You thought you knew me until...

I have always been fascinated by information, and this fact multiplies when it is information about someone. The things that remain unseen or untold often reveal more about a person. I think it is one of the reasons I originally wanted to be a reporter. I got to ask questions and find things out, like an investigator. Therefore, I thought it would be fun to try and reveal things about me that very few people would ever know. That being said, this is going to be really difficult. I have always been a big time sharer, so it is unlikely that I post things that NO ONE knows, but I can hopefully find some stuff that not many people know. Here goes...

  9 Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

1) I used to really, really hate roller coasters. In fact, I was once forced/peer pressured into riding one that resulted in two things. 1) me bawling my eyes out for 75% of the ride and 2) my mom feeling extremely guilty for being a driving force behind the forcing/peer pressuring. (For those of you that know my mother, this is VERY out of character for her to do). The name of the ride was the Tornado at Adventureland. Thankfully, somewhere along the way I grew to love roller coasters. The greater the thrill, speed, drop, twist the better. Crazy I went from crying on the wimpy Tornado at Adventureland to loving the 120mph Dragster at Cedar Point Ohio.

2)In high school I went to a national journalism conference in Kansas City with some of our newspaper and yearbook class. I participated in a sports writing competition where we got to interview the owner of the KC Wizards before they became extinct. The story that I wrote placed Top 8 nationally.

3)When I was a junior in high school, I once got so sick that I threw up upwards of 20 times in a 24-hour period. The result? I popped blood vessels in my cheeks from the constant opening of my jaw and the blood filled the bottom of my eyeballs. I looked like something out of a horror film. I was actually allowed to wear sunglasses at school because it was that terrifying to look at.

4)The first job I ever had was writing for a newspaper when I was 12 years old. It was a small local paper called "The West 'O'" that came out once a month. My story was featured in a section called the "Kids Korner." It actually inspired the name for my first blog when I used to only write about sports. I called it the "Krafty Korner." I was paid $0.05 per word so you can bet the dickens that I did not use any contractions in that thing. The more useless words I threw in there the more money I got paid. Ultimately, it got super boring because I was not as creative back then, but still cool to say I wrote for a newspaper in middle school.

5)Every kid had a thing, something that defined them. This was especially true in school, whether it was music or math or getting in trouble or getting other kids in trouble. There was some big thing that defined you. For me, that was reading. I read everywhere I went. I read in the car, I read in bed, I read in the tub. Literally everywhere. In fact, during my third grade year I read over 1,000,000 words in various books throughout the year. After every book we read, we had to take a Reading Counts Test which tested our comprehension about the book and it totaled up the words in each book. I don't know why it did this, such a silly thing, but my teacher (Mrs. Bragg) noticed how high my word count was getting and she pushed me to get to the 1,000,000. I finished the book that took me over the edge in the bath tub of Great Wolf Lodge when my family was on vacation. I had woken up in the middle of the night and my dad was snoring super loud, so I couldn't get back to sleep. Instead I whipped out the book, ironically the book was about wolves, and sat down in the tub with a blanket and finished the book that sealed my accomplishment. To put this in perspective, I read A LOT of Magic Treehouse Books that year. Those books only have about 5-10 thousand words in them. Even if I average it out to be about 20K words per book I still read around 50 books as a third grader.

6)For those of you that have seen my knees you know I have some pretty nasty scars on them. They are about 2 inches long and 1/2 an inch thick. Cue Joker voice..."you wanna know how I got these scars..." Disclaimer, I only know this because my parents have told me how it happened. This story comes from when I was 2 years old and you don't remember things from that age. We had a traditional kitchen, it had wooden floors and being the do-first, think-later kid I still am today, I thought it would be fun to run into the kitchen and slide across the hardwood floor on my knees. I presume it was a lot of fun until I slide right over the air vent and it sliced open my knees. My parents didn't get me stitches and it resulted in some nasty, nasty scars.

7)I dated a girl for almost two years from 5th-7th grade. She was really the only girlfriend I ever had that wasn't the girl I ended up marrying. The fact that "shouldn't be known" isn't that I had a girlfriend at that time, but how we communicated. Don't ask me why because I have no idea, but for much of 6th grade we communicated via note writing, and by "much" I mean that we probably communicated more through notes than speaking. However, we wanted to hide our identity in case the notes were taken or confiscated so we each had a code name. Mine was "hamburger" and hers was "coca-cola." No lie we wrote things like "Dear, Coca-cola" and "love, hamburger." Don't worry, we had the fries. Her best friend was definitely french fries and often was used to deliver the notes.

8)In my life I have been pulled over close to 10 times. Only once have I received a ticket and only twice did the reason I get pulled over have to do with my speed. Every other time, the police officer has pulled me over to ensure that I was not driving drunk. For those that know me well, you know I don't particularly enjoy drinking and I certainly would never consider driving with alcohol affecting my body in any way. 

9)I need to finish with the most entertaining one. I once starred in a commercial. Definitely using the term "star" lightly. In reality, myself and a group of friends played lazer tag with vampire teeth in our mouths as a part of a promotion for "haunted lazer tag." at a place called Family Fun Center in Omaha, Nebraska. We got paid in free passes to do stuff at the Fun Center and free tokens. Don't worry, I am a proud enough person to post the link to the commercial. Laugh all you want, it was fun. Sorry to my friends that are exposed in the video.