Response to Tagging

First, let me say that I will miss Hidden Nook’s blog, and I will leave the link on my sidebar in the event he returns to blogging, as he’s suggested. Second, I extend him a public invitation to blog here on occasion, particularly if the thoughts are reasonably topical.

Your correspondent is a rich lode of eccentrities, which is why it’s so difficult to pick just five things about myself that are strange:

1. My wife and I have always referred to each other using the Korean “yeobo.” Never by name. As a consequence, my son did not know my wife’s name until age three. It was especially shocking for him to learn that there was another Joshua in the family.

2. I’m left-handed. I shoot right-handed. I’ve never qualified less than expert at the pistol range.

3. I’ve had a Lakota name I was a toddler, and so have my brothers. Mine was given to me by a Lakota elder whose funeral I still remember vividly, though I was just six or seven at the time. The procession of cars mourning this kindly, regal lost link to another time stretched from Oacoma, across the Missouri River, through Chamberlain, and halfway back to the Ft. Thompson Indian Reservation. If I shut off the TV and close my eyes, I can imagine the brush of the cool wind, scented with five hundred miles of prairie grass. Related strange fact: my father speaks Lakota, along with six other foreign languages. I’ve actually heard him do it.

4. To me, there is nothing is as dull as watching sports on TV. I don’t understand how people can stand it. And just in case you were going to ask, yes, I’m completely heterosexual. I know that some people who claim to be experts say we’re all a little bit gay. As some(!) of you already know, those people are wrong.

5. When I retire, I’m going to move back to the West and build UAVs. It’s been my lifelong obsession to design and build a jet-powered UAV, put a camera in the nose, and fly it up steep, narrow canyons.