Oh, all right

Since both Tess and Rachel tagged me for the "8 random things about me" meme, I'll stop dithering and post already :)

Eight random facts about me:

1. My nickname on Yahoo and Librarything, Ariadne02, dates back to 1989, when my college boyfriend ran a BBS and I had to choose a handle to post under. I'd just read June Rachuy Brindel's novel Ariadne and thought the name was cool. The "02" was added later, because some other Ariadne had gotten to Yahoo before me.

2. I've seen every episode of American Idol since Season 2, except for the early auditions when they show the people who really suck.

3. When I worked as a temporary secretary for the Michigan Dept of Transportation, I read a book a day, making my way through every novel written by Jean Plaidy, Valerie Anand, and Norah Lofts that the East Lansing Public Library owned.

4. I was a vegetarian for about six years but gave it up when I left Ann Arbor and finding food to eat became too much of a chore.

5. My most infamous ancestor is Alice Bishop, one of the first women executed in the American colonies (again, "hanged" - not "hung").

6. I have scars on both of my knees after slipping on pavement while running to take my final exam in medieval English history during grad school. Rather than stop at the infirmary, I took my two-hour final, trying not to get blood on anything (sorry), after which my knees got badly infected. I got a B+ in the course. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is.

7. During middle school, I wrote a program in BASIC on my family's Apple IIe that did a fair job of mimicking ELIZA (a computer program that manipulates strings of text to emulate a psychotherapist's responses to statements).

8. I can bake a mean baklava.

I'm not tagging anyone else because this one's been around the block for a while, but if anyone else wants to join in, please do.