Seven Random Things

I read enough blogs that said, "I'm not naming any names, but consider yourself tagged if you want to..." that I will consider myself tagged.

1) I spent about a decade thinking I was allergic to pine nuts. I'm not. (Long story short: in college, my roommates and I made a dish that involved roasted eggplant and toasted pine nuts. It made my mouth itch horribly. Since I "knew" I wasn't allergic to eggplant because I ate it in stir-fries every week, I blamed it on the new ingredient: the pine nuts. Much later, my father-in-law pointed out that old eggplant, when roasted, can be quite bitter and itch-inducing.)

2) I met my husband when I was 24, but I spent the previous decade just missing him. To wit: I went to a math camp at Hampshire College when I was 14; my husband's father guest-lectured there, and my husband debated attending it that summer, but chose music camp instead. Also, in college, I lived downstairs from his best friend. And our first year in grad school, he wrote me out of the blue to ask me to join a pick-up Ultimate team, but I had to decline because we had lab meetings at the same time.

3) The longest I've ever lived somewhere is 8 years.

4) I'm half-Asian but I have hazel eyes and dark blond hair. Various students of genetics have told me that I'm a "one-in-ten-thousand" since those are the odds of the black hair and brown eyes not being dominant.

5) My husband is also half-Asian.

6) So are our children (duh!) although some people prefer to call them "two-quarters Asian" to distinguish how the lines of inheritance go.

7) People have been trying to teach me to knit since I was about 12. It didn't stick until I was 32. The key was that I am, apparently, born to knit Continental (yarn-in-left-hand) style. Once my colleague Allison (who learned to knit in France) taught me, I was off and running...