Yikes! I've been tagged!

Christina's tagged me with the "5 things no one knows about you" meme that's been floating around the blogosphere for the last little while. Not one for overly personal blog posts, I was hesitant a bit at first but then thought, "What the heck!"

1. Up until recently, I really didn't do too much cooking. Oh, I could scramble eggs, grill meat on the bbq, heat up frozen lasagna. I could even serve as a decent prep chef, chopping veggies and the like. But then, while my wife was recovering from a couple of hip replacement surgeries, I ended up watching a lot of Food Network Canada shows, Particualy Chef at Home featuring Michael Smith. Being at home a lot more also didn't hurt. So, I started cooking. First up was a couple of recipes by Michael Smith, including a decent clam chowder. I also got obsessed with cooking Chili, trying it several times until now I think I make a pretty darn good chili! For the next couple of years, I did a lot of weekend warrior cooking, prefecting my repertoire and techniques. Now that I'm on sabbatical, I basically do all the cooking.
   
   
2. I spent the summer I was 18 (1981) living in Calgary with my cousin, during the first great western oil boom. I remember the "Unwanted: Dead or Alive" Pierre Trudeau posters that were everywhere. I worked as a security guard for an agency which got me around to lots of different sites all over the city, from factories, contruction sites, even an indoor botanical garden. It was great fun and a great experience.
   
   
3. I loove trashy pop culture. The trashier the better. Heavy metal music (Black Sabbath!), pro wrestling (The Undertaker's my fave), cheesy horror novels and books, science fiction novels & movies, hardboiled detective novels, James Bond movies, the whole nine yards. Needless to say, it all makes my wife cringe to think about it.
   
   
4. I'm an athiest. No big deal here, I'm not going to go into a big production about the why's & wherefore's but this post from Adventures in Applied Math pretty well sums up where I'm coming from. Oh yeah, nothing like going to a Catholic/Jesuit all-boys school to wring every last bit of religiosity out of a guy.
   
   
5. I used to work as a software developer for a company called Aon, which is an insurance broker, in their Montreal office. I left in 1998 to become a librarian. Sometime after that, their New York offices centralized and relocated to the World Trade Center, where a couple of hundred employees died on September 11, 2001. There were 6 former employees of the Montreal office, who I knew to varying degrees, who died that day: Mike Arczynski, Cindy Connolly, Mike Egan, Meredith Ewart, Peter Feidelberg, Colin McArthur and Debbie Robinson.

To keep it in the canuckscitechbiblioblogosphere, I'd like to tag Carolyne, Richard and, to semi-second Christina, Catherine. Don't feel you have to do the meme if you don't want.