I’ve been tagged by 3 people, Liz, Alec, and Heidi, to participate in the “7 things you didn’t know about me” meme. Well, here it is… sort of…

1. I’ll start with a confession: I hate memes! As I openly admitted here, I was never really good at doing ‘assignments’ and this blog has never felt like that to me. I’ve thought about this post for days and couldn’t get my butt in front of the computer to write it because it felt contrived. Even when I last wrote a meme I sort of cheated and just printed something I’d already written, (my grandfather’s eulogy to be specific). So, the fact is that you won’t see me write too many of these. -Glad that’s out of the way! 🙂

2. I have bouts of insomnia. I’ll be fine for three to six months then I get hit with it. I’ll live off of 3-4 hours sleep for 5 or 6 days, then catch up with a 6 or 7 hour night, and then go another 5-6 days on less than 4 hours sleep. Even when insomnia isn’t hitting me I tend to need very little sleep. I slept in this morning and tonight, if all goes as planned, I will probably get 3hrs sleep. When people tell me, “You are killing yourself”, I usually respond with, ‘I might die younger than you, but I’ll be awake longer than you were.’ Oh and for no rhyme or reason sometimes I can drink coffee and then go right to bed, sometimes it wires me awake for hours, and the same holds true for medicines that are supposed to cause drowsiness.

3. I am not Tech Savvy! If I had a pair of dimes for every time someone said, ‘Dave, you are good with computers, can you help me with this…” then I could retire early. I’ll explain this with a tangent example: The fact is that I happen to be a very good driver. Put me behind the wheel of a car, even in a snow storm, and I’ll get you to your destination safely. However, don’t ask me to do anything more to the car than put gas or windshield washer fluid in it… maybe check the tire pressure… that’s it! Give me a working computer and I can do pretty good there too! Not because I’m savvy though… just because I spend hours trying things… see #2 above.

4. I’ve never owned a car. Both cars we currently have are in my wife’s name.

5. I’m am inventor. I commuted on my bicycle when I first moved to BC and I designed my own commuter bag. It was the first time I’d ever had something made that I designed and other than being a bit too small it turned out great!

From ’03 to ’05 I dedicated thousands of hours and created a patent for bicycle locks that connect together. At over 140 pages, 90 or so drawings (many requiring pixel-by-pixel adjustments), not to mention about $15,000, this was a huge undertaking! I flew to Boston to pitch my idea and a patent specialist at Kryptonite Locks liked it… But I pitched it to them just after this happened… their money was a bit tied up to be toying with a specialty lock. I also pitched it in my own back yard at Norco Bikes. They wanted it, but could not convince their foreign lock-maker to make it for them… a long story and moot after The World Patent Office rejected my international patent request because they thought my idea wasn’t ‘novel’ enough. This, despite two industry specialists liking it and finding it novel! I decided not to fight it and throw good money after bad, but I’m really proud of taking this as far as I did.

My ideas mostly come during my bouts of insomnia, when my mind won’t rest. I remember seeing Phenomena with John Travolta and in it there is a scene where he describes random ideas flooding his brain, like shortening the mailman’s route pattern and changing the layout of a parking lot to fit more cars. I really connect to what that feels like. I’ve fully developed ideas in my head for bike lights, an alarm clock and bed sheets… who in their right mind tries to revolutionize the design of bed sheets?

6. I was a Treasure Hunter! Some of my closest friends don’t know this… they thought I was doing ‘mineral exploration’… (this wasn’t really a lie). We never found any treasures, but we found some very interesting holes in some very remote places. Basically we always got there too late!

My adventures included: Nights under remote skies where Magellanic Clouds could be seen with my naked eye; Fishing in waist high water, catching barracuda and tying them to a rope attached to my leg -later on that evening called ‘bait’, when I found out that I was in shark-infested waters; An out-of-body experience, alone on spit facing the Atlantic Ocean with a storm passing by; Hiking a desert mountain only to be hailed on in a freak lightning storm- we had no choice but to take shelter under a tree to avoid welts from the marble sized hail… 20 minutes later we were sweating in blistering heat; Suffering from ‘mask squeeze’ on a 75 foot wall dive (my first dive ever)-I was relieving my ear pressure, but not the pressure in my mask and I ended up with the whites of my eyes almost completely red. Being bitten by over 30 wasps in a cave on a tropical island; Not being bitten by a 4 foot rattle snake I almost walked right into near the Superstitious Mountains; Dragging a boat for over an hour through methane-rich muck because low tide prevented us from lowering the motor; Spending 24,000 kilometers in a Jeep Cherokee in one summer… that’s 10 full days calculated at an unrealistic 100km/hr average; Thousands of false beeps on metal detectors and ground-probing radar; Too many holes dug; Watching the tide change in the Bay of Fundy; Horizon-less fog; Mesmerizing dust devils; Unbelievable hikes; Incredible sunsets; And fond memories to last a lifetime.

7. You didn’t really expect me to follow the rules did you? I’m done. And since I don’t like doing these, I won’t pass this on to anyone. If I’ve inspired you to share, leave a comment with a link and I’ll add my own link below this to give you some link-love.