Tagged! And Tagged Again!

My friend Burfica, (you've probably noticed I mention her a lot! LOL! She's the reason I got into this blogging thing!) AND my new friend Canadian Flake both tagged me for this new game. So here goes!

The game asks the tagees to post 7 things about themselves that those that read their blog probably didn't know about them. So here are mine:

1) I am the oldest of 4 children. I have 2 younger brothers and a "baby" sister. One brother is a paramedic in a small town west of where I live and he and his wife have 6 boys, ranging in age from 1 year to 16 years. Yes, their house is total chaos! Next in line is my youngest brother who, at 32 still lives at home with my parents. He is a junior accountant and seems to have no interest in moving out of mom and dad's place! LOL! He did spend a year sub-letting his friend's apartment and really enjoyed it, but when he tried to find his own apartment after the friend returned, he decided the rents were too high and moved back home. My sister is the artsy one of the family and is a professional student. She is currently working on her Masters Degree in Renaissance History and has been excepted into the PhD program in Modern History at the University of Toronto. She lives just off campus in a tiny bachelorette apartment in downtown Toronto and just loves it there. Of all my siblings, she is the one I get along with most as we share a lot of common interests like history and music and singing. My youngest brother and I get along pretty well too, but I rarely talk to the other brother. He has ticked me off just a few too many times in the past couple of years and his boys are just too much to take at family gatherings.

2) I was a star track & field athlete in Grade 8. I ended up "officially" the 3rd fastest sprinter in my region, and "unofficially" the fastest. Unofficially because it was later found out that the 1st and 2nd place finishers were running in the intermediate race when they should have been in the senior race, but the school sports association refused to change the results. My unofficial best time for the 100 meter sprint was 10.8 seconds and my official best time was 11.2 seconds. Those are almost Olympic Qualifying times and I was only 12 at the time. In Grade 9, I ran against a number of black boys my age who beat the pants off me (figuratively speaking there) and later I found out that one of them was Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who lost his gold medal at the Seoul Olympics because he cheated by using steroids. Considering my memories of him from Grade 9, he was cheating then too - I've never seen 13 - 14 year olds with arms and legs that big before or since! Sad that even in middle school and high school sports, you have to cheat to win!

3) I played trumpet for 8 years in middle and high school. (Back when I was in high school, Ontario schools had 13 grades - now they only have 12 - just like everyone else) In my senior year, I was invited to audition for Canada's National Youth Symphony Orchestra, but my parents refused to support that. By the end of high school I could play all the brass instruments and was actually teaching the junior grades as part of my "class work" as I was 1 of only 2 Grade 13 music students in the school. Like Flake, I wanted to study music in post secondary education, but again, my parents were not supportive and so I chose not to follow that path. Looking back, I really wish I had!

4) Tying in with number 3 above, I also am a singer. I developed a love of singing while in the high school choir and it's the only type of music performance I still actively pursue. I am a baritone (stuck between tenor and bass) so most of the singing I do is either for church or classical in nature. Unfortunately, 95% of all male pop singers today are either tenors or countertenors (higher than tenor) and I just can't sing their stuff! Too bad the Crash Test Dummies lead singer went so wacko... he was a bass and I used to love singing along with him on the radio, but when he showed up at a concert in Toronto wearing a bra, I decided not to support that band any longer! I also liked to sing along with Mark Knopfler of the Dire Straits as he was a baritone as well. My voice isn't rich enough to be an Elvis impersonator, but some of his songs are well within my range too.

5) I broke my right arm twice when I was young. Both times by falling after doing some stupid stunts. The first time I was 8 years old and fell off the metal roof of an old woodshed. Well, "fell" isn't the right word, since I was actually trying to JUMP OFF the roof! The wind tumbled me a bit and I landed on my back and shattered my elbow. I was supposed to have surgery to put in an artificial joint, but when the surgeon opened up my arm, he said all the pieces were big enough to put back together "like a jigsaw puzzle". So, lucky me was spared all the subsequent surgeries that would have been required to keep my elbow "caught up" with the rest of me as I grew. The second time I broke my arm I was visiting my grandparents in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was 11 yrs old and I had flown from Toronto to Winnipeg by myself to stay with them for 2 weeks. I had gone to a friend's place the first weekend and we had gone bike riding in a large construction site nearby. I was riding a "BMX" style bike with the shocks and big knobby tires while my friends were riding the old 10-speed racer style bikes. THEY made it down the hill ok, but I hit a rock with my thicker tires and bounced out over an 8 foot cliff. I landed on my hands and knees, but my right hand had hit a rock and snapped my wrist like a dry twig. Needless to say, the rest of my stay with my grandparents was somewhat subdued! LOL! Later on in life I would fall yet again doing some free rock climbing and dislocated my left shoulder. Needless to say, after all that, heights now give me the major heebee jeebies! As my dad likes to say, "I now prefer Terra Firma, the more firma, the less terra!"

6) I used to be a professional portrait photographer, but quit because it was so hard to make a living from it. I still love to take pictures of scenery, trains, cars, planes, flowers, my kids, etc. I got a decent digital camera a year ago and have been having fun learning what I can do with it. I would love to be able to get an SLR digital camera and really go crazy, but I have to save for quite a while before I can afford one! I would really like to get back into professional photography and get my studio back off the ground. I did a bunch of commercial product photography while I was working in the printing industry, and found that I have a knack for it and I enjoyed doing it too! Easiest money I ever made, but since all my 35mm camera equipment was stolen several years ago, I haven't been able to rebuild. Right now I'm toying with getting some photos published in calendars and magazines, but I have a ways to go learning my digital camera before my pictures measure up to those lofty standards!

7) I am one of the world's worst pack-rats! LOL! I collect EVERYTHING! I have collections of ball caps (interestingly enough, not ONE baseball team cap in the bunch! LOL!) model trains, books, souvenirs, mugs, figurines from movies and video games, CDs, old calendars, magazines, lapel pins, old electronic junk (I MIGHT be able to use some parts from this...), and the list goes ever on. One of my favourite sayings is "The thing you call junk is the item I will need two days after it is thrown out!" My wife is very tolerant of my collecting, but every once in a while she gets ruthless and makes me throw out a bunch of stuff. Yep, I usually end up wanting something from that pile about a week after the garbage truck has taken it away! LOL! Oh well!

So there you have it. 7 things you might not have known about me. Thanks for tagging me Burf and Flake! I know I'm supposed to tag some people now, but I don't know all that many people in blogger land, so I'll leave it for now. I hope you enjoyed my expose!