I am having lunch with a few photographer friends tomorrow, and since we don’t have a lot of time to meet, much less eat (definitely in the thick of the Busy Season), I thought I might check out their blogs so that I could be more up to speed with their work, lives, etc. – y’know, cheat and pretend that I’ve been following their lives a bit more. Anyway, while perusing, I saw that I was tagged on James & Meredith Walters’ blog. About 2 months ago. Oops. Blog Tag: to borrow words from their post, the concept of blog tag is that you tag a person who then has to post eight things most people might not know about them – then they tag others to do the same… So, my 8 things that most people would not know: 1. I grew up in Germany – I was born there and lived in several cities there until I was 11 years-old, then moved every couple years after that until I moved away to college. Army brat. I swore again & again that as soon as I was an adult and was able to make my own decisions (arms usually crossed while declaring this particular statement), I would find just one place to live and never, ever move again. So after college, I joined Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and traveled nearly 100% of the time for the next four years, moving in and out of six different apartments along the way. Voluntarily. 2. I am a vegetarian (that, a lot of people know) – but I’m also a vegetarian who really cannot stand quite a lot of vegetables. The big offenders – eggplant, squash, zucchini, bleccchh. I also truly despise oyster mushrooms, or any of those mushrooms where you have to really pull with your teeth to disengage the bite from the rest of the food. 3. After my husband and I had been married a year, we decided to plan a trip to Africa for 3 weeks. After much research into ticket pricing, though, we realized that it would barely cost more to buy a Round The World Trip. The deal is that you can travel anywhere you want up to a year, as long as you travel in one direction until you return home. Long story short, 3 weeks became 4 months and instead of just Africa, we added the rest of the world. We did the whole trip in extremes – backpacking and staying in $3/night places, camping on the beach, hiking for days without a shower – and then we would check into the best hotel in the country before flying first class to the next destination (first class hotels and flights all courtesy of rewards points for business travel!!). All in all our itinerary: Vietnam, Thailand, India, Nepal / Turkey, Israel / South Africa, Zimbabwe / Peru, Ecuador / Costa Rica. 4. I taught my daughter to read. I am very proud of this. 5. I once watched my little brother (now bigger but still younger) walk across what he thought was a pretty-colored road to get to some pigs on the other side – and then vanish. We were about 7 and 5 years old at the time, and we were touring a cheese processing farm, and the road he thought he was crossing was actually a thick, multi-colored bacteria pond of runoff waste. Somehow he was able to pop back up out of the muck and grab a hold of land, but not before he had swallowed tons of this disgusting bacteria culture stuff. I remember feeling pleased that he had not, in fact, died, but also heavily disturbed to have to sit next to him in the backseat while he threw up cheese-making waste for hours and hours. And hours. 6. My husband and I talked on the phone for two weeks after an initial conversation related to a work project. He was based in Charlotte, I was based in Columbus. We had never seen each other but struck up this fantastic, immediately familiar friendship. We decided to meet in Chicago at a bar and leave it to chance as to whether we’d be able to pick the other one out. So his plane got delayed for hours, and since I was, uh, in a bar, I felt like I really should be polite and engage in their liquid offerings. To sum those hours up, by the time he had finally landed in O’Hare, I already knew that unless he was a total troll, we might very well become more than just friends. Turns out he was gorgeous (even more so today, I swear) and we picked out our wedding date about 36 hours later. True story. 7. My 3 1/2 year old son refers to my 6 year-old daughter as “my lovely sister”. I am not even sure where he picked that up but since he got the same beaming response from both his mom and sister, he’s kept it up. So if I say, “Caleb, are you ready to go?” He will reply, “Yeah but I need my shoes and we have to find my lovely sister.” 8. Exercise is my drug. People ask me all the time where I find the energy to workout, but for me it is my pure energy giver. If I have to skip a few days in a row, I just feel exhausted and worn out and so not like myself. Luckily, I married a man who not only understands but feels the same way, and I believe this shared respect for fitness is a huge part of why we are so happy together. That and he’s hot. Whew. That wasn’t so hard. I don’t know why I waited two months to know I had to post this. So my photographer blog tags out, all 8: Rachel Garrison Courtney Gray Erica Erck Amber Holritz Ulysses Brandy Cardarelli Kevin Milz Neil Boyd
