Apparently there is something of a tradition in the blogosphere of answering a set of questions, and then tagging other specific bloggers to answer the same set of questions and pass the list of questions on. These lists of questions are called memes (as are other instances of data/info spreading through the blogospere) and the chain letter style distributions sometimes mean that many people wind up sharing personal, usually trivial, perhaps even interesting data about themselves. There is even a site that is simply an ever growing collection of these question lists.

Well, Jake tagged me with a very short list, just one question: What are 5 of your idiosyncresies? I won't discuss the definition of idiosyncrasies since Jake did that so well, but will just supply my answer:

1. I don't drink coffee. It's not that I can't drink coffee, it's just that I choose not to. In fact, the only times I have had coffee are when I've been in need of a caffeine hit and couldn't get to some tea or even coke. Don't actually enjoy coffee as a flavor for the most part, kahlua being a notable exception.

2. I don't care about fashion. Changing what you wear because some snobbish designer is promoting their latest clothes doesn't make much sense to me. Between being a bit colorblind and still harboring some anti-social tendencies, it just seems to me that what I wear shouldn't be as important as other aspects of who I am. I have especially low tolerance for things like What Not to Wear.

3. I like to double check numbers I encounter during the day. I'm not saying I like spending my days just doing math problems (though I do spend some time doing that), but when I run across a statement like "they travelled as far as if they'd been to the moon and back, though the three years it took them was 1,000,000 times longer than it would have taken light to do so," I'll start calculating the number of seconds for light to travel about 500,000 miles, multiplying that by a million, and then dividing that by whatever to get it into days to figure out if that really was a consistent set of numbers.*

4. I'm a cat person, not a dog person. I've had pet cats on and off (more on than off) most of my life. Until 10 years ago or so I'd never really had much to do with dogs (largely because I didn't want to). Then my wife decided the time had come to get a dog, something she'd always wanted. Not knowing much about dogs I had few arguments against getting a dog, so we got one. One dog, to be kept in our fenced back yard (except in the worst weather), which became one indoor dog, which became two indoor dogs. Now I know enough about dogs to be able to argue against getting another. I prefer cats.

5. I tend to be a collector. I stopped collecting comic books after accumulating about 20,000 of them. I have hundreds of record albums, thousands of CDs, and uncounted numbers of books. I have come to understand what people mean about how we belong to our possessions, not the other way around. I'm trying to change my collecting ways. I've sold about a third of my comics. However, I'm not really ready to stop accumulating and get rid of many of the things that own me. Someday.

OK, now to pass it on. (I rushed to answer this so I can tag some of the other pirates before the folks Jake tagged get to them.)

Reverend Mommy
Wandering Willow
Susiederk
Little Green Friend

And finally, the fellow who first got me into blogging: dlature (I'm still on his blog roll, I don't know if he still reads here)

*No, the calculation is not even close. Based on it taking about 2.5 seconds for light to travel 500,000 miles (rounding up a bit, but the moon is not quite 250,000 miles away, either) about 30 days is what it would take for light to make a million round trips to the moon and back.