10 Random Things

One of our administrators added a bonus challenge onto our 23 Things: Tell everyone 10 random things about yourself.

That's wonderful, really. But I have 2 minor problems. First, I have an unfortunate habit of thinking that everyone already knows everything about me. After all, since I know it surely everyone else does too, right? The other problem is that I like to tell stories, so I've totally lost track of which stories about me everyone's already heard and which ones are new to people.

So chances are I'm going to bore you with at least half of this post. Hopefully the other half will make up for it.

1. I was born in Cincinnati but moved to New Hampshire before I was a year old, so I'm a New Englander at heart if not by birth. It's a complete coincidence that I'm back in Ohio.

2. I've been a Red Sox fan since I was at least 6 (my favorite player was Jim Rice). My mother is a professional singer, and sang at an annual charity event where she was able to get me autographs of many former Red Sox greats (including Ted Williams), and also sang the National Anthem at Fenway park.

3. I started ringing tower bells at my home parish in Concord, NH when I was 9. I still ring the chime at Trinity Episcopal Church on the corner of Broad and Third and was written about in the Dispatch for it.

4. My father and I have climbed all 48 mountains in New Hampshire over 4000 feet elevation, and most of them we did together. This started when I was in junior high school and first got into hiking and woodsmanship and my father realized this was something we could do together during my teenage years. I know this went a long way to making my teen years much better than they might have been and bringing us closer together. We finally finished in 2003 when we climbed Mt. Moosilauke.

5. In college my summer job was working as a tour guide at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH.

6. In college I was very heavily involved in the theater: so much so that even though I graduated with only two half credits in drama, I co-won the departmental award. By the time my senior year rolled around there was literally no dramatic production on campus that I wasn't involved with. In addition to acting, I stage managed, directed, built and designed sets, hung and designed lights, and co-founded an improv comedy group that performed professionally (twice). I even used those skills to work as a master carpenter for Actor's Company of Pennsylvania for a few months after leaving college.

7. I first met my wife while she was still married because her ex-husband was friends with my best friend in college (it's not as much of a soap opera as it sounds).

8. I have a 19 year old stepdaughter who's currently attending Rochester Institute of Technology. When I moved in with them she was 6. So to all of my older colleagues who currently have teenage children or children in college, even though I'm younger than you I've actually already been there!

9. I moved to Columbus to enter the doctoral program in Philosophy at OSU. 4 years later I failed my candidacy exam, quit the program, started working at the library and wondered what I had been doing for 4 years.

10. Speaking of Ohio coincidences, I found out only after I moved here in 1996 that my grandmother's family was from Columbus, and that 4 generations of that side of the family had lived in Central Ohio. If you go to the Cardington cemetery, I'm related to any Maxwell you see there.

Well, that's ten. I'm sure there's plenty more, and like I said I like to tell stories. Ask me sometime and I'll probably yak your ear off!