Tagged - I'm It!

I discovered I was tagged on Tuesday by Dara Edmondson. I had to post my Thursday Thirteen first, so now on to the game!

1 - Each player starts with 8 random facts or habits about themselves.
2 - People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their 8 things with a copy of these rules.
3 - At the end of your blog you need to choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4 - Don't forget to leave them a note saying they've been tagged.

8 Random Things About Me

1 - Half an hour before I met my future husband, a palm reader told me I was about to meet my soul mate. She said he would be wearing a uniform. He was - a blue polyester Famous Players theatre usher's uniform.

2 - In a bizarre twist of irony, I have walked past my sister's musical celebrity crush, not once but twice. And she was not with me. She has adored Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, for the past twenty years. She even lived in his neighborhood in Toronto. When I worked as an usher at the Hummingbird Centre for the Performing Arts there, he walked down aisle two as I was working aisle two. He was there for a Puccini opera. That's not unexpected, as I saw a lot of interesting celebrities there. However, when my husband and I lived in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia for two years (a fishing town) the two of us set off walking one afternoon along Main Street heading for Foodland, a small grocery store. A storm was expected the next day and a lot of small vessels had taken shelter in Yarmouth Harbour. We passed a man moseying along, and as one does here in the Maritimes, prepared to say hi to a total stranger. Then I realized it was Neil Peart again. Probably taking shelter with his sailboat, being a solo world traveller and all. So being proper Torontonians we just smiled and let him be.

3 - My mom and I shared a completely trippy sensory deprivation experience. On one of my trips home to NS when I still lived in Toronto, she drove me out to Mavillette Beach so I could get my Atlantic Ocean fix. Though we had blue skies in town, when we got to the coast we saw that fog had completely socked in over the water. Not uncommon for Yarmouth but bad for my schedule. We didn't care. We walked onto the sand anyway, becoming totally engulfed in fog. We kept walking till we saw the water, but by that time we'd entered this weird white dimension devoid of sound or depth or edges or up or down. An otherwordly experience we'll never forget.

4 - I had an out-of-body experience when I was about 4 years old, in the midst of an asthma attack. It was night time, and my memory of this event starts at a point outside the house. The back door opens and my mom comes out of the house carrying a large bundle wrapped in my special quilt, held close to her chest. She climbs into our white Volkwagon. Suddenly my memory returns to my own POV. I'm looking at the red interior of the car. I can feel the cold night air and I notice how everything smells. I told Mom about this memory when I was a teenager. She was only slightly shocked, since she knows me, of course. She said she and Dad had to take me to the hospital that night.

5 - I was the captain of a team assembled for the Photo Aid fundraising event for the Toronto Children's Aid Society, which I did twice. On the day of the event, we met for a list of riddles, solved them so we could get to a check-in spot somewhere in the downtown core and have our Polaroid taken there. As we made our way between check-ins, we hit people up for money for our lovely shiny cans. It was a blast! All the teams eventually returned to the starting point for a big party.

6 - I always looked forward to working the "Sesame Street Live" shows at the Hummingbird Centre. It was essentially a rock concert for toddlers. The real walkabout characters were onstage ("Big Bird!" cried the parents to their round-eyed cuties.) The real character's voices were on the pre-recorded show. The house (that's the theatre) allowed movement in the aisles for the entire show because of the nature of it being for small children. That's when the fun began. The little audience members couldn't contain themselves and danced in the aisles, which were sloped. All the jumping and shaking their heads around always disoriented the wee ones, whose jumping became more and more slanted, until the floor got closer and closer and they went down. Twelve shows a tour visit, for eight years, and I never got tired of it.

7 - I used to make balloon bouquets for birthdays, weddings, etc. at A Buck or Two, a upscale dollar store if you can imagine such a thing. We used to have some amazing merchandise. And we did a lot of balloon business on Saturdays. I did that for three years and only popped one balloon.

8 - One of my favorite ways to spend the day when I lived in Toronto was to drive to Niagara-on-the-Lake with my sister to spend the day walking past gorgeous Victorian homes and shopping along Queen Street. There were two shops we had to visit every time: Just Christmas and Victoria Gallery & Teas. I always got myself a new Christmas ornament and my sister always purchased some specialty tea. I also got myself something at the tea shop, but my choices were design oriented, as I bought the tea expressly for the box to be a decoration in my kitchen. I still have them.

Now to tag the next players:

MichelleWriter, Annie Mac, Cathryn Fox, Lilly Cain, Annie, BecK, Carmen, toni