Pieces of eight.

Meggie, in a comment to one of my posts, said that she should have included me in the ‘8 random’ meme but that I could volunteer if I wished.

Why not?

But how do you decide on eight random things to tell people about yourself? It is hard not to be selective. So I wrote out eight lots of eight things in the following categories and let Excel’s random number generator choose eight from those eight eights. Pieces of eight.

Eight books I have still to read
Eight foods I love
Eight physical things
Eight things I do each day
Eight things I've done but don't want to do again
Eight things that are on my desk in front of me
Eight things that give me the irrits
Eight unusual or memorable things

And the eight (very) random things about me are:

1. Salesmen who keep calling me “Mr Kennedy” give me the irrits. You just know that they are reading off a script, Mr Kennedy, and do you know what, Mr Kennedy? I start counting how often they use my name. So, Mr Kennedy, why do sales people persist with this myth that people like you more if you use their name a lot? Once or twice I can understand, Mr Kennedy, but enough is enough. Don’t you agree, Mr Kennedy?

2. Hug my wife is a daily ‘must do’ and pleasure.

3. People who go to war also give me the irrits. Not to be confused with people who are forced to war by others attacking them. And also not to be confused with the soldiers that are sent to war, and bravely go where idiot politicians send them.

4. Vanilla ice-cream is a favourite food. Eaten slowly, with a small spoon.

5. I worked at a plastics factory in Libya for 18 mths. Never made any plastic while I was there. Learnt to make my own beer.

6. Bit the bullet and changed career from chemistry to psychology when 51. Still studying psychology.

7. As a young boy I used to make rockets. Exploits were curtailed when the neighbours asked my father if he was doing blasting in his back yard. Seldom found the rockets again but, as we lived in the country, they were landing safely somewhere out in a sheep paddock. One did take off horizontally into a dog kennel, much to the alarm of a resident bulldog at the time.

8. One of my jobs had me climbing on factory roofs testing stack gases, the gases going up their chimneys. A pretty precarious past-time at times. One factory, a sand-paper factory, draped a large roll of sandpaper over their building so that I had a non-slip surface for climbing up the roof.

That’s it.

Now, being as I wasn’t really tagged, I don’t feel obligated to tag anyone else.

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