This is my 10 for the Grim List Icebreaker. I'm writing this after I completed the list... and the number of I's and the me, me, ME's! kinda make me feel vain but with a sort of freeing feeling too. This was lots of fun... thanks for getting this started, Grim!

*** My apologies beforehand, I ramble and I ramble (it got really bad at the end with a gigantic wall of text but I promised myself not to delete! Also, please ignore my terrible sense of humour and my repeated use (or misuse) of exclamation points and ellipses. ***


1. I met my husband online in 1996. We spent 2 years long-distance before we moved in together. 6 years down the line we decided to get married and have been for 9 years. 18 years... who says Internet relationships don't work out? :P

2. We don't have children because I was born with a defect that would make pregnancy extremely dangerous... so instead we have a cat who is so vocal he could pass as a wailing baby. He's a Bengal that loves drinking out of the faucet and knocking on doors by way of sneaking his paw under the crack and pulling repeatedly. We have to stuff the crack under the door to our bedroom in order to sleep peacefully.



3. Once upon a time I used to breed fish. Mostly Guppies and Mollies because it's so easy (they are the rabbits of the water world). After a while I got curious if I could create a hybrid so I put on my mad scientist gloves, placed a Guppy female and a new-born Molly male into an isolated tank... and after several months of waiting (the Guppy had stored 7 batches worth of sperm and the Molly male had to fully develop), the one and only batch of hybrids were born. They are still alive today (about 2 1/2 years old) but they are infertile. They decorate my main tank and they do so with crazy neon colours that are so difficult to photograph. >_<



4. My English is what I like to refer to as 'mangled'. Yes, you will see strange spellings going on here... but I assure you that it is proper English! However, you will see some strange things from time to time even if you are not troubled by these spellings. In this case you may be troubled to see that I refer to lifts as elevators and motorways as freeways and many others. That's because I live in sunny Southern California (and it is ALWAYS sunny). The temperature atm (9PM) is 60 degrees. I haven't seen snow in maybe 12 years.

5. My grammar isn't the greatest, either. I phrase sentences backwards sometimes (hey, Yoda is awesome!!). I switch from formal to informal often, I am to I'm and I am again, and run on sentences too. Punctuation is such a pain in the butt! Does the comma go here... or here?! Double quotes, single quotes, inside or outside the period?!?! I attended Uni for two years and then dropped out which is probably the reason (kids, don't drop out of school). I don't have any degrees and everything I am semi-good at has been self-taught.

6. Why did I drop out so early? I found a job at a brand-spanking-new website hosting company and at the time it was not your average deal to find such a young sprout (I was 19 at the time) who knew about computers (this was around 1999) or the Internet. I learnt as much as I could pack into my brain about the Linux operating system, how to design websites and the ins & outs of databases. What probably worked best in my favour was that I knew a great deal about, what was then an unknown control panel, cPanel. The job was extremely stressful, called for crazy hours that flopped around more than my Guppies escaping a tank, and eventually ended up being more of a customer service job than a systems administration job. I quit at the start of this year and my only regret is that I didn't do it 10 years ago.

7. Are you snoozing yet? No? Your eyeballs are better than mine! I wear glasses and have since I was 8. When I put on my first pair I told my sister, "Look! The trees have leaves!!" or something like that. My sister is my bestest friend in the world and we trick people because our voices sound nearly identical.

I'm running out of things... ack! Maybe I shouldn't have bunched so many things into one number. XD

8. My hair is an ongoing crazy mess of different colours. I had a mohawk that I would put up occasionally from 2009-2012. Right now my hair is a combination of faded out green, blue and purple. The purple looks a beautiful lilac and so I haven't bothered to reapply any dye yet since it looks nice against the black of my fringe. Also, I'm lazy. Since I quit my job I haven't paid one iota into what I look like. I'm growing out my eyebrows so I look like a dog with mange... I'm going for a Jennifer Connelly circa Labyrinth era look but I haven't quite made it there yet.

9. I have many obsessions. Books, of course. Manga and anime in which I believe my love for mecha stems from. I'm watching 6 animes that are currently airing and 3 others that are complete seasons. I can only watch these with sub-titles, American voice actors just don't do it for me. ;) I cancelled my cable subscription 4 years ago but I still watch some TV shows on Netflix. I love, love, love movies! Video games!!! Right now I'm participating in the Nosgoth closed alpha... I have alpha and beta tested for a bunch of online games (World of Warcraft, Neocron, RO&RO2 and a crazy list of other Korean MMO's)... I've never owned an XBox but I have a WiiU & PS3, however, I prefer to play my games on PC. I still have my old Nintendo, Sega and Gameboys plus cartridges. Maybe one day I can sell them for zillions of dollars on eBay. $_$

10. I'm a -super- positive person that grins like a wild banshee. But not all is fun and rainbows in my world... I suffer from a bit of OCD and a few anxiety disorders (social and panic attacks mostly). On a good day I can enter a vehicle at night when there aren't many people outside, on a bad day you can't get me to leave my bedroom even if the house were on fire. Right now I am somewhere in between after having suffered a really big set-back last year in June. I don't have a drivers licence, nor do I want one. I have what I like to call faucet fingers when I get near unfamiliar people and places. I can stare at a comment box here at Booklikes for an hour without posting the message I've typed out... the social media phobia I have is really bad BUT the only way to fix it is to do it! Maybe one day I will join the masses over at Facebook and Twitter... but I'm willing to bet that some new technology will replace them before that day comes about. Positive, I said positive before, didn't I? I am grinning like a banshee! :D I'm afraid of heights, spiders and several other creepy crawlies. I don't fear the dark and I haven't read or watched anything within the Horror genre that has actually scared me. One day... one day!!