Thanks to Michelle, who also blogs over at The Flight Deck, I’ve been tagged with the following meme:

List eight habits or facts about yourself, then tag eight more people

Eight facts about me… huh. And they have to be facts?

Hmmm. Here goes:

1. I love fresh coconut, but can’t choke it down in any other form. Yuck!

2. I play two different instruments, and have been a member of various symphonies and wind ensembles over the years.

3. I have owned or ridden four generations of Morgan horses related to my late Morgan mare, Beth. I leased her granddam, trained with her sire, owned her, rode two of her siblings for various events, and helped train one of her daughters. Beth’s youngest foal, now aged seventeen, is owned by the National Park Service and was specially trained for and is used in search and rescue operations.

4. As an undergraduate, I memorized the entire Linnaean taxonomy (for all kingdoms, phylums, classes, orders, families, and genuses) for an exam, and could reel off any portion of the tables. Now I can’t remember any of it!

5. I’ve visited or lived in 28 of the 50 States in the USA, but have never been outside the USA except for visits to Canada.

6. While I was working for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I supervised twenty-five undergraduate employees that worked for me on a multi-year project for the Institute for Research on Poverty. One evening, while on their way home from classes, one of my employees and her roommate were accosted by an ax-wielding maniac. My employee survived with minor physical injuries, thanks to another brave student who helped stave off their attacker, but her roommate was brutally murdered in spite of their best efforts to bare-handedly fight off the ax-swinging assailant with all they had at hand - their backpacks. To this day, the murderer has never been found or even identified, and no one has ever discovered a motive for the crime.

7. I haven’t eaten chocolate or anything containing chocolate in seventeen years.

8. Although I have sailed in sailboats of various classes since I was six years old, I have never been in a motor boat or on any motorized ship except for a car ferry.

Hmmm, now who to tag… any volunteers? ;-)