Twenty Things - Tagged At Last!

I was finally tagged last week by that Piratey Know-It-All, Elaine. (I was tagged a second time shortly thereafter - and then again the other night - by two other people, but I will get to them in due course.)

So here are Twenty Things you probably didn't know about me. (Even if you did, just go with it.)



1. I have a younger sister who is a school teacher (the profession I trained in but never took up).

2. I have an even younger brother who is better than I am at everything I ever wanted to do; singing, drumming, acting, etc.

3. I refer to Coke (the drink) as "mother's milk to me", and drink it near-daily. I'm probably going to die in five years by rotting from the inside out.

4. At one point I owned three cats at once - never again.

5. At one point I owned no cats - never again.

6. I have a 97-year-old Grannie who we hope will make it to the big 1-0-0 so we can collect her letter from the Queen. Then Grannie's free to go about her own business and do as she pleases.

7. As well as being a crazy Muppet fan (which you may have noticed), I'm also a massive Buffy fan. I won tickets to see the final two Buffy episodes at the cinemas two weeks before they aired on Australian TV. I dressed up as Spike (which looked strikingly lifelike), and Wifey went as Faith (another striking resemblance).

8. I have a scar on my inner right thigh that I got from a piece of barbed wire. It happened when I was about 10 while walking along the top of a small brick fence that had three strands of barbed wire running above it. I was trying to show off by straddling the wire as I walked along the fenceline - but I cut myself about 5 centimetres wide. Instead of bleeding, I had some leg fat sticking out of it. It was cool ...

9. When my beloved first cat Fluffy (no relation) was killed by a rogue dog in our backyard overnight when I was three, and my mum had to tell me the next morning that he was in heaven, I was devastated. She was dreading having to tell me that Fluffy was dead, and I remember standing there in the hallway and saying to her softly, "Mummy, my heart is very sad", which caused her to break down.

10. I was President of my university's drama company for a record-setting two years ... and I ruled at it :)

11. It might not seem like such a stretch from The Muppets, but I'm a huge Disney fan as well. I know there are many anti-Disney sentiments out there, but I'm not one of those people at all. Wifey's a fan too. We currently have 52 animated Disney DVDs, and we have every intention of getting 'the rest of them' over time, despite how many I know that is. (I still find this very amusing, though.)

12. I had secret piano lessons in the six months leading up to my wedding day, so that I could perform a secret song to Wifey during the wedding ceremony (which I'd written for her). It came as a complete surprise to all but the band members who accompanied me. Nice moment.

13. No matter how much of a hurry I'm in, I can never pass a doughnut shop or book shop without stopping and going inside. In the case of the doughnut shop, I will usually end up buying something even if I probably shouldn't, and in the case of the book shop, I usually end up spending an hour or two browsing, sometimes culminating in me buying something I definitely shouldn't! (If it's a second-hand book shop, say good-bye to the whole afternoon!)

14. I once found a turtle in the gutter of our very-residential street as a kid, took him home, named him Tiny Tim, and dutifully looked after him for two or three days. He lived in our bathtub and was very happy (although that's just how I remember it as a kid - in hindsight, I think the poor thing was probably petrified out of its mind!). After three days, Mum had had enough of it preventing me from having a bath, so the RSPCA was called and Tiny Tim was taken away. Dad said he probably 'fell of the back of a truck', which was a term I hadn't heard before so I took it at face value and grew up imagining this little turtle somehow falling off the back of a truck in downtown suburbia. It was a perplexing mental image to grow up with, and it wasn't until I thought about it again many years later that I realised what Dad had meant.

15. Still on the subject of pets, at one point in my childhood I had two cats (a wonderfully friendly black one and a misbehaving white one - imaginatively called Sooty and Snowy), and I loved them both - although at that point, Snowy was the more personable, so I spent more time with him (being a fickle child). One day when I was about 8, after not seeing Snowy for a while, I asked Dad where Snowy was, to which Dad said that he'd wondered how long it'd be before I'd ask; he'd taken Snowy to the RSPCA two weeks earlier because of his mischievous behaviour. I cried my heart out all night (literally - I got no sleep and neither did my parents) and all the next day (I didn't go to school). Snowy and I had been really close, and I was upset because I hadn't had a chance to say goodbye - but worse than that, I felt terrible about not realising or noticing his absence for two weeks! I can understand my parents having to get rid of him, though. He used to use his claws to pick the lock on the back sliding flyscreen door (!), come inside and eat the chicken that was defrosting on the counter for dinner. Houdini's cat. I still don't get why my parents didn't tell me what they'd done either in advance or at least in the two weeks that passed before I finally wondered where Snowy was. (A note on the above point: It wasn't strange not to see the cats for a few days, as they were 100% 'outdoor cats' and our property ran adjacent to a huge paddock of unused land - complete with metre-high grass - so sometimes we'd have dead mice, rabbits, rats, snakes and possums on our back doorstep. They were always disappearing for a while and then returning to lounge around the backyard again. And although I was heartbroken for a while, Snowy's 'abduction' was a blessing in disguise, as it meant that I got to know Sooty again - who had been the family cat for two years prior to Snowy's arrival - and who had taken a back seat to Snowy's attention-grabbing behaviour. Sooty lived until the ripe old age of 18 and became my favourite ever cat (and I love cats! ... but not in a yucky way), and he even became my close friend during those trying teenage years. You know how some pets can fill that void. I was truly blessed to have Sooty when I was growing up, so Snowy's departure helped that to happen.)

16. Amongst some of my friends, I am known as The Cat Whisperer. I can make all domestic cats - no matter how 'feral' you think they are - sit calmly and docilely in my arms. I have the magic touch and all cats love me.

17. My favourite chocolate bar of all time (and there are a lot of them I love!) is Violet Crumble. A close second is chocolate-covered Turkish Delight.

18. My blogger name 'BEVIS' is not pronounced 'Beavis'. If you've been imagining that it sounded like 'Beavis', that makes you 'Butt-Head'. Note the difference in the spelling. 'BEVIS' is pronounced: 'Behh-viss'. 'Be' as in 'beverage', or 'bevy of heavenly beauties'; 'vis' as in 'viscount' or ... um ... that's about it, actually.

19. The little green frog in my blogger image is not - as many of you seem to have assumed, by your comments - Kermit. It's actually his little nephew Robin. He's much smaller and cuter than Kermit. Just like me.

20. I was born and bred ("in a briar patch") in Sydney. I lived there for 16 years and then my family moved down to Melbourne. By the time my family moved back to Sydney, I had embedded myself in Melbourne with friends, a uni course, etc, so I did what I had sworn black-and-blue when I moved down at 16 that I would never do: I opted to stay in Melbourne while my family returned to Sydney. I am ambidextrous in regards to the two cities / states. I prefer neither one to the other and see good and bad points to each. So don't draw me into a Sydney vs Melbourne debate, for I will undoubtedly beat the pants off you with contrary arguments, no matter which city you're supporting. I'm used to arguing for each city and I've heard every complaint about either one known to man. They're both beautiful cities and have different intricacies and foibles. (Brisbane, however, is a hole.)



So there you go. And now, to encourage other bloggers to post some 'stuff' about themselves, because I'd like to know more about them, I tag Djali and Riss and Sheriff of Nothing.