7 things you probably did know about me

Zonker tapped me for the 7 Things meme. Since it sounds infinitely easier than the 25 things that I've been tagged for several times on Facebook, I decided to do the 7 things and count it as both.

How the 7 Things meme works:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I pretty much tell everybody all the things I want people to know about me, so this is a bit difficult but here we go with seven things you may or may not know about me:

1. Driving on icy roads is much, much more terrifying than public speaking! There's not much I let scare me but driving on icy roads tops the list. The first snowy day after I rolled my truck, I opened and closed my garage door at least 10 times before I decided I really was going to drive into work.
2. I don't think I'm very good at knowing when I've done good. I could tell you a hundred ways this post could be better, that last email could have better or that last talk could have been better. By the time I'm finished critiquing myself, it's hard to tell whether it was good or not.
3. During my first public talk ever, my manager's manager's manager held
   up a sign with the word "SLOW!" written on it. I never saw it.
4. My heart rate is lower when I'm reading than when I'm sleeping. (Honest, I wore a heart rate monitor through a nap once just to check. My dad didn't believe me so he woke me up one morning with the heart rate monitor in hand to double check.) So reading is good for me!
5. I got my first guide dog puppy to raise at the age of ten because my parents wouldn't let me get a dog so I talked them into a dog for a year. My last guide dog puppy got to go on business trips with me and she's now working in Alabama.
6. While everyone talks about how few women there are in technology and open source, I found it much harder being young (or looking young) than being female. Martin Fink once told me that going gray prematurely was a huge asset to him and I actually debated whether coloring my hair gray would help!
7. Frank and I met on Match.com. We hadn't talked about whether or not we were going to tell people that when someone asked us … we ended up making up a rather confusing story about meeting in the grocery store until I finally broke down and blurted "we met on Match.com!" In spite of us both living in the same area and both knowing hundreds of people, in six years we still haven't met a single person that we both knew before meeting each other. Our worlds were several degrees of separation apart.

Here are the people I've tagged: (And it's really too bad they had to have a blog because I found that some people that I really wanted to tag, didn't have blogs. Or at least not ones they've told me about. 🙂 Actually, I ended up surprised at how many of my friends don't blog.

1. Frank (because he needs to blog again!)
2. Jack Repenning
3. Ragavan Srinivasan
4. Dirk Riehle (because he followed me on Twitter while I was writing this)
5. Deirdre (because her blog always makes me laugh and sometimes cry)
6. Christian Einfeldt
7. Ken VanDine