ARG! I've been tagged

Well a couple of days ago, the lovely Heather from Slightly Dramatic tagged me! (not to be confused with my Heather from As the Coffee Brews, which is finally being updated again. I'm pretty sure she will have something to say tomorrow. I promise) Here are the basic rules:

A). Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog...
B). Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself...
C). Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs...
D). Let each person know that they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
**You get it?? --- You got it?? --- [GOOD] --- So here goes:*

1. Believe it or not, I never tasted a drop of alcohol until my 23rd birthday. Not for any particular reason, I just never wanted to. I blame my friend Travis for ruining me. Apparently that night I called him and also blamed society for making me drunk. That damn society.

1b. OK, so that first one was sort of a lie. I did ingest some alcohol in high school, but not the normal, fun kind. For about a week, a friend of mine and I thought we'd be cool if we DRANK Listerine. Not for the alcohol or anything, but mainly because it told us not to, and we thought we'd be tough for doing it. Instead, we were just really, really stupid. And I know if I didn't list this here, KP would call me on it.

2. The most-prized items of sports memorabilia in my collection are (in no particular order): a personalized Roger Craig autographed 5X7 photo saying "To Chris, Be Good," (he's from Davenport, IA, and my uncle knew him and his mom, I've met him a couple times), an autographed Willie Mays baseball card, and a Buck O'Neil autographed baseball.

3. I have a strong desire to someday live in Boise, Idaho.

4. One of (if not THE) earliest memory that I have is from when I was about 3-years-old, being on the beach in Oregon, and getting knocked over by a wave. I can remember crying "The ocean got me!" to my mom, and seeing lots of gulls.

5. My favorite actress of all-time is probably Audrey Hepburn. There was a while there when I had a HUGE crush on her. It was kind of weird.

6. The reason I started playing the saxophone was Lisa Simpson.

7. The first movie that I can remember seeing was a showing of The Jungle Book at a drive-in movie theater. Be jealous.

now, for people that I myself will tag. . .

Of course H is there
As is Lucy
And WhiskeyMarie
Next is Christina
Then Nicole
Errr. . . and anyone else that wants to. I just needed to get my ladies out there first (I feel like some sort of blog pimp now.)

***

Also! Last chance to tell me you're interested in the Great Blogger Mix CD Exchange! I'll be sending out an email soon with more details, so if you want to join in, let me know!

My day and wine tour photos

First off, tomorrow is a special day for The Politics of Lonely. It will be the first time that I will have a guest appearance, H of Random Mindless Rambling and As The Coffee Brews fame has put together her screening process for getting with the Flenker. Look for it either later tonight or early tomorrow. It's a good one.

After I left the coffee shop where I blogged earlier, I was walking around town, and happened to run into my brother and his roommates pulling their boat, getting ready to hit the Coralville Reservoir. Since it was a beautiful day, I jumped in, and joined them for an afternoon on the water. Unfortunately, I was in my jeans and 3/4 length sleeves, so didn't have quite the optimum clothing for getting into the water. Next time, though, I'll be ready, and I'll go tubing and have some fun. (I tried wakeboarding once, and couldn't last a second. Made for an entertaining time, though.) Also unfortunately, I didn't bring any sunblock with me, and the only stuff they had was SPF 8. I wear 6 times that normally. So I got a little red. But only on about 1/4 of my arm. And a tiny bit on my face/neck. Oh well, it was bound to happen.

Travis and I had to leave a little early, since our dad was coming up for some pizza and relaxing in a park. Again, beautiful weather for it, and I'll never pass up a free meal from a parent. We sat out for a while, then drove around a section of Iowa City I've never seen. There's a ton of new housing developments going up, some really nice places, so it was nice to check out.

Anyways, it was a fun day. I'm glad I was able to enjoy it, that I actually got outside instead of sitting on a computer or playing video games all day.

***

Since the "internet" is working at my place now, I'm going to take this opportunity to post some photos from the wine tour yesterday, just so everyone can be jealous.

This was our ride for the day
(I'm not sure why the date is wrong... Dawn must not know how to operate that part of her camera)

An interior shot of our ride

Another interior shot, featuring my brother and mom

My brother and I "enjoying" High Gravity
(notice how young I look in this picture!)

Travis posing with our $8 worth of champaign

We definitely overpaid

An exterior picture of the front of my favorite winery, Park Farm

One of the rooms inside Park Farm

The view from the back of Park Farm. Absolutely gorgeous

From left to right: Pamela, Flenker!, Travis, and Jake
lounging outside of Park Farm

Group photo

The homestead from Field of Dreams

Standing at home plate on the field

I'm pretty sure that's the "Captain Morgan" wind-up

A shot of the sign from our last stop

Here's (another one) of my Big Ideas

Ok, here's one thing that I've been thinking about proposing for a little while, one of my grand schemes, and I hope I can get a lot of cooperation from everyone out in the blog land. It seems that most, if not all of people that have been reading are interested in music to some extent. So I'm here to announce the Great Blogger Mix CD Exchange! If enough people sign up or agree for this, it could be pretty awesome. If not, it can still be fun, I'll send out some CD's to anyone that would like. But first, I want to get an idea of how many people would be into this. And I invite everyone out there to post on their blog, asking others to join in the fun! For now, just post a comment here and let me know if you're interested, and maybe send me an email and I can start compiling names. Once I get an estimate of who would participate, I could send emails out to line things up, to get it all started. So for now, leave a comment, send me an email, and start thinking of some kick-ass mixes. This is a no-holds-barred event, you can do a theme mix, you could do a totally random mix, a mix of bands or songs that you don't think anyone has heard, or you could just do a mix of your all-time favorite songs. Right now I'm kind of picturing everyone sends everyone else a cd, but if we get enough people, I have a couple options of how it could go down. I'll save that for later, though. For now, spread the word around, you can link here or just give the basic gist of things and hand out my email (flenker@gmail.com).

Oh, and one more time, I want to promote my latest creative hijinx with my good friend H (the brains behind Random Mindless Ramblings). It's As the Coffee Brews, a story about whatever we decide it will be about. It's fun, so just humor us! You might even like it!

Just in case you couldn't get enough of me. . .

The first couple of installments of As the Coffee Brews, a joint venture in writing between me and H, are up! We're both very excited about it, I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as we've enjoyed talking about, planning, and writing it thus far. I have to give Haley credit, she's the one who came up with the idea, I just (unwittingly) supplied the name and kind of basic plot theme. It took me about 2 seconds to agree to it once she told me her idea. I don't know how often it'll be updated, hopefully daily or so. It's kind of funny that this is starting right after I say that I'll be posting less frequently, but it just worked out like that. So you may be seeing (slightly) less of me here, but you can still get your Flenker Fix over there. Plus, Haley's a fine writer, so you'll have plenty of good stuff to read. Assuming you think that my stuff is good too. So enjoy!

Please note that this is only part of the Big Ideas that I alluded to earlier. Stay tuned for more.