For this meme, I’m supposed to tell you 6 things you wouldn’t know about me from reading my blog. I’ve had my blog for 8 years, but I don’t think anyone will be checking so maybe I can cheat? Or I can just blog about anything that has happened in the last 8 months. Just kidding. I’ll try to be a little more creative than that.

Some of the most basic things you know are: I’m a hockey goalie, hobby photographer, a mom, business owner, and a geek. Let’s see if we can expand on that.

I skipped a grade.

Most people don’t know this about me, actually. I graduated high school when I was 16. Because my birthday falls in September I started Kindergarten when I was 4, but halfway through Kindergarten I started going to both first grade and my Kindergarten class, then the next year I went to second grade. So, I essentially skipped a grade.

Having done so early on didn’t make much difference to me while I was going to school. I’m pretty short so it was more that trait that made me different from everyone else rather than my age. Until I got to high school that is. I wasn’t permitted to do a lot of the things my friends were because of my age (and my parent’s wishes). I did well in school though, and I never really had to try very hard. Except at history, even then I only needed to put forth some effort. And only because I hated it. Oh, and Algebra. Yuck.

I worked on F-15 Eagles.

I grew up in a military family and I moved a lot. So, when I graduated at 16 I got a part time job and started going to college, but quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted to (work with computers) as a career in Smalltown, North Carolina. So I joined the Air Force. My step-dad was a Marine and there was no way in Hell I was going to do that, and the Army and Navy weren’t appealing to me. I signed up shortly after I turned 17 (which, incidentally, is also when I moved away from home) and my mom had to authorize it. Two months later, March of 1993, off I went to basic training.

I went in with a guaranteed job field of “Electronics”, and in basic training I chose my job. The only reason I chose my job was because a) it was in Colorado and I really really wanted to go there, and b) because it sounded cool. I went to tech school at Lowry, AFB (which no longer exists) and trained for F-15 Avionics for about 10 months before heading off to England for my first assignment. I was a F-15 (C and E) Electronics Warfare Technician for the next 3 years.

I love my liquor.

Not in a bad way, but I love scotch, gin, vodka, you name it. I’m allergic to some beer and some wine. I’m allergic to sulfa and there are sulfites in some beer and wine. That said, I’m very careful about which ones I drink and I can usually tell immediately if I’m allergic or not. I’m a beer snob; you won’t ever catch me drinking anything lighter than amber and certainly not anything with “light” attached to the name. I love wine too, although it seems to affect my allergies more than beer. I stick to bordeaux or margeaux, which don’t affect me.

I collect Stephen King novels.

The Shining was the first SK novel I read — when I was 9. I think it’s kind of funny that I went from Encyclopedia Brown and Judy Blume books to Stephen King. I started collecting SK novels when I was 15 and I have all of them to date in hardback. I don’t have his non-fiction stuff, and I have one or two of the softcover only books, but I have all of his actual novels. Misery is the only book I haven’t read all the way through, it was way too boring. I actually enjoyed the movie way more than the book, which is pretty rare. IT is my favorite, and The Talisman is close behind (although that was a collaboration).

I’ve always been a fan of horror, and I enjoy just about any horror flick, even if it’s cheesy.

You will die if you hear me sing.

I have the worst singing voice, but I really wish I could sing well. It makes me happy to sing, I just need to turn up the radio so I can’t hear myself.

I’m a professional back-end web geek.

You may know I run my own IT consulting company, but you may not know that I know a lot about back-end support of IIS. I managed the infrastructure for a startup that went from 1 server to well over 100 in less than 2 years. Multiple web farms responsible for millions of dollars of revenue per month. If we were down for 5 minutes during peak traffic, that was tens of thousands of dollars lost. Yes, stressful, but I also got pretty damn good at what I did. I was the “web goddess”.

I’ve built websites for clients, although I’d much rather do it for fun. I prefer the back-end support side of things. Managing IIS, virtual sites, dedicated IP sites, isapi_rewrite, web-farms, DNS, host headers…I just love it! I only wish I knew more about PHP and Apache. I know nothing about it and have never had time to learn.

Next up: I’m tagging these 6 people!

Continuing with the meme, I’m tagging 6 additional people.  Have at it, peeps!

• @girlmonkey at Herdingsquirrels.com
• @chrisainsworth at Chris Ainsworth
• @bartonomus at bartonomusings
• @aruni at Entrepremusings
• @loblolly at Talk Hockey to Me
• @hieronymus at A Trifle One-Sided

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