Ten things I've done that you probably haven't

[dagibbs]

This was, actually, an interesting enough meme that I thought I'd do it. Trying to not be TOO specific, while getting uniqueness (at least among LJ friends) was quite some work.

1) Bicycled accross large chunks of western Europe. (Italy, Monaco, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.)
1a) Bicycled along part of the course for the Monaco GP while they had it repaved & resurfaced for the GP, and walled off from traffic, with the boards up and everything, but still let bicycles on it. That was the BEST road surface we rode on the whole bloody trip. Glass smooth.

2) Attended over 100 science fiction conventions.

3) Rode and dropped a motorcycle on the Shanonville race track. (The corner monitor figured I was doing about 80mph when I went down, I think I probably was a bit slower, I probably started braking at about 80, but managed to scrub a bit of speed before I locked the front wheel and went down.)

4) Achieved Air Canada Aeroplan Elite status. (Yes, I travel a fair bit for work.)

5) Played in a World championship Bridge event. Didn't win, but didn't disgrace myself either. I did learn just how damn good the world class players are, though

6) Dated a woman 14 years older than me. Hm... oops... that isn't unique, actually now that I think about it, since I think northbard's #7 might be related to an older woman if I remember the incident properly.

Maybe, instead, I should go with:
6a) Offered my motorcycle to a friend at an S.F. convention for escape from a jealous husband. :)

7) Jumped out window of my 2nd floor dorm room at university because my dorm-mates had "secured" the door shut from the outside.

8) Wheeled Fritz Leiber around an S.F. convention in a wheelchair.

9) Swam in a cold lake in Quebec on May 24 weekend. Repeatedly. Year after year.

10) Fixed bugs in a commercial operating system's kernel. If that's not specific enough, qualify it a bit more as, "in a commercial micro-kernel operation system's kernel".

11) Stayed awake for 68.5 hours straight. Then, went to sleep, got up 4 hours later, and walked home.

12) Bug-fixed and enhanced a character-graphics RPG game. (It was/is called Omega and is in the same family as Hack, Larn, Moria, Nethack, Ancient Domains of Mystery, etc.)

13) Took two partners to a work event. (Work summer BBQ one time, work Christmas party another time.)

14) Been mistaken, repeatedly, by several different people, on several different occasions, for thatguychuck.

15) Burned a book. Actually a bunch of them.

Comments

[foms.livejournal.com]

1) I bicycled for a living. Probably over 100km per day, five days per week, including winter, in Montreal. Not quite the same.

2) I figure that I'm probably at about only 70 sf cons.

6a) You also drove someone who missed her train from Montreal to Burlington, VT (about 250km) and back on my say so on about 15 minutes' notice. A good friend.

8) I've hobnobbed with and had lunch solely with Roger Zelazny. I've also had Diane Duane tell me to get off the phone (to Ireland (before cheap long-distance)) before I bankrupted myself. We hit it off pretty well.

9) I know that lake. I've been in Lake Champlain in a fairly cold November, for about 45 minutes. Afterward, I ate quickly and then fell asleep under more covers than I've ever used, for about two hours. Been in similar water many times.

11) I haven't done 68 hours. Once, I stayed up for about 50 hours, slept for two hours and then stayed up for another 42 or so hours.

14) I'll tell you the mistaken for stories in another venue. Come to think of it, I've probably told you some of them.

Whew.

[foms.livejournal.com]

Con_girl made me rip books into pieces when she managed a bookstore. It was very hard.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Mistaken for Jesus is different. :)

And, you know, cause you read my LJ I couldn't mention going to the con the wrong weekend as one of my uniques, too. :)

Though, I've also arrived at a convention to find it cancelled, which is somewhat different from arriving to find that the convention is NEXT weekend.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and that drive to Burlington -- I apparently did that with half a case of beer in the trunk. I didn't realize this until I got to the Canadian border on the way home, and they became curious about why I'd just been in the states for such a short time. (It was my parents' car, I'd borrowed it for the weekend. This was a few (many) years ago.)

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

dagibbs
11) Stayed awake for 68.5 hours straight. Then, went to sleep, got up 4 hours later, and walked home.

foms:
11) I haven't done 68 hours. Once, I stayed up for about 50 hours, slept for two hours and then stayed up for another 42 or so hours.

I *keep* hearing stories like that, often from Canadians. After about 30 hours for me, everything shuts down whether I'm technically conscious or not (something about which I lose control after the aforesaid 30 hours--I can fall asleep while *walking*, or conversely might be unable to get to sleep even if I go to bed in a dark room after taking sedatives).

HOW in the names of all the gods can you DO that? There have been numerous occasions in my life that I really wanted to be able to do that. (Again, often in order to keep up with the Canadians....) Is there something in the water, or what?

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

See, we Canadians live in the land of extreme seasonal differences in daylight. In the summer, the sun shines 24 hours straight, and we naturally don't sleep while the sun is shining. Of course, in the winter when the sun doesn't shine, we sleep for days on end to compensate. Of course, for special situations (e.g. an SF con) we can treat it as a virtual, or artificial, summer and stay up for an extended time -- but we have to sleep for a week afterwards to recover.

Seriously, I don't know about foms, but I was 17 at the time. I don't think I even did much caffeine. Maybe the caffeine has wrecked my system -- but I can't do shit like that no more.