30 March, 2008

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. :-)

9 comments:

kc bob said...

Good job Kevin.. just the right amount of detail.. I enjoyed hearing a bit more of your story.. but you will have to tell us more about ironing your shoes :)

Missy said...

(hehe!) I was thinking the same thing as Bob.

Milly said...

I could be wrong because Ohio is a different state but I think he was saying iron his cloths and shine his shoes.

Always good to learn more about you.

Lynne said...

LOL! You did good (and note, I'm not saying a word about the remarkable ironed shoes)
But I couldn't do thid meme -- I have no idea what I was doing 10 years ago (basically just being a mum) I haven't lived in 5 different places and I haven't had 5 jobs. So take heart cp, there are those of us, by comparison, who are truly boring people .. :)

Kevin Knox said...

Dutifully taking heart. :-)

(And if you think ironing my shoes is hard, you should see how long it took me to find polish with vertical stripes.)

pearlie said...

:-) I was delighted to see this in my Google Reader. CP did a meme.

Staying up too late.
Yeah, I am doing that right now, and for as long as i can remember.

Anonymous said...

Lynne,
There are those of us who find that kind of "boring" very appealing :) I've moved so many times, and I'm the kind of person who would like to live in the same house for 50 years.

The billionaire question made me smile, because my 12 year old son recently asked me earlier if we got a million dollars, would I buy him a new lawnmower (our current one seems to have died for good now.) I told him yes, actually I have one of those push reel mowers in my "wish list" on Amazon, and that would be among my first purchases (after the house we are renting, which is up for sale), along with a European scythe. I was not joking, but he was neither amused nor impressed.

Kevin Knox said...

Push reel lawnmowers!

My ex bought us one about 7 years ago, and dutiful, half-green guy that I am, I used it faithfully for a couple weeks. At the end of it, I gave her my verdict:

Well, it's harder and it takes longer, but at least it doesn't work as well.

When she finished the double take, we had one of our best laughs in a long time. That line is still thrown around in the family from time to time. :-)

Milly said...

My grandfather used the old push mower with nothing but the sweat of his brow to power the thing up until the day he died. I can’t remember how old he was but I do remember thinking he was really a bit old to be taking care of such a large amount of space. He had a double sized lot with a vegetable garden and a large flower bed of irises. If you drive through Jay Ok. you might still see some of the flowers that he grew spread through the city. I think us young folks are a bit soft now.