100 Things About Me..

Today was a pretty good day. I woke up early today to go swimming with Joe, a buddy from swimming. We did a pretty hard workout. You can read about it on his blog - http://cyboc.blogspot.com. Anyways, after that, I came home and had some preparation to finish for my classes on Tuesday. I guess I wanted to get it out of the way. It didn't take as long as I expected so that was good. I also found out that the only problem with my car was that they didn't top up the transmission fluid properly.. duh! Oh well, now it seems to be running really well so I'm happy :-)
Later in the day, I didn't do much. I played some scrabble with a friend online and he kicked my butt... kind of embarrassing considering his first language isn't even English. Oh well... that's the way it goes sometimes.
Based upon some recent insipiration, I've also decided to come up with 100 Things about me here as well. You will probably find some funny, some quite sad and others quite weird. But hey, that's me right? I'm a unique person...

100 THINGS ABOUT ME

1. My full name is Damien Christopher Ponech
2. My birthday is May 12, 1978
3. I have green eyes and short brown hair.
4. I have lived in 3 cities in Canada: Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver
5. I have set foot upon every continent in the world except Africa and Antarctica
6. I am able to speak to one degree or another most of the major European languages and some Asian ones too (French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Norwegian etc.)
7. Inventing my own languages is actually a hobby of mine
8. Yes, that is a bit nuts.
9. The sport that I'm the best at is swimming
10. My best swimming stroke as an age-group swimmer was freestyle, now it appears to be backstroke.
11. Despite the fact that I'm a swimmer, I almost drowned at age 6 and my mother rescued me.
12. I once drank paint thinner as a child and had to be rushed to hospital. Luckily, they did or they said I could have become blind.
13. I swam across a 16 kilometre lake once.
14. The furthest I've biked in one day is about 385 kilometres
15. I used to compete in Triathlons when I was a teenager.
16. I have only had sex with 3 different people in my life (not all at the same time of course!)
17. I currently have a girlfriend (as of 2006)
18. The feature I most look at on women is their hair.
19. I prefer women who have natural looking features and don't look like barbie dolls.
20. I once slept in an outhouse (not willingly of course)
21. I currently own a Silver 2-Door 2002 Hyundai Accent (as of 2006)
22. Chocolate, Strawberry or Vanilla? - Chocolate of course!
23. Croutons or Bacon bits? - Bacon bits :)
24. I have a B.A. Honours in applied linguistics and a B.Ed. from the University of Ottawa
25. I only got my first computer in 1996.
26. My favourite foods are pizza and tacos.
27. My favourite dessert is Rocky Road ice cream
28. My favourite colour is blue
29. I've never had a full beard or moustache
30. I've never owned a house
31. My favourite movies of all time are The Cube and Rain Man
32. My favourite type of music is anything 80s (mostly new wave)
33. I have no brothers and sisters - I am an only child
34. Both my parents died some years ago. So, I'm an orphan too
35. My father died of a heart attack and my mother died of a brain anerysm
36. When I was 5 years old, I tried to drive off with my parents car and got into an accident.
37. I've never been involved in a major accident since then except a few fender benders
38. I've only gotten one speeding ticket in my life.
39. I still drive fast anyway.
40. I've never smoked cigarettes or marijuana in my life.
41. The only food that I won't eat is eggs. Can't stand them!
42. I'm currently 5'8" and 170 lbs. (I was once as high as 220 if you can believe it! ouch!)
43. My favourite fruit are grapes
44. I hate the cold. I much prefer hot temperatures to bitter cold.
45. I've held the following jobs in my life: mailroom clerk, landscaper, teacher (current job), tutor, customer service at a bank, working for the university of Ottawa with the student union, inventory clerk, factory worker, government of Canada employee at Health Canada/Justice Canada and courier.
46. I was always an above average student but never was the top student in any of my classes.
47. I was once stung 50 times by a swarm of bees when I ran into a bunch of nests while out picking raspberries one day.
48. Ever since that time, I have a bit of a phobia of bees, hornets etc.
49. I am also afraid of heights.
50. I've never been struck by lightning
51. I've never won the lottery
52. The one trait that I dislike the most in people is stupidity/ignorance.
53. I tend to swear a lot
54. I have had road rage before but never acted on it.
55. I've felt an earthquake before in person
56. I've seen a tornado before in person.
57. I have a bit of an obsession with the weather and tend to watch the weather channel for hours at a time.
58. I seem to have a gift with memory. When I consciously decide to remember a number or a statistic, I tend to never forget it.
59. I like to look up my friends on Google Earth
60. I'm currently located at 49º12'53.00N 122º58'53.09W
61. I get bored easily
62. I don't tend to watch many sports on TV except when the Olympics are on. Then I'm glued to the set.
63. I've been to several Major league baseball games in my life - A few Toronto Blue Jays (in Toronto) and one Baltimore Orioles (in Baltimore)
64. I'm quite absent-minded despite the fact that I have a good memory.
65. My mother told me that I never actually learned to speak proper English until I was about 2 years old. Before that, I would speak in a kind of gibberish that only she and my dad could understand. It seems I was inventing languages even as a toddler!
66. The coldest water I've ever swam in continuously (for more than 20 minutes) without a wetsuit is 48F. I went swimming in a lake in October in Ottawa as a swim practice once.
67. I would like to cut a hole in the ice somewhere and do a polar bear swim sometime. I know it doesn't seem to make sense since I don't like the cold
68. I have a currency collection with coins or bills from almost every sovereign nation and dependent territory on Earth that issues their own currency. (I think I'm missing about 9 or 10 of them)
69. I am of Irish and Polish descent. My last name is Polish in origin
70. I own a Super Nintendo and like to play all the Mario Bros. video games. I can't really get into these new fancy games these days.
71. I like to read Wikipedia for fun.
72. I've had 2 pets in my life. Both of them were dogs. My first dog was a purebred sheepdog named Barclay (from Sesame Street) and my second dog was a half black lab/half bouvier mix named Ebony.
73. I'm not gay or bisexual.
74. I've got every single Unicode font on my computer (i.e. I can pretty much type in any language that exists or has existed on the Earth)
75. My favourite breakfast cereal is Honey Nut Cheerios
76. I like to watch cartoons - mostly anything Disney
77. I never seem to have much of a problem adjusting to jetlag. Within 1 or 2 days, I'm feeling perfectly fine.
78. I once had to translate for someone who didn't speak English.
79. My girlfriend and I currently own 5 computers between us - 2 laptops (1 Toshiba - Pentium IV (works sometimes), 1 Acer AMD), 1 E-mac, 1 Celeron 366 (not working) and 1 Pentium III 800mhz.
80. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer or cosmologist when I grew up after visiting the planetarium several times as a kid.
81. When I was 2 years old, my mother took me to a doctor and told her that I was autistic and a vegetable because I hadn't started talking at that point.
82. My worst subjects in school were art and music.
83. I take size 10 shoes
84. Currently, my waste size is 32"
85. My favourite alcoholic beverage are vodka coolers (Mike's Hard Lemonade etc.)
86. I'm addicted to gummy bears
87. I rarely listen to the radio
88. I made a really bad politically incorrect comment once and I'll never forget it. I still feel ashamed of it to this day.
89. I love watching the Trailer Park Boys - Bubbles is my favourite.
90. I'm also a huge Star Trek Fan and I own all 10 movies in digital format plus several episodes of Voyager and Next Gen too.
91. I consider myself to be a very messy person
92. I'm not a coffee drinker at all. I will only drink tea.
93. At home, I often only walk around in my underwear.
94. Peppermint or Chamomile? - Peppermint!
95. I usually wake up at around 7:00am to get ready for work during the week and sleep in on weekends.
96. I hate wearing ties and I avoid wearing them at all costs.
97. I've been run over a car twice in my life. Both times I had nothing broken miraculously, just some bruises.
98. My mother always used to make me peanut butter and honey sandwiches to take to school for lunch when I was little.
99. I consider myself relatively intelligent.
100. I know that I'm a good person inside.