Return of the Newbie!

Happy New Year! Tag, I'm it! Kate tagged me for an "8 things" meme that seems to have been kick-started by my fellow Girl Geek Maggie Fox, and as much as I normally dislike memes, I can't think of a better way to kick off 2008 than by the oversharing of personal info. And awaaaay we go!

Eight things you might not know about me:

1. If you didn't start reading this blog at the beginning then you might not know that my parents co-founded a commune in 1971. Yes, it's true, I was raised in the woods by hippies. We made our own cheese and had no indoor plumbing. We had a communal garden and a shared cow, and in the summer we wore no clothes. Some of these tenets have fallen by the wayside in the ensuing years, notably the nudity, but the commune is still very much a going concern (in fact I am regularly courted by the current members to join).

2. And that crunchy-granola upbringing perhaps explains why in high school I was a full-on goth. Black clothing, white makeup, lots of Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees... the whole iconoclastic shebang. You can't get much less outdoorsy than goth culture, so I suppose in my way I was rebelling by embracing a subculture dependent upon urban living. There aren't many goths in the woods.

3. I'm an only child with 6 siblings. No, not a riddle -- a result of a broken home. After their divorce my parents both hooked up again (and again, in my Dad's case), so I have 2 half-brothers and 3 half-sisters plus one bonus stepsister -- but no full-on sibs. It freaks me out a little bit to think that the people I think of as my brother and my sister could get legally married since they're not related except through me. It gets even freakier when my mom talks about how my sister Alix and my brother Steve have SO much in common and would make SUCH a good couple... (All together now: EW.)

4. I'm distantly related to the King of Sweden. My Dad is second-generation Finnish-Canadian, and is still in contact with my grandmother's family in Finland. They are fond of telling the story of the Crown Prince and our great-great-grandmother, who used to work for the Swedish royal family... until she got pregnant, left Sweden, and moved to Finland, settling down in a small town on the coast to raise her young son alone, speaking only Swedish. (All together now... Hmmmm...)

5. I'm epileptic. It's not a secret, just not something I tend to publicize. It's easy to forget that I have this chronic, incurable condition because my seizures are controlled by medication -- in fact until a couple of weeks ago, it'd been 6 years since my last seizure. Then I had a seizure on Jan. 2nd. Quite a way to usher in the new year, wouldn't you say? There's a fairly lengthy recovery period involved, and now you know why I haven't posted until now.

6. I have a 3-year-old daughter, Zoe, whom I absolutely adore, even though she is single-handedly responsible for turning me from a jaded sophisticate into a pajama-wearing marshmallow who cries at the barest hint of sentiment.

7. When I was young, I wanted to be an actress. I took acting lessons all through high school and minored in Drama in University. My career peaked with a one-time appearance on Degrassi Junior High and I eventually realized that to be a successful actress one needed to get used to baring either one's soul, or one's boobs, or both. I chose modesty and baring my soul only online in blog form.

8. I have a deep and abiding love for good single-malt Scotch. I used to be strictly a wine-or-beer-or-cooler girl, with the occasional G&T thrown in on special occasions, until I went to Scotland on our honeymoon. After touring a few distilleries, I spontaneously and somewhat accidentally entered a blind-nosing contest (in which you are given opaque glasses of Scotch and must identify the vintage only by smell) and against all probabilities, I won!

Now I'm supposed to tag 8 others and keep this chain going, but all of the people I know who blog have already been tagged! So I'm going to take a cue from my sister Alix and dead-end this meme right here. Unless of course you want to pick up the torch and carry it for me!