Idiosyncrasies (tagged)

I recently did a post with a list of random facts about me. I've gotten the idea since then to do a list of my idiosyncrasies. I'm thinking 10, rather than the 16 from the last list. As before, you're now tagged - if you blog, you should do a similar post on your blog, and feel free to leave a link to it in the comments here.

To the list, then:

1. I keep my money (bills, not coins) in a specific order. I arrange them with the biggest bills on top, so that when they're folded and put in my front pocket (I don't keep my cash in my wallet), the smallest bill is showing. Also, I make sure all the bills are facing the same way - face up, and right side up. I believe that hearkens back to my days of running a cash register at McDonald's, where we were required to keep the bills in the same orientation like that.

2. When I have my CD's arranged - I really haven't had them arranged since my wife and I moved into our house almost 3 years ago - I arrange them alphabetically by artist, then chronologically for each artist. I recall debating with myself whether my John Cougar Mellencamp & John Mellencamp CD's should be filed together under C, together under M, or separately. I went with M, since John never wanted the stage name Cougar.

3. There are seven applications that I have running at all times on my computer at work. I open them in order, so their icons are always in the same place on the task bar. If I have to close something early enough in the work day, I'll reboot so I can open them all fresh. I'm not going to go 6 hours with my Outlook way over on the right.

4. The station pre-set buttons on my car radio are programmed in order, to a certain extent. This is one I've changed a bit over time. There are 6 buttons, but I can toggle through 3 groups of pre-sets, so there are 18 stations I have programmed. Every car I've had before that had a toggling option, each group would be limited to either FM or AM stations. It was always 2 groups of FM and one of AM. Before, I always had my FM's entirely in order - e.g., with the stations I now have programmed, the first group would have been 92.5FM through 100.9FM, the second would have started with 102.9FM, and so on. The last group would have my AM stations in order. My current car's radio doesn't limit each group to AM or FM; they can be intermixed. Since I was intermixing the bands, I also decided to make a further change and arrange the groups so that the 6 stations I listen to most are in the first group, and so on through the second and third. But, within each group, they are still arranged in order, with FM's first (e.g., the first group is 92.5FM, 94.9FM, 104.1FM, 105.7FM, 107.9FM and 950AM - the second group starts at 93.7FM [which would have been {and was} in the first group previously] and goes in order through 4 FM's, finishing with 690 & 1130AM).

5. When I eat M&M's, Smarties or some other candy where you have several pieces of different colors, for each handful I will group them by color and eat all of one color before moving to the next, saving my "favorite" colors for last. This makes a little bit of sense (to me) with Smarties, since the different colors indicate different flavors. I want to save the best for last. There's really no way to justify doing this with, say, M&M's. But I still do it. With no real set pattern. Blue will often, but not always, be last. Brown and tan are likely to go first. But nothing is carved in stone. With Smarties, yellow are second-to-last, white are last, but the rest is just however I feel like going at the time. If there's no particular reason to choose one color before another, I'll usually go with the one with fewer candies first. No real reason, just what I do.

6. Similarly, when I'm eating a handful of chips, I'll often separate the broken ones from the whole ones, and eat the broken ones first. Again, it's a "saving the best for last" thing, I think, yet I could not tell you why whole ones are better than broken ones. If they're flavored chips, and there's one that seems to have more of the flavoring on it than others, that one will likely be kept for last.

7. (Hmmm, lots of these are around food) This one I do not do anymore, but through my childhood and adolescence, when eating a meal, I would always eat all of one item before starting the next, and continue to do that with whatever starch, vegetable(s) and meat I had. The meat was always kept for last. By now, you ought to be able to guess why.

8. The second-t0-last thing I do before I go to bed is to go to the bathroom to floss, brush, whatever. Just before that, third-to-last, I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. After the bathroom, the very last thing I do before I go to bed... I check to make sure that all of the stove's burners are off. Not sure who I think is going to turn one on while I'm in there, but there you have it. I have a real paranoia about that, tho I've never gone to bed and left a burner on. I did a similar thing when I smoked. I couldn't leave the house without checking twice that I hadn't left a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Once day, many moons ago, when I got to work I called home and asked my mother to check the ashtray to see if I'd left a cigarette burning. I hadn't. I never did. Always checked.

9. (Hmmmmm, lots of these are around food) When I eat a sandwich, the cheese has to be underneath the meat. I'll make sure that I pick up the sandwich and put it in my mouth so that the cheese is on bottom (save for a piece of bread, of course). On the rare occasion that I get a cheeseburger from the cafeteria at work, it's presented with the cheese on top. We add the condiments ourselves, and my first step in the process is always to flip my burger over so the cheese is on bottom.

10. Like #7, this is another one I don't do so much anymore. This may have led directly to item #7, in fact. I used to be really hard-core about this. It used to really bother me if different foods on my plate touched each other. Unless they were supposed to - you know, you're eating a stew, a hash, Chinese food, you're going to have different foods all over each other, which is no problem - or in various situation where I would arbitrarily suspend the rule - I had no problem, for example, with mixing corn and mashed potatoes. But for the most part, "no touching" was the rule. For the most part, no problem. But if there was a sauce or a gravy involved, well, that could pose a problem. It would require some attention. Beets were an issue. Hard to control beet juice, and with that bright red color, there wasn't any pretending that it hadn't touched something else on the plate. You may have noticed the qualifier in the first sentence - I don't do this one "so much" anymore. To this day, if I'm having beets, they'll be in a separate bowl. I just can not take beet juice on my other food.

I'm really not as crazy as this list makes me seem. I think.

Remember, you're tagged.