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Monday, December 22, 2003

100 OTHER things about me

Really you ought to also check out the original 100+ Things About Me; those are, I think, more interesting than these, on the whole. I tried hard as I was doing these not to duplicate any of the original ones.

1. My eyes are light brown, with darker brown flecks in them like freckles.
2. I am 5'8 1/2" tall. I reached this height in the eighth grade. This was not as much fun as it may sound.
3. I have lost 25 pounds in the past four months, on my way to a total loss goal of 44 lb.
4. I have spider veins in my legs.
5. I was born at 12:15 a.m.
6. I am far, far more in love with my husband now than I was on my honeymoon (and that's saying a lot).
7. My favorite classical composer is Mozart, but my favorite era of music is baroque.
8. I have one older brother. I always wanted younger siblings but never got any.
9. I had a very happy home life growing up. We never had a lot of money, but we had enough love and good times to make up for the unhappy time I had outside of my home.
10. I was book-smart but socially inept as a child.
11. Most of the time I still think I'm socially inept and I frequently try to get out of going places where I'll be around people who know me, but not very well (e.g. Bible study meetings, sometimes the grocery store, that kind of thing). I always think people will discuss how idiotic I am after I leave. I am most comfortable around my own family, or around total strangers.
12. I talk too much. I am always mentally kicking myself and telling myself to shut up.
13. Some people say I talk too fast, but I think most people talk too slowly. Sometimes I think they do it just ... to ... bug ... me.
14. As my dad would say (and has said!), I would lose my head if it weren't bolted on. It is like a disease with me; I set something down and lose it instantly; it takes me half an hour to find it again.
15. I have never been in an airplane. I had a five-minute flight in a helicopter once, though.
16. For a long time, I swore I would never have an online diary/weblog/journal. oops.
17. I wiggle my feet in a specific rhythmic way when I'm going to sleep. It's like a comfort mechanism; I've done it as long as I can remember. If I notice I'm doing it, I stop, but as soon as I stop thinking about it and start drifting off to sleep, it starts up again.
18. I have never had a surprise party, although I've thrown them for other people.
19. Whenever I watch an orchestra perform I get this jealous kind of feeling. I want to be down there playing, not up here watching. It doesn't last, though.
20. I can't draw, except I can make a passable-looking horse if I try really hard and erase a lot. Beyond that it's strictly stick figures. I can't even make a straight line or an even circle.
21. I make a mean pecan pie, though.
22. I grew up in the 80's but a lot of the pop culture references (like the cartoon-related ones) go right over my head, because we didn't watch a lot of TV.
23. In a similar vein, I have never watched even a single episode of a "reality TV" show, and frankly I think the idea sounds way over-hyped.
24. I also didn't watch any coverage about the OJ Simpson trial. I would have made a perfect juror in that case. When he was arrested, I heard about it on the radio and turned to my husband and said, "Who's OJ Simpson? Didn't he play a sport or something?"
25. For my nineteenth birthday I got a boxed set of the eight books in the Anne of Green Gables series. I read them over and over, starting with Anne of Green Gables and going all the way through to Rilla of Ingleside, and then starting back over at the beginning. I read the entire series fifteen or sixteen times that year. It was like an obsession for me.
26. I am extremely easy to amuse. I think it has something to do with living so rurally. When a high-school "party" is a bunch of your friends getting together and going for a walk in the middle of the night, you know it doesn't take much.
27. I haven't been sick enough to have to stay in bed, with the exception of recovering from surgery which doesn't really count, more than twice or three times since I've been married. The whole household (the whole COUNTY, it seems like) will be sick and I'm just fine.
28. I don't like Scarlett O'Hara.
29. I like reading about Jane Eyre but I think I might get tired of being friends with her.
30. I like the smell of diesel, if I don't have to be stuck behind the vehicle for miles but can just catch a whiff as it goes by.
31. I also like the smell of gasoline, and of new pavement.
32. When I was in high school I wrote an execrable poem (OK, a lot of them, but this is a specific example) with a line that went "couples dancing with their orange passion." I thought that was the best thing ever. Why nobody killed me in my sleep I still do not know, but I'm grateful.
33. I have never done any illicit drugs. I just never saw the need.
34. I have a scar on my forehead from when I slammed my bicycle into a pole when I was 5; one on my shin from when I jumped off a bus-stop bench (visiting a friend in a place civilized enough to actually have bus stop benches) and smacked my shin into a fire hydrant; one on my hand from when I was washing dishes as a teenager, put my hand inside a broken glass, and it sliced off a chunk of skin from my pinky knuckle on that hand.
35. I never put my hand inside glasses to wash them now.
36. I once stepped into a cattleguard at full walking speed. That doesn't feel good at all. (If you don't know what a cattleguard is you need to get out of the city for at least three years and then report back to me. Thank you very much).
37. I think I have pretty much confessed all the bad stuff I did as a teenager to my parents by now. (There would be a whole journal post all by itself, to go into those)
38. The only celebrities I have ever met or seen in person are authors.
39. I have a pointy chin.
40. I take the shoulder pads out of any clothing I get that has them. My shoulders are huge enough without them.
41. I walk very fast. Again, like the talking thing, though, I tend to think that I walk at a normal pace and everyone else dawdles.
42. I bring a book with me almost everywhere, especially if I'm going to be without children, just in case I get stuck waiting somewhere unexpectedly.
43. I remember smells so strongly that I can trick my brain into thinking I'm smelling a thing, and I can actually smell it at will, sort of.
44. I wear a size 12 (American).
45. I read very fast. I used to read a 300-page book each day when I had less to do (i.e. before I had children).
46. I hate centipedes and millipedes. Other than that I don't have any phobias.
47. I like to get a different kind of shampoo every time I buy it.
48. My favorite perfume is "Pleasures" by Estee Lauder, but it's too expensive to buy regularly, so most of the time I wear "Sand and Sable" instead.
49. My favorite place to visit is Morro Bay, California.
50. I live in a major tourist destination. The population of our small town mulitplies by more than 10 in the summer, if you count the people staying in the hotels.
51. My best girlfriend lives 2500 miles away from me. It makes it difficult to shop and "do lunch" together.
52. The first car with my name on the title was a 1966 Dodge Polara.
53. I get about 200-300 emails a day. That's less than it used to be.
54. Every year I try to read Jane Eyre during the first protracted spell of gray weather.
55. My husband calls me "Ducky". But absolutely nobody else does or is allowed to.
56. I do not have any furry pets, just fish, and I'm getting tired of those.
57. I had a horse from the time I was 9 until last year when she had to be put down.
58. The last furry pets I owned (never really considered my horse a pet, she was livestock ;-) were two cats named Chloe and Chelsea. They had litters within a month of each other, Chloe first. Chelsea was a poor mother so Chloe adopted her kittens. We gave them all away when we had our first baby.
59. Two of my grandmothers are still alive.
60. My husband's great-grandmother is still alive. One of her nieces is Tanya Tucker, the country singer.
61. I was raised on country music, REAL country music, and I roll my eyes at a lot of the modern stuff that gets called "country," even though I very rarely listen to that genre anymore.
62. The first computer I owned, other than the Atari 800 my family had in the 80's, was a 386 33MhZ (I think) PC with 2M RAM and a 256M hard drive. It was a really fast machine and my friends were extremely jealous that I only paid $400 for it. This was in 1993.
63. I sing alto.
64. I got an F in analytic geometry in high school, my junior year. That was the class where my extremely poor study habits finally caught up with me. Before that I was able to pull As, Bs, and the occasional C just by doing well on tests and quizzes even though I very rarely did homework in most classes.
65. I play the flute and the piano, but not often, and consequently, not very well anymore.
66. My 4-yo daughter looks a lot like me. My 7-yo son looks a lot like my husband. We joke that we cloned ourselves.
67. The woodstove is the only source of heat in my house. I like it that way. Wood's a lot of work but it's free, and it feels so cozy to have a fire.
68. We are still using the towels we got as wedding presents.
69. I wanted to try having red hair for years, so finally in late 1999 I tried it. Well, I tried auburn. It didn't look good on me.
70. We always put up our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, and we generally try to take it down on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.
71. Three of my parents' five grandchildren were born on the day after a holiday: my nephews on the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Valentine's Day, and my middle daughter on the day after Christmas.
72. I have a black thumb. Any plant I own, from lawn grass on up, is doomed. This is largely because I am a loser and I forget to water things. But even when I do water things, somehow, I kill them.
    
73. I like the smell of brewing coffee but I can only tolerate the taste if it's blended with milk and stuff.
74. I taught myself HTML when I wanted to make a family webpage in 1996.
75. My husband's and my tenth wedding anniversary will be on March 19th, 2004.
76. My absolute utter money-is-no-object dream vacation would be a world tour on the Queen Elizabeth II. Assuming, that is, that I don't get seasick; since I've never been on the ocean in a boat, I don't know if I do or not.
77. My enormous forehead requires me to wear bangs. I grew them out once, and tried going without them for one school year. It was not a good thing.
78. My daughter inherited my forehead. Fortunately, she looks adorable with bangs.
79. Most of my female friends are people I've never met in person.
80. I dislike dark chocolate, except as chocolate chips in cookies.
81. I eat too many carbohydrates.
82. I am a Raiders fan by default. Before I was married I liked whatever football team was trendy (like the 49ers), or just didn't pay attention. However, becoming a Raiders fan was practically a written prerequisite for marrying my husband. ;-)
83. I love to watch ice skating, although I've only ice skated a few times myself.
84. I am not a sporty type. I don't throw well or catch well, or even run well, and I definitely don't jump well.
85. There's no such thing as too many books; there are only too few bookshelves.
86. I go to the same church as my parents, brother/SIL/nephews, and grandmother. It's like a mini-reunion every Sunday.
87. If I Google my name, I find a bunch of stuff about some woman about my age who lives in Illinois, and a few newsgroup posts from me, from the days when I wasn't so careful about putting my full name all over the Internet.
88. I do not like my feet.
89. I have worn glasses since junior high, although I didn't start wearing them constantly until I graduated from high school. I get bad headaches if I go without them.
90. I have never had braces.
91. My handwriting varies from extremely neat (but still not as neat as my mom's) to pretty messy (but not as messy as my brother's), depending on my mood more than on how quickly I'm writing.
92. When I was 15 I took a handful of Tylenol because I wanted (or, more accurately, I wanted people to think I wanted, if I am to be totally honest with my angst-y teenaged self) to kill myself. Having one's stomach pumped sucks. Don't ever try it just on a whim, OK? There are other ways to get your point across. Also, this incident left me with a distinct lack of faith (which endures to this day) in psychologists and the mental health industry in general.
93. I did a lot of stupid things as a teenager, but #92 was the stupidest.
94. I am a possessive, jealous type of person by nature, but I'm better about it than I used to be. When I was younger I would get irrationally unhappy (although I had the sense to at least try not to show it) if my close friends were close friends with other people as well. Same went for boyfriends -- if my boyfriend was friendly with my friends, it bothered me. I've improved a lot. Still, it's a good thing that I married a man who is similarly inclined.
95. On one side my extended family is quite dysfunctional. On the other it's the most normal family you could possibly imagine, for the most part.
96. I love swimming, although I am not very good at it; I always manage to look as if I were about to drown.
97. I am not picky about misspellings or grammatical errors in chats or casual emails, but it really bothers me to see them in purposefully published materials. I could go on and on about this. (just tonight I saw "post hold digger" in the "tools needed" list for a project at Home Depot and I had to physically restrain myself from shuddering).
98. I have really awful periods. My friends are all aghast when I tell them about them.
99. I don't see how it is that people think classical music is boring. A great deal of classical music makes me cry, it's so beautiful.
100. I get a new stuffed duck from my husband every year in the top of my Christmas stocking.

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