Pearlie asked so nicely. :-)

5 things on several subjects in 1998, huh? Well, it was a pivotal year for me. My marriage was showing its first final cracks, and I was screwing up my courage to leave my dream church.

What was I doing 10 years ago?
1) Just settling in to my first job as an IT guy.
2) Rehabbing my knee surgery. Hit the gym and make it really hurt, bad, every day.
3) Hiding my true feelings about my church in hundreds of odd situations.
4) Wondering why I owned a pickup truck. Amy wanted it and wouldn't drive it.
5) Training a dog Amy rescued. When I was done, she could tie him to the handlebars of her bike and ride past squirrels without being nervous.

5 things on my to-do list today:
1) Church then Prayer meeting later.
2) Trial position some rocks I bought yesterday for the garden. Dig them in next weekend.
3) Watch a little tennis.
4) Work really, really hard to stay off the court. I need an off day, no matter how bad I hate them. Fortunately, when Nate called it started raining.
5) Iron and shine the ol' shoes. (All done.)

Snacks I enjoy
1) Uh. What's this? A joke? Food good. Grunt.
2) Whole-wheat, soured biscuits before tennis. Good energy, no sugar blitz.
3) Failing that, bread and butter.
4) Failing that, wait for dinner.
5) I love all snacks, but nothing good comes of them. I'll sit down to eat a snack, and before I'm done it was just a meal out of snack food. I eat until I'm not hungry.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire
1) I'd write, publish and advertise everything I could.
2) I'd support anything promoting the old Christianity.
3) I'd hire a lawyer to figure out how not to bleed it all to the government.
4) I'd probably spend loads trying to figure out how to set up community in my neighborhood around my church.
5) After I'd made all the mistakes, I'd try to change every church in the world into a neighbor church.

Five of my bad habits
1) Staying up too late.
2) Fitting too much into every little crack of time.
3) Ignoring the state of my house, cleanliness and repair both.
4) Focusing entirely on what's directly in front of me, without thought to what's waiting on me.
5) Doing recreational tennis and blogging before other things that matter more.

Five places I have lived
1) Grass Valley, CA - The gorgeous foothills of the Sierra Nevada range.
2) Fort Hood, TX - The armpit of one of the most ungorgeous states in the union.
3) Atlanta, GA - Too hateful to be busy.
4) Columbus, OH - The most pleasantly non-descript place I've ever lived.
5) Aaaah. Well, I did 9 weeks of basic in Fort Leonard Wood, MO (Fort Lost-in-the-Woods.) Basic was one of the most trying and affirming experiences of my life, but it really got under my skin. Once I started sleep-walking there, I never slept more than 90 minutes at a stretch again until I was married. My wife said after our first night, "The first task with a new baby is getting it to sleep through the night."

Five jobs I've had
1) Computer sales flunky. (I was fired. I learned then that it is not good for Kevin Knox to be bored.)
2) Fast food cook. (Probably my all-time favorite job. For 13 hours a day I was in full-on adrenaline mode. I loved the layers upon layers of challenge there. I burnt out every 3 months like clockwork, but I got really good at overcoming burnout.)
3) Soldier. (They weren't shooting at anyone while I was in, so it was pretty easy. I became a mechanic assuming that, "At least they can't make me a clerk. I was wrong. 3 times. For all 3.5 years of my active duty.)
4) Mechanic. (Probably did more to define my character than anything else. It was another 13 hour a day job, and I loved that too.)
5) Programmer. (Probably the most natural fit for the old, reclusive me. I got to serve people without ever dealing with them. These days I'm more of an admin, and I think I might like it for the very people dealings programming is intended to avoid.)

Phew. I survived. Now I can go another 6 months without doing another self-revealing meme. :-)