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Monday, September 08, 2003

100+ Things About me

100+ THINGS ABOUT ME

1. I was born on Christmas in 1974.

2. I lived in 7 or so houses my first 4 years of life, then in 6 more houses in the next 24 years.

3. I was born in the same small town where I live now.

4. I lived in Taft and Maricopa, CA for a few months when I was around 2 years of age.

5. Other than that I have never lived anywhere but this small town.

6. My brother taught me to read when I was 3 years old.

7. By the time I was in kindergarten I was reading at a 3rd grade level.

8. I also had a really bad cold when I started kindergarten.

9. Kids on the bus, including high schoolers, called me "Green Slime" and the nickname stuck for that whole year on the bus.

10. Socially my elementary school years absolutely sucked.

11. When I was in 6th grade the class bully put dog biscuits in my lunch bag when we were eating indoors (because, you see, I was a dog, ie, a very ugly person).

12. Even the teacher laughed, although she tried to hide it.

13. I did not laugh. I did try very hard not to cry in front of everyone.

14. I was pretty homely but I didn't deserve the treatment I got.

15. Being smart didn't help.

16. In sixth grade I won the California State Spelling Championship.

17. Greg Evans, who draws the comic strip "Luann", was there as the guest speaker at the banquet.

18. As the winner, I got to ask him to draw me a poster of one of his characters. I chose Puddles the dog.

19. I still have that poster somewhere.

20. When I got back to school they held a special assembly for me, and then the principal sent me around to all the classrooms to tell the other kids about my experience and to have them see if they could stump me with words to spell.

21. I spelled "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "antidisestablishmentarianism" in every single classroom.

22. That little "parade around the spelling champion" bit didn't help my popularity at all. (thanks, Mr. Principal).

23. In eighth grade I met the girl who would become my best friend for the next five years.

24. We had a lot, a whole lot, of fun together.

25. It was the first time I had ever been part of a group of friends.

26. My best friend lived with her aunt and uncle. Her mother lived in LA. At Christmastime during my junior year (her sophomore year) her aunt and uncle didn't want her to live with them anymore. So my parents and I asked her to move in with us, and she did.

27. It was a really great experience, even though we had little fights like sisters do. (not that I would know since I don't have a sister).

28. A year later she wanted to live with her mom again so we moved her back down to LA.

29. I went down to visit her three times that spring and summer. These were some of my first trips on my own without my parents.

30. I have never seen her since that summer.

31. We spoke on the phone twice during the first five years and that was all.

32. Then, after ten years of being apart, I tracked her down and called her this last spring.

33. We are very good friends again. (yay!)

34. Halfway through my senior year in high school I became a born-again Christian.

35. I got married the March after I graduated from high school, to a man who had been my archenemy and then my best friend before we fell hopelessly in love.

36. Nine and a half years later we are still hopelessly in love. In fact, much more in love than we were when we started out.

37. And we are still best friends.

38. We did not have sex with each other until our wedding night.

39. When we had been married two years, our son was born.

40. I had had a dream during my pregnancy about having a blue-eyed blond-haired girl. I thought the girl aspect was much more likely to come true than the blue eyes and the blond hair. However, my brown/brown husband and my brown/brown self produced a stunningly gorgeous blue/blond son.

41. When our son was 20 months old, we had a daughter.

42. She had a very severe and rare congenital heart defect.

43. She was supposed to have surgery to correct it when she was three months old. But she died when she was two months and one week old.

44. Our son does not remember her. :(

45. But we do.

46. When our son was 3 1/2, we had another daughter.

47. This little girl was and is perfectly healthy, praise God.

48. I knew before I had children that I wanted to homeschool them. My husband agreed wholeheartedly.

49. Originally our reasons were pretty much solely religious in nature.

50. Now, however, that is only a small part of the reason we homeschool. It's still very important to us, but so are a lot of other reasons.

51. I am 5' 8 1/2" tall.

52. I am trying to lose 44 lb. So far I have lost 15 pounds.

53. I have been stuck at 15 lb. so long that I have lost track of the days.

54. When I got married I weighed 155 lb and wore a size 10/11.

55. My lowest adult weight (just before my senior year of high school) was 142. At that weight I wore a size 9, or 8 in tight jeans ;-).

56. I was getting really uncomfortable in my 14s when I decided to lose weight.

57. I have brown hair that goes to my waist.

58. It is really thin and fine, though.

59. My favorite of my physical features is my eyes.

60. The list of my least favorite of my physical features would be pretty long. At the top, though, are probably my nose, my lips, my skin, and my legs, where I have just discovered a gazillion spider veins.

61. Spider veins, and I'm only 28 years old. Life is totally not fair.

62. My parents, brother, and I lived with my grandma for 5 years while I was growing up.

63. I did not get along AT ALL with my grandmother while I lived with her.

64. Now, however, we get along totally fine and enjoy each other's company.

65. I still have two grandmothers living.

66. My two grandpas and my step-grandma (who was "Grandma" to me and had raised my dad from babyhood) died within 5 years when I was in junior high and high school.

67. My parents have been married to each other for 32 years.

68. I adore my parents. I would choose them as friends even if we were not related.

69. My husband also gets along wonderfully with them.

70. I have a brother who is 2 1/2 years older than me.

71. When we were little it seemed like we fought all the time, but looking back, almost all I remember are fun times with him.

72. When I was 9 1/2 years old I spent my life savings (just over $200) on a small horse. She was a Welsh pony with leopard Appaloosa coloring. I named her Spot. My brother thought this was a stupid name. In fact, pretty much everyone except me thought it was a stupid name.

73. My brother also had a horse. His had been given to him by our grandpa when he was born (family tradition). We rode our horses all over creation until he got a job and got all interested in the girl he ended up marrying. In the summer we would get on our horses in the early morning and ride around the very rural valley we lived in until dinner time.

74. We just had to put Spot down a year ago because she was totally blind and stopped eating.

75. I am almost literally addicted to Diet Coke.

79. I love romantic comedies. My favorite right now is Return To Me

80. I am also a sucker for surveys. Filling in blanks and answering questions just gives me a little thrill.

81. I love doing people's taxes. I am considering taking night classes to become a CPA so that I can get paid for it.

82. I also think about becoming a librarian or a lactation consultant, but I wouldn't do that until the kids were done being homeschooled (in other words, grown).

83. Before I had kids, I had a job as an in-home child-care provider for a local family. I loved that job. I loved the kids. Now they are all teenagers.

84. I love to read. I like reading even better than being on the computer. :)

85. I like classic literature best. In fact I used to only read classics. Then in 2000 I really branched out a lot and now I like a lot of different authors.

86. I am on 19 email lists. I manage them via a stunning array of email filters and folders.

87. I got a job from one of them. It's for an author I like. The author actually runs the list. One day she posted that she needed someone to take over maintaining her webpage. I used to do web design professionally. So I wrote to her and got the job. It is only a few hours a month but it is a lot of fun.

88. I breastfed my children for a total of 3 1/2 years. My son for a year, and my daughter for 2 1/2 years. One of my biggest gripes about the way my middle daughter's situation was handled was that we were told by people (mostly NICU nurses for whom I suspect it would have been inconvenient for us to really try) that she couldn't nurse. By the time we found out she could, my milk was almost dried up and it never caught up. She developed an oral aversion from being tube fed. Some of my most precious memories with her are of the few times I nursed her.

89. I am a staunch breastfeeding advocate. Which is part of the reason I think about becoming a lactation consultant "when I grow up".

90. I love winter weather. Even when it's here and everyone else who was complaining about the summer heat has started to complain about the winter cold, I still love it. I count the weeks until we can have fires in the woodstove and wear sweaters.

91. I applied at four or five colleges when I was in high school, and I got accepted at all of them.

92. My dream college was the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. I got accepted there, and auditioned and was accepted into their Conservatory of Music. But we just did not have the money or the financial aid to send me there. I was very mad at God for a few days, until the man who would later become my husband (unbeknownst to either of us) pointed out that God had something even better planned for me, if he was saying "no" to that. Little did we know...!

93. I decided to start out at a community college and see where God led me from there.

94. Then I got the child care job and wanted to do that instead, and save up money.

95. Then I got engaged and married, and we wanted to have kids pretty much right away. There is always time to go to college.

96. I have never regretted that decision for a minute.

97. I loved taking tests in school. I took the SAT a second time just for fun. I scored in the 99+ percentile both times. But I only ranked twenty-fourth in my class of 105, because my study skills totally sucked and I only wound up with a 3.75 GPA.

98. I played the cornet in 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, until I learned the flute which I played throughout high school and still sometimes play. I also play the piano, but I haven't done much of any instrument since high school.

99. We are planning to buy our first house next year. We have been renting in the same place since we got married.

100. My favorite candy bar is Cadbury Roast Almond. YUM.



101. I have never been in a car accident or had a ticket, in 12 years of driving. Well, except the time when I was 17 that I tried to stop too fast and tapped into a guardrail. But there was no damage.



102. I have never done drugs, at all.



103. In high school I got drunk twice. Once on a stupid blind date, and once on my front porch. Both times it was because I was really thirsty and beer was all that was convenient to drink. It only took one beer each time. Since then, except for champagne on my first wedding anniversary, I've not had a drop of alcohol. It's not exactly because I think it's wrong; I just don't need to do it to have fun, and I'm afraid of losing my inhibitions and looking silly. Someday maybe at a fancy dinner when I don't have to drive anywhere, I'll have a nice drink. who knows.



104. I had two longish-term boyfriends in high school. One was a nice guy, if a bit geeky, but we were just way too immature for a relationship as heavy as ours was, and not really compatible either. The other was, well, a jerk, in a typical testosterone-overloaded juvenile male kind of way.



105. I have a tendency to rely more on people's affection than they do on mine.



106. One of my favorite things about my husband is that this isn't the case with him.



107. I plan to bring my children up with a totally different view of teenage relationships than I had, or than most people have.



108. I adore my husband's arms. Just looking at his wrists... mmm. I have always had a thing for arms.



109. In our household we do not watch television. Really. We have a TV, but it only serves as a monitor for the DVD player and the VCR -- no cable or antenna is attached to it. We like it this way. Occasionally I miss a few things (like kids' shows and documentaries) but we never miss them enough to allow the rest of that glurge into our house.


110. This list was originally just going to have 100 things but I kept thinking of more things.

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