Six Unremarkable Things About Me

A tag from Elastigirl . . .

1. I cannot walk around with one sock/shoe on and one sock/shoe off. In 5th grade, I had a teacher (take note teachers of the power of your words) tell me it was bad luck to walk around with one sock on and one sock off. Now it gives me the heebie jeebies when I see someone else walking around like that, and have been known to take off my sock if I need to walk somewhere in the middle of putting a pair on. Curly Girl still makes fun of me for it, saying to her son, "Your driving your Aunt Smarty crazy with your one sock on and one sock off." And she is right.

2. I see all the flaws in the movie The Wizard of Oz when I watch it now (thanks to a summer camp dean - now a deacon - who pointed them out to me one summer when it was well over a hundred degrees so we had rest time in the cafeteria and watched movies because it had AC and the cabins didn't). Some of the magic is gone. I won't ruin it for you, but the problems are there. And I can't watch the movie without thinking about them.

3. I love to put together wooden jigsaw puzzles that were handmade by my great uncle. Regular puzzles don't have the same meaning for me. Our puzzles have pieces in crazy shapes and ones we call "specialty" pieces that are shaped like everything from the liberty bell to animals to one we call "running guy" that looks just like a guy running. Lots of family holidays have been spent doing these puzzles together and it is a great time to catch up. We have all levels of difficulty and we recently started The Gift on some that are 24 pieces. He loves them too.

4. I can say all 50 states in alphabetical order, thanks to a song I learned in the 5th or 6th grade called "Fifty Nifty United States." It has come in handy on more than one occasion, but I can't think of any of those occasions right now.

5. Because I moved so much as a kid (military brat) I do not remember things by the year that they occurred, but by where I lived when they happened. So the reason I said 5th or 6th grade in the last item is because I know where I lived when it happened, and I know I was in 5th or 6th grade then.

6. I like math. I always have, and I guess I always will. The world is filled with patterns and math problems and people ask my advice on "mathy things" (as my mom calls them) all the time. My pet peeve is when people say, "I can't do math" like it is an unnecessary skill. No one ever says proudly, "I can't read!"

I tag curly girl and jennie, two remarkable women.

I Missed My Own Blogiversary!!

Hard to believe that it has been a year that I have been blogging. I've been so sick the past couple weeks, that I haven't much felt like doing anything. It was all I could do to go to work and work on homework. Then sleep, sleep, sleep. And somewhere in there my blogiversary rolled on by. I also lost a brand new credit card for a week under my coffee table. Thank God I found it yesterday, because I was sure that I would have to cancel it before too much longer if I didn't find it. And I hate changing to a new number on everything.

So happy belated blogiversary to me. One year of looking at life through the prism of the world wide web. Hope there are many happy years in my future.

P.S. Thanks for all the well wishers. I am finally feeling better and have climbed out from under the mountain of laundry that needed washing and cleaned off the counters and surfaces, so I am back to the world of blogging again.

I'm SICK

Really and truly sick. What is it you do when you have a cold? For me there is a regimen of day-quil and ny-quil, nose spray and throat lozenges. And on the homeopathic front, I take zicam. I am usually not a big homeopathic remedy person, but I do think it makes me better faster, so I added that to my cold remedy about two years ago. I think it helps.

So today I am doing nothing but drinking lots of liquids, catching up on stuff that I have DVR'ed and napping throughout the day. Hope the combination of drugs and rest works its magic soon. I do not like being sick. At all.

So all you lurkers out there - leave me a message to help cheer me up on my sick-day at home.

What Decade is This Anyway?

I'm not saying I agree with her philosophies (she's pro-life, pro-gun, pro hunting, pro-who knows what else because before last week I had never heard of her....) but this is not the 1950's. Haven't we moved beyond the idea that a mother can't be a good mother with a big job? It is insane to me that these questions are even coming up. And even more so that they are being brought up by those people that I have seen as champions for equal-work-equal-pay idealism.

Her opponent, Joe Biden, when asked about her, said she was "good looking." REALLY?!?!? That's what he could come up with? Nothing about her politics? But what do you expect from a guy who's presidential race came to a grinding halt when he said that Obama was "articulate and bright and clean." He's certainly not PC by any stretch of the imagination. And he was a single father for sometime with small children, so he can't really be the one to throw stones. He had it all, career and children.

So all in all, in a world where I was really excited to know that I will see either an African-American or a woman in one of the top two spots in the nation, where there will be some kind of barrier broken for sure, I couldn't be more disappointed in the world's response to her as an individual. I am excited to see a woman on the ticket. We all should be. No matter what her party. Congratulations Sarah!