Raising a dork: nature or nurture?

My parents just had some major work done on the house.  It's a pretty old house that requires some upkeep, so a friend of the family who happens to be a contractor basically moved in for almost a month and sanded, stained, and polyurethaned ALL the wooden floors and repainted all the rooms in the upper 2 stories.  Every time I went over to walk The Stella or hang out with my parents, I felt like I had inadvertently stumbled onto the set of This Old House.  I was waiting for Bob Vila to pop out from behind the piano and duke it out with Tommy Silva for the title of best home renovator.

The place looks really beautiful now, but all that work generated about a metric ton of dust that settled all over the place (no joke, Stella somewhat resembled Pig Pen as she tore through the living room).  So after proctoring the big fat stupid Earth Science Regents and wanting to claw my own face off from boredom, I headed over to have pizza with my mom and help her excavate the living room a little bit.

While unearthing the furniture, we flipped through the channels for something to have on in the background and stumbled upon Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, or as mom and I like to call it "Lord of the Rings: The Great Schlep" and figured that this particular Tolkien-fest would be the perfect backdrop to some tedious housework.  My mom is a Tolkien NUT, and she was in charge of raising me, so what happened next is hardly a surprise, but it did make me wonder whether there's a specific gene for dorkiness (dorkishness?) or whether one is inculcated into Dorkdom by current members.

Mom and me about 13 years ago.  We both of us have greyed a bit since this pic was taken.

So we hit a stride with the cleaning during the battle at Helm's Deep.  One of the best threads in that scene is the competition between Gimli and Legolas over who can kill more, so this translated to a contest between Mom and me over our furniture dusting.  While dwarf and elf yelled "17! 19" my mom and I would yell out what we finished cleaning:  "Lamp!" "Piano!" "Coffee table!" "Cat!" (Sorry Ma, you're the dwarf in this analogy cuz I'm taller.  And I'm wearing my hair like Legolas right now because my bangs are way too long.  Did all the elves decide to grow out their bangs at the same time?)

At this point, I'm thinking we should enroll in an Elvish immersion course to solidify our status as super-dorks.  We're already amped up for The Hobbit this summer, (ETA: apparently December for Part I of III) where, by the way, Sherlock and Watson reunite as Smaug and Bilbo, respectively.   

Between this and our penchant for misreading signs, I have to wonder whether the cause is blood or environment.  Maybe it's a little from column A, a little from column B.  I guess the world will never know.

And neither will Bob Vila.