(I had this on my Facebook a few weeks back, and thought I’d add it here, for posterity or something.)

1. When I was student teaching at a high school in Manchester, Iowa, the seniors would pick up my Ford Escort L and put it sideways in my parking spot, just for kicks.
2. On the morning our son Mitch was born, just two hours before the C-section, Elizabeth and I got coffee drinks at Starbucks. For some reason, we found this very surreal.
3. I’ve tried numerous times to teach myself guitar, but just can’t get into it.
4. I once went skiing on Mount Hood on Thanksgiving.
5. I’ve never been to New York City. Yet.
6. I’ve held onto a headless chicken until it stopped struggling and died. Numerous chickens, actually.
7. I flipped over our family three-wheeler numerous times.
8. I was goofing off on a freshly graded gravel road in our old Jeep and rolled it, ending up upside-down in the ditch, hanging by my seatbelt. The car still ran, and I didn’t have a scratch.
9. I know how to splice together an eight-reel feature film from my days as a theater projectionist at a one-screen theater in my hometown (alas, the theater is gone now!)
10. In my two years as a high school/junior high school English teacher in Nebraska, I had my tires slashed once, the air let out of my tires at a basketball game once, and had the F-word scratched into my passenger-side door. Gotta love those kids!
11. I met my wife Elizabeth at a bar, while she was in college, half a year after I moved from Nebraska to North Carolina.
12. I got drunk once in high school and swore I’d never do it again, and I didn’t until I was a sophomore in college.
13. I got my first-ever “F” in an Honors Calculus class my freshman year of college, and it devastated me. It also turned me into an English major.
14. I much prefer riding the elevator at work all by myself, instead of with some stranger from other floors.
15. I always feel like I’m not not doing enough for my two sons.
16. I get about six hours of sleep a night and I drink way too much caffeine as a result.
17. I miss the sports I was in during high school — football, track (shot put and discus), and even wrestling! Where’s my singlet and headgear?
18. I sometimes wish the Internet, with all its distractions, hadn’t been invented.
19. But I hate, hate, hate talking on the phone. I get tired of chatting after about 5 minutes, tops.
20. I don’t want to get famous from writing fiction, but I’d love to pay off all our debts with the money I make from selling books and work 1/2 time at a day job.
21. I get very cranky if I’m not working on some sort of fiction-writing project (okay, this is probably not news to anyone I know!).
22. I worry I won’t have enough energy to keep up with our two sons as they grow up. I’m already exhausted!
23. If I’m sitting at the computer, I have to have a drink next to me — usually coffee or water, though sometimes it’s something with a little something-something in it.
24. I think my wife is the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.
25. My two biggest problems in life are too much debt and too many extra pounds. In the grand scheme of things, these are not terrible issues, and both are surmountable (though some days they seem insurmountable).