1. Where had you moved from?  Good ole’ home sweet home. I was moving to my first apartment in college.

2. Describe your first apartment. It was a college apartment complex with some plush amenities (for a college student) A 4 bedroom apartment, 2 bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, washer and dryer in the apartment, balcony, and community swimming pool, community recreation area.

3. How old were you when you had your apartment?  19. I was a youngin’

4. Did you have roommates? I had 3. 4 guys in a 4 bedroom apartment.

5. What was your place of employment then? A very large national retail chain that I won’t name.

6. How were your finances at the time? I didn’t have any. Ramen Noodles and Macaroni and Cheese were my staples of life!

7. Tell us about a lover who spent a night there. At the time she was my high-school sweetheart turned fiance’ turned ex. Nuff’ said.

8. Tell us about a band you listened to then. Hmm none at the time. Wasn’t of age. LOL

9. How long did you live there and why did you move from there? 2 years, then moved into another apartment during my college years. I hop scotched quite a bit.

Yeah, I know I’m a day late on the Meme.

Carpe Diem

Thanks to Lisa over at Driven to Distraction for this one.

So apparently this meme is circling the blogosphere and it landed on my screen thanks to my friend Phil Baumann. He sent this to me via Twitter.

So without further a due. Here are 7 things about me that you may not know:

1. I am follicly challenged.

I follow the all -or -none principle. If I couldn’t grow all of my hair, I didn’t want none of it! The balding gene was prevalent on my Mother’s side of the family. I found out the hard way that you get this wonderful gene from you mother’s- father. (yep, he was a horseshoe hair kind of man)For me it didn’t happen gradually. It happened over a summer. It happened when I was 24. I decided then that if I can’t have a full head of hair, I was going totally bald. In the beginning I was accused of being a member of the ‘skinheads‘. You see at that time, Caucasian men who were bald were not viewed positively. I can remember how differently I was viewed compared to my dark-skinned bald friends. It was quite astonishing at times. Thankfully over those first 2-3 years the WWF spawned a whole new outlook on what was ‘OK’ or ‘cool’. I can thank Stone Cold Steve Austin and Goldberg for making my life a lil’ easier during that time of my life. I can tell you some stories about how many times people really thought I was Stone Cold Steve Austin. (Not a lie, true story)

2. I worked in Retail for over 10 years, including management.

I had to pay for college and earn a living at the same time. Retail is where I found that answer. I attribute my customer service and people skills to my time in retail. Working in retail.. well sucked. Maybe not so much retail, but the environment of department store retail is grueling. You have to have that ‘McDonald’s Smile’ on at all times. No matter how bad the customer treats you, no matter how wrong they may be. You still have to ‘grin and bear it’. That job taught me about patience, time management, stress relief, and above all how to communicate appropriately and effectively to not only your fellow co-worker, but to the public. I hate to admit it sometimes, but my nursing days would have been very different had I not ‘suffered’ through those years in retail.

3. Do your fingers do this?

Yes. I am simply putting my 2 index fingers side by side. Ya gotta love genetics. Do you think I’ll have arthritis later in life?

4. I eat all day. I eat non-stop.

You would think the way I eat, that I would weigh over 400 lbs. I eat roughly every hour if not every 2 hours. I have food with me at all times. It’s the standing joke, if you’re hungry and you forgot money or forgot to bring something find me. I bring a plastic grocery bag full of goodies for just my 8 or 12 hour shift. Everything from my ‘bad-for-you’ cake donuts to all my healthy 100 calorie snack packs and snack bars. I swear I have a tapeworm.

5. I graduated 3rd in my high school class

It was a small town school. I was quite the nerd-jock. I participated in 2 sports (4 yr letter winner for one of them) and was a member of multiple clubs and organizations. Yep, I was the All-American high school kid.

6. I am extremely flexible

I don’t know why, but I have always been flexible. In high school my nickname was Jean-Claude Van Damme. I mean, it wasn’t by accident. I worked at it. At one point in my life I could ‘box’ my hips. In college I used to win bets by ‘kicking’ things that were too high for people to touch with their fingers. (true story) I still to this day can put my palms to the floor when ‘touching my toes’. My flexibility, in my humble opinion, has kept me free from most injuries.

7. I have undiagnosed ADHD (at least that what my wife tells me)

I have this problem. I get bored easily. EXTREMELY easy. It is the reason why I can’t stay in a job/position for a very long period of time. It’s the same reason that working in a Trauma ICU was the perfect fit for me. I cannot do repetition. I cannot do the same thing day in and day out. I cannot rinse, refresh, repeat.

It’s why I could not work surgery, too repetitive. It’s why I can’t work behind a desk. It’s why I do 5 things at once. And it’s the reason why I drive my wife mad sometimes.

I hope you enjoyed my 7 ‘chunks’ of off the wall information about lil old me. And in true meme fashion I’m passing this on to 7 in my circle of the world. Here are the 7 I pick from my blogosphere:

1. Emily A.K.A. crzegrl (Yes! 7 things we DON’T know about you!) ( @crzegrl15 )
2. Dr. Val ( @drval )
3. Enrico ( @medpiano )
4. Ken Stewart ( @changeforge )
5. Matt ( @hypocaffeinemia )
6. Vijay ( @scanman )
7. Mark Salinas ( @mark_salinas )

I tried to pick a didactic group of people, since I seem to interact with many walks of life.  I truly wanted to break out he Big Guns and ask someone like Darren Rowse Or Robert Scoble, but I knew neither of them would take the time to actually do the meme. They’re they superstars of the blogosphere and I’m just a mere blogger newbie.

I look forward to learning more about everyone!

Well it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve been tagged with a MeMe- the Blogosphere’s version of passing notes in high school.

This one comes to us from Trauma Junkie over at Surviving Respiratory Therapy School: Tales of a Trauma Junkie.

So here are the rules:

Pass it on to five other Bloggers, and tell them to open the nearest book to page 56. Write out the fifth sentence on that page, and also the next two to five sentences. The CLOSEST BOOK, NOT YOUR FAVORITE, OR MOST INTELLECTUAL!

They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The "professor" group didn’t know more than the "soccer hooligan" group. They weren’t smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a "smart" frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier – in that stressful instant after a trivia questioned was asked – to blurt out the right answer. – Malcolm Gladwell, Blink .

This book is sitting on my right hand book shelf of my computer desk.

I read it once already, and I enjoyed his novels so much I’m reading this one again. (I highly recommend it!) Ironically I believe Matt (CanuckNurse) tweeted about this book a lil’ while back.

So don’t kill the messenger, but I have to pass this on to FIVE other Bloggers:

1. Matt of Canuck Nurse (yep, had to)

2. KatieBee of Young and Restless Nurse

3. Running Wildly of Running Wildly

4. Caroline of Brain Scramble

5. May of About A Nurse

Once again.. Please don’t kill the messenger. I thought this would be something different.

Carpe Diem