Deric's 7 Things

Well, I guess I am supposed to come up with seven random facts about me to share with you all. So here we go...

1) I keep a spreadsheet of ever single movie I watch. I include the date and a rating for each movie, along with the number of minutes the movie lasted. This is totally an engineer thing to do, but I just got so tired of trying to remember which movies I had seen and when I had seen them. I have been keeping it since early 2005. Since then I have watched 314 movies. In actual time it totals up to over 22 days of movie watching. The average rating for those movies is right at 7/10. I am thinking about adding a genre column so I can see my avg rating by genre. I also have a Netflix account and have rated 1062 movies on there. It makes me sad that only 314 of them are captured in my spreadsheet.

2) I hate hanging stuff up on walls. It just feels like such a permanent thing to do. I really don't like the feeling of driving nails into an untouched wall. In my apartment at college we didn't have one thing hung up on any of the walls. For the two years we were there we didn't put up any sort of pictures or decorations. In my apartment in Arkansas, I actually did have a couple pictures hung up, but I didn't enjoy doing it. Now at our house there is stuff hanging all over the walls. I am glad Amanda is motivated to put up pictures and things because it looks really nice. However, if it were up to me, the walls would stay completely plain.

3) I have never given the Starbucks corporation a cent of my money. Starbucks is evil. If you go to Starbucks you should feel ashamed of yourself. Starbucks is contributing to obesity in America with their super sweet, calorie filled crap. Their products are so over-priced. Most of their customers probably shouldn't be spending so much money on coffee. I hope we have reached the saturation point with the Starbucks chain. When I first moved here to Arkansas I don't think there were any Starbucks stores in the town where I lived. Now, there are 3 of them within a 4 mile radius of my house. That is insane to me. As money becomes tighter in the economic slow-down, luxury items are going to have to go. Hopefully this will hurt Starbucks financially and cause them to back-pedal a little bit. I will continue to not give them any of my money, and you should do the same. *steps down from soapbox and moves on to number four....

4) I was able to make my wife cry by throwing a sock at her from across the room. Let me repeat that. I threw a sock, just a normal floppy athletic sock, at my wife, who was standing at least 10 feet away, and hit her in the ear with enough force to make her start crying. Yes, struck her powerfully enough to make water drip out of her eyes. There was no rock or any other heavy object in the sock. The sock wasn't even rolled up into a small ball. I just wadded it up and thew it, and somehow it whizzed through the air like a bullet, and hit her square in the side of the head. Don't worry, Amanda was fine.... eventually. I am still amazed to this day of my sock-throwing abilities.

5) I am a lot more organized than my wife. I care so much about having everything in its place, and it really bothers me if things look messy. I don't feel like I can relax in a room where things are out of order. I don't care as much about keeping things really clean. Don't get me wrong, I don't like a layer of dust on stuff, but I can deal if its not spotless. However, I cannot deal with a bunch of clutter. At work everybody comments on how organized my desk is. At the end of every day I put things were they need to go and make sure it is nice and organized for when I come in the next day.

6) I haven't played golf in over 18 months. Ever since I started playing golf in 8th grade it has been a passion of mine. I played as much as I possibly could in high school while on the team. I don't think there was a stretch of more than a few weeks where I didn't play golf. My senior year of high school I actually felt a lot of pressure during golf season. Towards the end I started getting really burnt out and the pressure was really making my game suffer. After our last tournament I took a couple months off, but I started playing again right after that. In high school I got free golf because I was on the team, and in college I worked at a course in the summers so I got free golf there. Then I moved down to Arkansas and I lived at an apartment complex with a golf course so I got free golf. Well, when we moved into our house it ended my free golf. I realized how expensive it was to play golf a lot. That, coupled with the fact that part of my foursome from work moved away, led me to just stop playing. Last summer I didn't even get my clubs out and swing them. Golf has always been such a relaxing experience for me, and it is kinda disappointing that I haven't played. I am sure I will play a few times this year, and hopefully someday find a course where I can become a member and play a lot.

7) I am really cheap. I actually hate spending money. The excitement of buying something new is completely wiped out by the realization that I am losing dollars. When we do buy something big I have to do research for several months before I can actually make the purchase. It took me forever to decide on our new TV, and right after I clicked the button to buy it, I felt total remorse. I don't like going out to eat. Before Amanda came here I would avoid going out to eat as much as possible. I still don't really like eating out, but I am getting better about that. We usually go out to eat once a week. Sometimes we will do twice a week if we really don't feel like cooking on the weekend. In addition to not wanting to spend money, I also don't like having a lot of stuff. Before I buy anything I think about whether it is something I really need, or something I just want. I think about how much space it is going to take up, and if it is worth having to store it. I still feel like we buy too much stuff, and would be happy if we could eliminate some of 'the extra'. Simplification is happiness.

So there are my 7 things. It was actually really hard for me to come up with seven. I am a pretty boring person.