Five things meme

I'm not normally the meme type, but I have great respect for Eszter's blog and thus I don't take her tap lightly! Hi Eszter!

I talk so darned much all the time that it's hard for me to imagine any information about me that everybody hasn't already been subjected to, but I'll give it a try. :)

1. My mom is deaf. She speaks almost flawlessly and can lipread most people, but I still functioned as an "interpreter" and handled all the family's phone calls from an early age (five or six). I think it may be similar to how second-generation immigrant children translate for their parents. I suspect this is why I'm so talkative and have always been fairly confident speaking up around my elders. I got in trouble with some adults for correcting Mom's pronunciation in public, but she would always reassure me privately that she wanted me to help her speak perfectly and she welcomed those corrections. I wonder if that's why I'm so contrary now. ;)

I don't sign worth a darn, except for the alphabet and "Silent Night", but I lipread pretty well and I normally watch people's mouths, rather than their eyes, when they talk.

2. For several years in my late 20s, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I volunteered at the North Texas Emergency Pet Clinic¹ in the evenings (after working my day job as a software developer). Chuck and I traveled to Texas A&M University for an open house at their CVM, and I spoke with counselors there and at UW about what it would take for me to pick up remedial science credits before applying to vet school. When we moved back to Seattle, I initially took a job as a clinic receptionist. I ended up abandoning my veterinary aspirations when I got a closer look at the challenging economics of clinic practice and, at the same time, got an offer for an obscenely high-paying job as a software consultant.

I adopted Jiji in part because I figured I could at least put my experience to good use taking care of older pets with special needs.

3. I'm an active member of the Order of the Eastern Star and the proprietor of the only, as far as I know, OES blog on the web.

4. I'm a language geek, although I'm quite terrible at actually speaking languages. I have taken classes in French, Russian and Spanish. Russian was the biggest disappointment; I loved it, but after nearly four years of study, these days I can barely remember two words and one children's song. I do read Cyrillic pretty well, though. I'm a huge fan of modern-traditional Scottish Gaelic music and I've learned phonetic Gaelic so I can sing along (and I've done exactly one a cappella Gaelic gig). I picked up a respectable amount of travelers' German on my trip in 2005 and would like to learn more. I mastered exactly two words in Czech, although I was able to muddle through a few more to fend off a would-be suitor at the Prague train station. I've dabbled in Welsh, Japanese, Danish, Cherokee and Latin. I like to study alphabets and pronunciation so I can handle native people- and place-names even in languages I don't know, such as Polish and Hawai'ian. For no apparent reason, I recently decided to collect the Nicene and/or Apostle's Creed in as many languages as possible, which necessitated installing about a hundred new fonts. I'm considering a new, more useful project to document "excuse me", "thank you" and "please" in as many languages as possible, and maybe "hurry!" in case I ever get cast on "The Amazing Race".

5. I play guitar in a startup quasi-bluegrass band.

Tapping Jana, Jim, Cameron, Siri and LG.

______
¹ I created their first website and was surprised to find that a lot of the content they're using today was originally written by me!