Liebster Nomination (Part 1): Ten Facts About Me

My new friend Axel Kussman nominated this blog for a Liebster Award yesterday.  The Liebsters are a kind of pay-it-forward blogging award meant to help others discover new, interesting, exciting corners of the blog-o-sphere.  Axel writes the blog Iron Rogue, which is mostly about his triathlon career, but the guy is also both a comics & pop-culture fan and a working engineer.  That makes him a decidedly kindred spirit.

What kind of guy takes up triathlon?

To find out, all you have to do is read Iron Rogue.  Axel is an active family guy with a successful career, great looking wife and kids, and a lot going on, both in and out of the world of sport.  This, I think, is a perfect example of why so many triathletes blog.  Because they have a lot going on, and they want to share all that joy with others.  Speaking personally, I've only just started reading Iron Rogue, and I already love it.

The Liebster Award: Helping You Discover New Blogs

As part of the Liebster process, bloggers are supposed to:

1. Tell ten things about themselves.
2. Answer ten questions posed by the blogger who nominated them.
3. Nominate ten new blogs, preferably ones with fewer than 200 followers.
4. Pose ten questions to the nominess, who will then pay-it-forward by nominating ten more new blogs.

There are no "Liebster Police", but I will totally think you're a punk if I nominate you, and you don't play along.  In addition, Liebster Award participants are "nominated", but to my knowledge, no one ever actually wins.  That is bullshit.  In life, there are winners and there are losers, and I myself don't believe in participation trophies.  So I'm going to pick a winner from amongst the blogs I nominate, and I'm going to do a follow-up post covering their awards process going forward.  Winners deserve to be celebrated.

I spent some time Googling this yesterday after I got nominated, and what I learned is that most people do all of this Liebster stuff in one long post.  I am not going to do that.  First, because it is a Hell of a lot of work, and I don't have that much time on any given day.  Second, because this is a blog, and blogs need content, and that much content can easily provide fodder for more than one post.  And finally, because I've noticed that folks don't like to read more than about 1,200 words at a sitting.  As I just noted, that works for me, too.

So.  Today's post is...

Ten Facts About Me

1.  I was born in San Diego but graduated high school in Tampa, Florida.

2.  If I had it to do over again, I would branch Engineers.

3.  I am a Gemini; my wife is a Scorpio.  This is a famously bad astrological combination.

4.  My father ran Cross Country in college but couldn’t swim a lick.  So I swam and later became a triathlete.  In turn, my own daughter has become a singer and an ice skater.  I know absolutely nothing about either activity.

5.  We vacation at Green Lake in Maine.  It is my favorite place on Earth.

We rented this cabin for eight days last year.  We're going
back in August.

6.  I participated in an accidental car-jacking back when I was stationed in Korea.  We stumbled drunkenly down from Hooker Hill at three in the morning, grabbed a taxi when it pulled over at a red light, piled in amid the driver's protests, and demanded that the guy take us back to post.  He started yelling at us in Korean, but my buddy got in his face and told him “You take us home right fucking now!”  So he finally started driving.  We all fell asleep.  

When we awoke a half hour later, we looked, but nobody could figure out how much money we owed the guy.  Where was the meter?  So we finally just threw a shitload of money at him and then stumbled out of the car towards the front gate.  The guy honked.  I turned around and realized…

Oh shit!  That wasn’t a cab!  It was just some poor bastard driving his car!

7.  I’ve been married twice.  I wouldn’t say that my first marriage was bad, but it only lasted eighteen months.

8.  I took up triathlon shortly after my dad died.  Being on the bike for long rides really helped me work through my grief.

9.  My mom’s dead, too.  When I was younger, we got along well, but for the last ten years or so of her life, we didn’t.  I kept thinking that we’d someday work through our problems and start seeing eye-to-eye again, but that never happened.  She just died, and all those old arguments are still lying there unresolved.  That bothered me for a long, long time.

10.  I majored in European History but work as an Electrical Engineer.  If you’re wondering, I think history is an excellent preparatory major for the engineering life.  You learn how to find stuff, and you learn to read and write, all of which are

common/essential tasks for engineers.  

Bottom line, engineers make a living solving problems.  But once you find the solution, you still have to explain it to people, and that’s where being a historian comes in handy.  That said, you also have to be able to do the math.

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Tomorrow I'll answer Axel's questions!