I am *not* weird, merely differentially-experienced. F'r instance --

1. I've been whacked by lightning. Three times. Each instance occurred at a training site on Fort Dix, all jolts occurred during the summer of 1971 and all occurred while I was herding trainees (at a dead run -- watch a lion chasing zebras and you'll get the idea) away from lone tall trees into heavy woods. The weird thing is, aside from feeling like I'd simultaneously bitten into a 220-volt line, been stomach-butted by a Mack truck and had a two-by-four cracked over my skull, I was almost totally unaffected by it after I could move again...

2. I played tennis in college for about two days. Nobody could return my serves -- and, since I was told the object of the game was to volley back-and-forth until somebody missed, and, since I couldn't get anybody to return my shots, I figured I wasn't cut out for the game and gave it up. Twenty years later, I found out that players who could do that consistently were making more in a week than I was in three years. Gave me kind of a weird feeling.

3. I loathe creamed parsnips. That's not weird -- that I actually ate a forkful is weird. I plead extenuating circumstances -- I was too young to know exactly *what* a parsnip was.

4. I can't write unless I'm wired and can't do anything else if I am. Uhhh -- well, since you asked, three mugs of espresso in the last hour. I'll be at my peak right after I compose answer number six...

5. My scars don't last. I can show you where I've had fifteen stitches along my jaw, thirty on my ribcage, a dime-sized hole in my left leg and a spot on my right shin where I caught the rebound of an axe. After five years or so, you needed a black light to find 'em. After thirty-five years, even the VA docs couldn't find them. I caught a beaut of a fuel burn on my left wrist and the only thing left is a couple of thin white lines. I lost a half-inch off the tip of my left thumb -- it regenerated, thumbprint 'n' all. The only war souvenir I still have is from a chunk of copper jacket that caught me close to one eye and burned its way in -- I figure Dad had some lizard DNA left over from his stint in the Marines.

6. But the weirdest thing is, the Ya-Ya BlogSisterhood keeps tagging me with these memes in the forlorn hope that I'll come up with something interesting. Geez, you'd think they'd have learned by now...

...and tag 6 people.

Sure thing.

I tag Tomás de Torquemada, Cato the Elder, Sir Francis Drake, Vercingetorix, Igor Sikorsky and Michel Ney.

You didn't say they had to be *bloggers*, kidlet.

Oh, all right. So, that's *seven* weird things about me...