Summer Reruns: Ten things I've done

"Losing" Monday and Tuesday knocked me off schedule for the entire week, and as we're expecting a houseguest a few hours from now, I'm checking out until Monday. But instead of leaving you with nothing to read today, I've dredged up an old post. Unless you've been digging around in my archives (and there's certainly no crime in that) it will be new material to most of you.

You kids stay safe and play nice while I'm gone. Thanks for reading No Rules.

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Ten things I've done
Posted February 28, 2004

I haven't seen this, but according to the infallible Terry Teachout, these lists are appearing all over the blogosphere. It's Monday morning and I'm supposed to be working on my taxes, but this sounds like more fun, so here right off the top of my head is a list of....

Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't

1. Almost drowned in Niagara Falls. (Okay, it was a hotel pool in Niagara Falls, Canada. But I would have drowned if my mother hadn't been watching closely and jumped into the deep end just in time to save me.)

2. Allowed a snake wrangler to demonstrate the "harmlessness" of a very long, very fat black snake by draping it around my shoulders. As I held the reptile's head and smiled bravely for the clicking cameras, I felt the smooth, leathery tail wind itself around my right thigh and begin to squeeze.

3. Went out with a guy twice and then said yes when he proposed on our third date. (We'll celebrate our 30th anniversary this July.)

4. Sat next to the president of my city's Chamber of Commerce on an airplane and told him how great our city was -- because I had misunderstood him and thought he was making his first visit here.

5. Parachuted from an airplane way back in 1980, when it was still a pretty risky thing to do. (Now they have t-shirts that say, "Remember when sex was safe and skydiving was dangerous?")

6. Accompanied by several nerdy friends, dragged my telescope to the top of a cold, bare hill in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to be among the first to view the 1986 return of Comet Halley.

7. Laughed at my 13-year-old child when he told me he had broken his arm playing touch football. (Well, he wasn't screaming or anything.) The next day he couldn't move his fingers so I took him to our doctor, who gave me a long, hard look as he pointed to two fracture lines on the x-ray film.

8. Saw a dead whale wash up on a beach in Nova Scotia several hours before it was reported on the news and identified as a very rare species.

9. Told a bestselling novelist that I thought the only really good novelists were dead novelists. (I was gushing about my love of the classics. And, yes -- this was before I ever thought of writing a novel.)

10. Put down a romance novel, said, "I bet I could write one of these things," then wrote a complete novel and sold it on the first try to a major publishing house with no revisions. Yeah, go ahead and hate me.

Now go read Terry's list, which is way more interesting than mine. And then maybe you'd like to add your own list in the "comments" section, below.