A Few Crazy Things About Me

So I have been blogging for a few months now and while I have given a few details about me and my life, most of my posts have been about recovery.  So I wanted to take a minute to tell you a few odd and fun things about me.

• I am originally from Arizona.  I was born in Kingman and then lived in the Phoenix area for the first few years of my life.  I moved to Utah when I was 5 years old and my only memory of Phoenix is going to the MetroCenter Mall in Phoenix and getting giant iced Cookie Monster cookies at a specialty bakery there.  
• I served  a mission in the Belgium-Brussels Mission and I speak French.  This is something I have tried to maintain.  I even just finished taking French courses at college to try to maintain a level of fluency.  When I was serving there my favorite city was Strasbourg, France.  In Strasbourg there is a beautiful area near downtown called Petite-France.  It was so beautiful to spend time there.  It felt like you were going back in time a couple hundred years.  Walking over worn cobblestone and seeing the old style shops and homes.

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•  I absolutely love baseball.  I love to watch, play and play fantasy baseball and other associated games.  I am a diehard fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I became a Dodger fan because my grandfather was a lifelong fan and used to tell me stories about watching the greats like Sandy Koufax, Duke Snider and other legends.  Towards the end of his life he gave me a Brooklyn Dodgers logo hat he had purchased at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York because he thought of all his grandsons, I would be the one to appreciate it the most.
• In my adventures in retail management I have reported a dead body to the local authorities and given the Heimlich maneuver to someone that was choking.  I have often joked that I could write a book about some of the things I have encountered working in retail management but these are two of the most interesting.  I found the body on a very cold Utah winter night when a poor homeless man had huddled against our building to try and stay warm and died of exposure.  I have no idea why he didn't just come inside but it was a sad night.  The Heimlich happened one night when a young man was choking on a corn dog in the hot deli area and no one knew what to do.  They called me because I was the manager on duty and they thought I might know what to do.  I told them to call 911 and then did my best to perform the Heimlich.  I was never a very good Boy Scout but I remembered enough to get the job done and he was able to cough up chunks of corn dog mixed with some nasty phlegm from a recent case of bronchitis.  It was pretty gross but I was glad that he was ok.
• I am the middle of 5 children.  I have 1 older brother, 1 older sister, and 1 younger brother and 1 younger sister.  I was sort of the bridge in our family as my oldest sister and my youngest sister are almost 16 years apart.  I was the baby for the first 8 years of my life and then after my older siblings moved out I was the oldest child and was the babysitter and what not my younger siblings.  I was the only one in my family that really "grew up" with everyone.  
• I love Halloween.  I still dress up with my kids almost every year.  I have come up with some pretty crazy costumes over the years but this one in my favorite.  I am the big 70's hippie guy on the right and the guy? on the left was my boss at the time.

So that is a little bit about me.  I hope that you enjoyed it.  I hope to get more information about me posted in the coming weeks including a detailed post about my life and how I first encountered my addiction but for today I just wanted to share a little about who I really am.

~~~ Tim