After 5 years of blogging, finally a 101 about Angela

Image by Monopoly card generator.

Some bloggers start with their 100 things about them as one of their first few posts.  Maybe I'm not so self-centered, or maybe I'm not that interesting , you tell me.  So for waiting so long, I present 101 things about Angela.

1. I am an only child.
2. My parents emigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1963. 
3. They were both born in China and fled to Taiwan during the Communist Revolution in 1949.
4. My mother was completing her PhD in Chemistry when I was born.
5. I was born in North Dakota during a blizzard in January of 1967.
6. Um, that would make me "wicked" old. 
7. But not as old as my husband who turns the big 5-0 in four days.
8. I have lived in six states: North Dakota, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California and Connecticut.
9. My favorite season is winter.
10. I play classical piano.
11. The only time I venture out of of playing classical music is for Christmas carols.
12. I played the flute and clarinet in bands and orchestras in high school.
13. And I've taken violin and cello lessons.
14. I can play one song on the guitar - Blackbird by the Beatles.
15. And I can fake playing the electric bass.
16. I've sung in choruses, but only non-audition ones. 
17. I've always failed audition choruses.  Perhaps I can't sing!
18. But I love to sing!
19. I tried singing in my friend's band. 
20. I've heard the tapes... I can't sing.
21. Even though I have perfect pitch.
22. I took ballet and modern dance as a child.
23. My husband and I were sucked into the Arthur Murray cult before our wedding.
24. But luckily getting married allowed us to exit gracefully.
25. I feel self-conscious when dancing.  I can't "dance like nobody's watching."
26. Ever since I was little I've wanted to capture moments of my life through photography.
27. I learned how to develop black and white film in a cytogenetics lab when I was in high school.  That's the lab where they culture cells from amniocentesis to determine chromosomal abnormalities.  Back then we had to cut the chromosomes out of a photograph and line them up by hand.  They do that by computer imaging now.
28. I also took strobe lab at MIT where I captured a photograph of a bullet cutting through a playing card.
29. I bought my first digital camera one month before my son was born in 2000, so that all his photos would be digital.
30. I love video games.
31. But mostly puzzle and music games (guitar hero, rock band).
32. Even though I have 30+ years of piano playing under my belt, my son still beats me at guitar hero.
33. I am tickled pink that my son is so much like me.
34. My daughter however, is from Mars. 
35. No wait, I'm from Mars and she's from Venus.
36. But I still love her to death.
37. I tend to be like a guy when it comes to movies, gadgets, and most geeky pursuits.
38. I may or may not be addicted to Bejeweled.
39. I can stop playing anytime.  Wait, did someone just pass me in Bejeweled Blitz?
40. I tend to be extremely competitive.
41. And a perfectionist.
42. My favorite board game is Monopoly.
43. I love to play cards.
44. My favorite card game is Hearts.
45. I can hold my own at Spades.
46. And we used to play some crazy version of Whist.
47. But I never figured out how to play Bridge.
48. My name "moonfever0" comes from shooting the moon in Hearts and earning zero points.
49. I also like the number zero because I'm a software engineer and everything must be zero-based.
50. In high school I took every computer language course they offered. 
51. That would be BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL and oops I didn't really take COBOL because I was playing hooky with my boyfriend.
52. We had teletype machines on a timeshare computer back then.  At least we had progressed beyond punchcards.
53. I took an IQ test as a teenager and scored 189.
54. Mensa kept asking me to join, but I felt that their organization was too snooty.
55. So I went to MIT at age 16 instead.
56. I first majored in physics because I was enamored with astrophysics after reading the June 1983 Universe issue of National Geographic.
57. But I flunked my Electromagnetic Waves course.
58. That was mostly a "boy" issue and not incompetent academics.
59. So I attempted to major in electrical engineering and computer science, and then architecture and then finally settled on an "easier" major, mechanical engineering.
60. After many software school projects involving all-nighters I swore I would never become a software engineer.
61. I am a proud software engineer today.
62. Being a software engineer in the real world is NOTHING like school.
63. You actually strive to make code simple and elegant, not fancy and incomprehensible.  Or at least I do. 
64. I think some developers like to create incomprehensible code because it makes them feel superior.
65. I applied to graduate school as a senior only because I was too lazy to start recruitment interviews.
66. I did really poorly on my Engineering GRE.  I had no idea how to answer any of the electrical engineering questions.
67. I only scored at 49% percentile!  But I aced the general GRE.
68. I was not accepted to MIT for graduate school (they were the only ones who required the engineering GRE and they were on to me!).
69. I was accepted at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and only choose Berkeley because it was cheaper.
70. I hated California at first.
71. It smelled weird.
72. In graduate school I took a course in Mathematical Analysis and it was totally beyond my comprehension.
73. I guess that 189 IQ didn't take me that far.
74. I whooped for joy when I didn't fail the class.
75. I assumed that Berkeley was full of liberals, but I was shocked when a fellow teaching assistant was campaigning for Bush 41.
76. I kept taking down his signs. 
77. I loved being a teaching assistant, but really I was just one week ahead of the students.
78. So began my lifelong trait of faking my job.
79. My first job was at Sikorsky Aircraft performing analysis in the Rotors group.
80. It was definitely not as glamorous as it sounds - lots of hand- written stress and fatigue analysis.
81. There were no computers, only 2 Macs for the entire group.
82. We watched lots of scary videos of rotors failing and helicopters crashing.
83. I will never ride in a helicopter!!
84. Talk about right wing nut cases...  Operation Desert Shield started while I was there and everyone was all for the war.
85. I was laid off in 11 months because I was the last one hired in the group.
86. I cried like a baby when I heard.
87. I tend to be fairly liberal (if you haven't already guessed).
88. I always try to make every thing I do efficient.
89. It drives people around me crazy.
90. Or maybe it's because I'm a control freak.
91. It pains me when something is inefficient.
92. My travel dream is to see the Taj Mahal one day.
93. The Eiffel tower comes next.
94. I love cars.
95. I have a motorcycle license but no motorcycle. 
96. I used to have a motorcycle.
97. Two motorcycles in our household is enough (one for Doug and a dirt bike for Adam).
98. I never wear make-up except to weddings.
99. But I have too much gray and have to color.
100. I don't like high heels much either.
101. 101 things is a dang lot of things!  Do you know how many months it took for me to write this?  The title of this draft post was "After 4 1/2 years of blogging..."

Happy 5th Blogiversary to me!