Six random things

Amy tagged me. In the spirit of fun, I'll post the six random things, but truth be told, I'm not sure these are things people already don't know about me -- I tend to have a big mouth and wear my emotions on my sleeve as it were ...

1. I hate swimming. Not as bad as Holly maybe, but you'll be hard-pressed to ever get me in a pool or large body of water. I attribute it to being stuck in the birth canal when my mom was in labor. (For 48 hours, if you want to know. They thought I had brain damage when I was born, I say the lack of oxygen just upped my VO2max.)

2. I do not bore easily, or rather I find something I like and stick with it. I have been eating basically the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day since I started losing weight. Eleven years ago.

3. My brother is the mountain biker in our family. He took me out to a gravel pit once when I was in college -- he was on his Gary Fisher (the one I just rebuilt), with me on my fully rigid Miyata 700c hybrid. I vowed from that moment forward to never ride the dirt again.

4. Speaking of bikes, my love affair with them started at a very young age -- when all my friends wanted to be firemen or astronauts, I wanted to be a Tour rider. It started when I saw Breaking Away in the theater with my grandparents (I was about 6 years old), and really took hold when I did a report in second grade about Belgium and Luxembourg, and learned about a certain rider named Eddie Merckx. By the time I was 11, I was doing 2-3 hour solo rides before school on either my dad's old 10 speed or my new Sears Free Spirit. It all went away when I found cars, girls and cigarettes ...

5. My first "shop" experience was when I was seven, when my best friend, brother and I opened Strout's Bike Shop in our garage. Our first project was to strip down my dad's old bike and repaint it, and then we put it all back together again. Holy crap was that thing a TANK!

6. Finally, I'm a pack-rat. I had forgotten about Strout's Bike Shop until I was going through a box of stuff last winter, and came across our price list of services -- yes, that small piece of paper has been in my "collection" for 28 years!

I am going to tag Jim, Mark, Mark, Brendan and Jay

here are the rules:
link to the person who tagged you.
post the rules on your blog.
write six random things about yourself.
tag six people at the end of your post.
let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
let the tagger know when your entry is up.