards.

5) I'm a huge Theodore Roosevelt fan, and describe my political views as a "Roosevelt Republican." I'd vote for him in 08 if I could.

6) I once co-wrote an article titled "Everything We Know About Program Management We Learned From Punk Rock." It was published in Defense AT&L, then reprinted in Harpers and quoted in Reason Magazine. I met a lot of cool people through that article.

7) I do most of the cooking in my house (and food shopping, for that matter). It's just something I've always done. I enjoy cooking, experimenting and creating new things. Most of the time it comes out quite yummy.

So now I'm supposed to tag some people, but I'm out of time. Maybe I'll tag 'em later.