Hmm. It’s been a good seven hours since I woke up, and last night’s evidently weren’t compelling enough to remember, but I’ll come back to this thread tomorrow morning and transcribe something for you. Or I’ll go dig up something from the notebooks, but those tend to be better-than-normal.
Heh, well, it could have worked out better, I suppose. He ended up being A Bad Idea! We wrote a couple of shoeboxes full of letters (and he called me from Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain and Germany), but before we actually met in person, about 20 letters and as many phone calls.
Our son isn’t all that severe, but has pretty bad social skills and mostly has trouble relating to other people. He’s very smart though (most AS kids are) and does pretty well in school. Has fine and gross motor issues, all that. His stims are verbal and pacing.
Cheers,
G
I’m neither Mormon, a homeschooler or a speaker of Danish, but dipping chocolates is something we have in common.
I mold them, too, though. Painted chocolate roses, and I get to eat the mistakes!
Cheers,
G
Geez, with skills like that, you should be a 4-star general!
Nope, skills like that get you a reputation for being a very useful non-conformist.
A little like Radar for MASH but annoying like Hawkeye if you happen to be a stickler for the Regs and a lifer. Some Chiefs thought I was their best PO and some thought I should be busted back down to fireman.
You know how the last few months of your enlistment the Div Officers start pushing for you to extend or reenlist. They did not bother with me. Myself and a friend who I went to A-school with and then we shipped together to the Ranger started out countdown to separation at 1000 days.
They all knew I would do my job until it was time to go and then I was heading home fast.
Jim {EM3}
I’m right-handed, goofy-footed, and situationally ambidextrous (ie. playing pool).
I’m a natural redhead.
Bonus point: with brown eyes.
And a red-haired sibling.
With 2 dark-haired, brown-eyed, tan parents.
I can touch my tongue to my nose.
I have a photographic memory.
I’m a woman with a very visual mind and strong visual-spatial skills.
I’m equally strong in both analytical/reasoning (left-brain) skills and intuitive (right-brain) abilities.
I’m a middle-aged woman who has been reading science fiction since age 7, and still reads it.
I spent 6 months playing a MMORPG > 8 hours/day. (I was 48 and female).
I’m “highly sensitive” - sort of like the Princess and the Pea fairytale.
I had natural childbirth twice, with no medical interventions.
The women on the Scottish side of my family have clairvoyant dreams, as do I.
I’m 22 and an owner of a successful retail business
I’ve been running a D&D campaign world for almost 7 years regularly
When I can’t sleep I teach myself new things, mostly useless things I’ll never need but who knows.
I’m a closet inventory, which is to say I always think of interesting ideas that could be useful in some application, but never really do anything with them.
Anything that doesn’t pose a constant challenge or is consistantly changing bores me.
I love playing video games but have only beaten 1 or 2 because the static environment bores me before they are finished.
People applaud me when I sing karaoke
The double “a” in Danish is a sort of “o” sound, made a little further back in the throat. (Nowadays they spell it as an å, except in names.) “Kierkegaard” is thus pronounced Kierk-eh-gor’ --the “d” is pretty much silent, almost swallowed. “Gård,” by the way, means farm or yard, and “kirkegård” is a churchyard, as in cemetery.
Gleena, yay! I don’t know hardly anyone who dips chocolates. I’ll have to pick your brain sometime…
I know the Gettysburg Address by heart, verbatim. I’ll use bad spelling/grammar and stuff just so you know that I didn’t rip it from some site:
four score and 7 years ago our fathers brought forth on this contenent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so concieved and so dedicated can long endure. we are met on a great battlefield of that war. we have come to dedecate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who hear gave their lives that that nation might live. it is altogether fitting and propper that we should do this.
but in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. the brave men living and dead who struggled here have consicrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. the world will little note, nor long remember what they say here. but it can never forget what they did here. it is for us the living rather to be here dedicated to the unfinished work for which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. it is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we bring increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vein. that this nation, under GOD, shall have a new birth of freedom. and that the government of the people, by the people, for the fucking people baby, shall not perish from this earth.
I can recite it in easily under a minute, if timed.
I am a cancer survivor but still count the days/months/years between checkups because cancer (my type) is never cured but can go into remission.
I bought my first pair of steel-toed boots at the age of forty to load and unload airplanes.
I was a flight attendant going in and out of Vietnam in the Sixties.
My first degree was in Journalism in the Sixties, the second in Information Systems Management in the Eighties.
I met my former husband, a Peace Corps volunteer, in the Philippines, at the Clark AFB hospital where I was confined with what turned out to be Toxic Shock Syndrome.
I lived in King’s Lynn, England, and Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, each for a year as a Software Documentation Specialist for a major US firm. This was in the late Nineties.
My long-haired blue-eyed snow-white cat was polydactal but not deaf.
My paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants to Canada where they eventually taught at and ran an Indian reservation school in British Columbia around Chilliwack. My grandpa was 20; my grandma was 17. My grandma was a County Nurse. I shudder. They were good people.
I was accepted as a student at the Sorbonne at age 19 but never followed through.
I was raised Catholic and went through twelve years of Catholic schools but lost my faith at somewhere around age fifteen. It took me about 5-6 years to get over it. I’ve never looked back.
I’ve been married and divorced twice and learned nothing from either experience. Marriage number one lasted ten years but was over at year seven. There was a seventeen year gap before marriage numbers one and two, the second of which lasted eighteen months. There will never be a marriage number three. Evidently I’m not good at this stuff.
My daughter, my only child, loves me.
Hurrah I’m a freak no more!!! 
I hate whipped cream. I get some really odd looks from people over that one :dubious:
I’m not an American but I can recite the Pledge of Allegiance [not off the top of my head - but when I hear other people saying it… ] no idea why unless it’s a past [passed?!] life doohickey
I can tell when I’m in a dream, and can run when dreaming (once I was trying to run and couldn’t, realised it was because I was laying “flat on my face”, turned onto my side, and carried on dreaming - now able to catch up to the people I was running with in the dream)
Touch your tongue with your nose? You are my dream woman.
Clairvoyant dreams? More, please.
Such as?
Now do it backwards and in Haitian Creole and I will be impressed.
Congratulations on the cancer survival! What do/did you have? What do you think you owe to it being in remission? Positive attitude? Medical miracle?
How do you view the Vietnam War, seeing the soldiers firsthand?
I apparently didn’t dream of anything interesting last night, but here’s the tail end of what I was dreaming right before the alarm went off this morning. It’s not quite verbatim (never is), but I’ll say it’s accurate +/- about 10%.
You know it’s a good shower when it hurts. The water hits your back like fire, makes you arch your your spine until you feel your shoulders pop. That’s when the pain melts, when the heat starts seeping into your muscles, washing out the tension. Just breathe. Suck it deep into your lungs, like a sauna, relax a bit, five minutes or so. Then take it down as cold as it’ll go, feel the cold slam into you, sledgehammer between the shoulderblades, straight into the bone.
I woke up right around here. If I wanted to actually do something with it, I’d take this and put a character of some sort into it, poke around with it a bit and smooth out the rough edges. I’d sketch out a loose plotline, mull it over, and take lots of naps over the next week or so until I had a good feel for it, and even then I’d only write a little bit on my own; at the end of the story, before I go in for a polish, probably three quarters of the words will be made when I’m fast asleep.
WOW, this is absolutely amazing to me. I have never heard of this before.
Wow, I really like the writing too.
Former Marine Guy asked:
I have stage 2 breast cancer; invasive ductal carcinoma. I attribute remission to the medical profession, technology, research, and the extraordinary (but well deserved) attention given to breast cancer. I also detected it rather early and am fortunate to have good medical insurance, well equipped hospitals and treatment centers close by, and knowledgeable doctors.
Most of us cringe when the ‘positive attitude’ method of remission is brought up, akin to, “She didn’t pray hard enough,” or “My prayer group prayed for you. Of course you’re in remission!” Yes, a positive attitude helps one to cope but it’s treatment and surgery that make a person cancer free.
If attitude cured cancer we’d probably be sent to psychotherapists rather then endure the rigors of surgery, chemo and radiation. We’ve attended too many funerals of those with positive attitudes, standing alongside the surviving whiners (“Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why did god chose me? Me! Me! Me!”)
I like this quote about Linda Ellerbee discussing her most recent book, “Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table.”
Your question reminded me of an old Winnie the Pooh poem:
Politeness
If people ask me,
I always tell them:
“Quite well, thank you, I’m very glad to say.”
If people ask me,
I always answer,
“Quite well, thank you, how are you today?”
I always answer,
I always tell them,
If they ask me
Politely…
BUT SOMETIMES
I wish
That they wouldn’t
BTW - you should be Great Former Marine Guy! Your interest in the answers to the question you posed is really commendable.
Well, I’m plotting to overthrow all legitimate terrestrial governments, install myself as God-King, outlaw Wikipedia & all other non-straight-dope web sites, and send all of you except Anaamika, gigi, Polycarp,, and Carlyjay to the pickle mines, but you already know that.
So…um…
Well, I’ve always enjoyed adminstering a spanking to a willing, post-nubile pair of female thighs. That count?
Thank you! Now, I need to find a way to work him into a conversation. 
Ayup. For FMG’s edification, hold out both fists palms up, let’s say. Extend your left thumb, and that’s 1. Extend your index finger and tuck your thumb back in, and that’s two. Thumb out again for three. For four, your middle finger goes out and all your other fingers are tucked back in. And so on.
For some reason, when you show people in traffic how you can count to four in binary, they get really upset…but they will often show you how they can do it, right back at you. In Britain, you only get the same effect if you show them how you can count to six.
If I’m fully naked, I can count to 2,097,152. Although, for the last 1,048,576 numbers, I need to be thinking about nekkid wimmim…rawr!