1. I have an anal-retentive streak... to the point that my instinct is to try to put this list in chronological order, beginning with facts about my birth and childhood.
2. I'm laid-back enough to fight that streak every now and then... although I do have my CDs and VHS tapes alphabetized and it drives me batty when someone puts one of them back in the wrong place.
3. I was potty-trained by the age of 18 months - go figure.
4. I was born in Lakewood, California - so I'm a native California girl, although I lived in California only 9 years of my life (not consecutively).
5. I am a packrat. I am not as successful at fighting that tendency.
6. My house does not have nearly enough storage for a packrat.
7. I went 12 years without having one single guy I was attracted to be interested enough to date me. During that time I wrote a lot of melancholy poetry.
8. I found my soulmate at the age of 28 and got married at 29.
9. We've been trying to have a baby for over a year and a half, without success. I suppose I'll make a doctor's appointment one of these days to see if there's anything that's not working properly.
10. I hate going to the doctor. I especially despise needles.
11. I seriously considered dropping out of college in order to avoid a measles/mumps/rubella booster shot.
12. My best friend had to go with me and hold my hand to convince me to get the shot.
13. I ended up getting a mild case of rubella from the shot.
14. Don't ask me to donate blood either. My one experience with that was a nightmare.
15. I graduated from college with a BA in Radio and Television, minor in Theatre.
16. My first paying job was as the news director of our local oldies station, for 4 months during my senior year of college.
17. I got fired from my first paying job for a bogus reason.
18. I am now a Construction Project Engineer (no actual engineering work involved).
19. I first started working in construction 10 years ago. I was asked to be the field office secretary for a large renovation project that was already in construction, which involved taking notes at 3 to 4 weekly construction progress meetings. I had no previous exposure to the construction industry.
20. I learn fast.
(You sure you want more? See the extended entry...)
21. My best friend in elementary school was a compulsive liar. She told me that she was born in Hawai'i and smuggled into the mainland US by the Mafia.
22. I believed her. I was gullible.
23. I have one brother who is 6-1/2 years older than I am, one nephew and three nieces.
24. I also have two older stepbrothers that I haven't seen since my wedding.
25. I was adopted by my stepfather at age 9. (But I've had the same mom my whole life - hi Mom!)
26. Dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor 6 weeks before my wedding, was hospitalized for the last time 4 days before the big day, and passed away less than 12 hours afterward.
27. I miss him a lot.
28. I have always had at least one cat since I was about 6 years old.
29. At one point I had 12 cats (2 mother cats that had litters of 4 and 6 kittens about 3 days apart).
30. Both of my cats now are spayed.
31. I like dogs but don't have room for one right now.
32. I'm feeling a little guilty that it took me until #32 to mention that the most important thing in my life is my relationship with Jesus Christ.
33. I am a poet (published only on my website right now) and songwriter (I hope to have the opportunity to record some of my songs this year).
34. I play piano (reasonably well) and a few chords on the guitar (not very well).
35. I mostly listen to talk radio because I like having the traffic reports every few minutes while I'm driving to and from work.
36. I worked as a talk show producer for one of our local talk radio stations for about 2 months when I first moved to Phoenix. It didn't pay well enough for me to consider moving out of my brother's house, and I didn't want to live with newlyweds indefinitely, so I took a receptionist job with the City of Phoenix, and haven't worked in the broadcasting field since.
37. Someday I'd like to work in radio or TV again... once I don't have to depend on it to make a living.
38. I am a procrastinator. My motto is "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
39. I performed with an improvisational comedy troupe for all 4 years in college.
40. My favorite color is purple - especially in combination with blue and green.
41. I have never been east of Indianapolis.
42. I've also never been out of the United States - even to Mexico.
43. And I've never been to Boston in the fall!
44. I love the Veggie Tales.
45. I was born with my ureters in the wrong place - a side effect, most likely, of the doctors prescribing tranquilizers to my mother when her pregnancy tests kept coming back negative - and pretty much had constant kidney and bladder infections until I had surgery at age 5.
46. I still have a lot of scarring in my bladder and not the best control, so when I've got to go, I have got to go! (Get outta my way!)
47. I took both French and Spanish in high school, because I went to three different high schools. My freshman year I went to a small Christian school and the only foreign language class I had available was French... Sophomore year I had moved to Collinsville, IL, and the high school there didn't have French so I took Spanish. The school I went to my junior and senior years had both, so I took Spanish 2 and then French 2 to round it out.
48. I can't really speak either anymore.
49. I am a baseball fiend.
50. I have really long, dexterous toes - "monkey toes", you might say.
51. I also have really long, thin fingers, which are great for playing the piano.
52. I am left-handed.
53. I adore rainy weather.
54. My favorite food is mashed potatoes. Chocolate is pretty close behind.
55. I talk to myself while driving. A lot.
56. The first concert I ever went to was Amy Grant, on her Age to Age tour.
57. I've never used illegal drugs, and had only a few sips of alcohol (on 3 different occasions) before I turned 21.
58. I have a scar on my chin incurred during a nasty playground accident... the week after college graduation. (Guess I'll have to tell that story sometime.)
59. My junior year of high school, I turned into a stalker for a few months. (Maybe I'll tell that story too.)
60. I never got around to sending thank you notes for all our wedding gifts. I feel bad about that.
61. I love shopping at office supply stores.
62. I have had two cases of whiplash from car accidents in 1997 and 1999.
63. I pay all my bills by scheduling the payments through my bank's online bill pay feature, and hence rarely open my mail. This is also how I tithe.
64. I am a worship leader (and occasional keyboard player) at my church.
65. My real first name means "worshipper".
66. I have a collection of individual wine glasses. My best friends and I have a tradition, every time we would gather for a special occasion, one of us would buy a set of matching glasses, one for each person who was there. I now have over 20 of them.
67. There is a fireplace in my condo. I have lived here for over 7 years and never once lit a fire in it.
68. I've never had my tonsils or my appendix removed.
69. I got honorable mention for singing in an Assemblies of God "Teen Talent" competition when I was 15.
70. I have thick eyebrows that will overtake my face if I don't keep them plucked and/or waxed.
71. I am very, very bad at miniature golf, bowling and pool. Pool is the only one of those three activities I will even attempt to do on a regular basis. Normally, I don't enjoy myself at the others, because I don't like sucking at things.
72. I tell people I am not good at pool because I didn't take physics. I did take geometry, but it doesn't help much.
73. I got my first gray hair - right in the middle of my bangs - when I was 17.
74. I think mice are cute.
75. I had a mouse as a pet in college, for about a week. My cat helped break it out of its cage and proceeded to track it down and have it for lunch.
76. My dream car used to be a purple '66 Mustang.
77. Now it's a purple (or maybe green) 2005 Mustang. The new Mustangs are the bomb, yo.
78. I only write with purple rollerball ink pens at work.
79. I set my alarm for at least an hour before I really need to get up in the morning, because I have been known to hit the snooze button and go back to sleep 5 times before I wake up enough to realize my alarm has gone off.
80. I almost never clean out the inside of my car - when I do, most of the time the stuff I've thrown in the back seat winds up in the trunk. The trunk of my car is nearly full of stuff I haven't used in over a year.
81. I have abysmally bad vision.
82. I wore glasses from 4th grade until 8th grade, when I got contact lenses. From then on, I almost never wore my glasses until about 4 years ago, when I had some problems with scratches on my corneas and had to start wearing my glasses in the evenings. I haven't worn contacts since about 3 weeks after my wedding.
83. I have an extremely hard time falling asleep without the fresh taste of toothpaste in my mouth.
84. I'm addicted to The Apprentice - but it's the only reality show I've ever watched.
85. I like the flavor of onions but not the texture. Strangely enough, the texture of raw celery doesn't bother me, but the flavor does.
86. I'm not horribly good at keeping secrets. I always have to tell someone - but if it's really supposed to be a secret, I'll tell one of my friends out of state who doesn't know the people involved and doesn't really care, just to get it off my chest.
87. I have ordered 2 things that I saw on infomercials. One of them was a set of Titanium II kitchen knives that I'm still using today.
88. I would like to go to culinary school.
89. I'd also like to go to school for graphic arts classes, or learn computer programming.
90. I'm not entirely sure I would be good at any of it.
91. I have been told I sometimes sleep with my eyes open. That just sounds creepy to me. I'm glad I can't see it.
92. I absolutely hated the color orange until my friend Christi gave me a couple of orange shirts and a cute orange dress a couple of years ago.
93. I have never lived closer than 6 miles to where I work. Right now it's 37 miles.
94. When I was in college, I started compiling this cassette tape of clips of comedy routines and bits of songs, strung together in themes and odd combinations that amused me. When last I worked on it, the tape was about 18 minutes long.
95. My first e-mail account was on Prodigy, back in 1994. I pretty much used Prodigy only for e-mail and chat rooms, and cancelled my account when they went to their Prodigy Internet service because I wasn't interested. Heh.
96. I got a stereo with a CD player in it for Christmas my freshman year of college. My friend Tom bought me my first CD ever, U2's October, a few days later.
97. I watched the movie Dead Poets Society 6 times in the theater, then bought it on VHS.
98. My favorite movie of all time, though, is Real Genius.
99. I bought a "grow your own Christmas tree" kit one year... when I got my seedlings to sprout and put them in a planter box outside to get plenty of sunlight, I promptly forgot about them for the next two weeks. They were dead.
100. I stubbornly refuse to succumb to peer pressure - ever. Except when it comes to memes and Internet personality quizzes, and then it's not so much the peer pressure as it is the curiosity.
If you've made it through this list, congratulations! Leave me a comment if there's anything you want to hear more about... or any questions I should have answered instead of one of these 100 things.
I'm glad to see I made the list somewhere. Regarding #94, I understand exactly why you did that. On my iPod, the vast majority is music, with a few comedy albums. When I put it on Shuffle Songs, I will enjoy a few hours with a set of 10 songs, and an intermittent comedy break, usually Bill Cosby. Perhaps someday I will create a radio station that follow this format, and I will become extremely wealthy.
Or I will quickly become bankrupt.
Posted by: Tom Henderson | January 28, 2005 at 01:27 PM
I understood number 43 even before I saw number 44. Thanks to my 5 year old for that.
Posted by: kneel | January 28, 2005 at 05:16 PM
Well it's about time you got around to doing one of these! Sheesh! Don't feel guilty that it took until #32 to mention a personal relationship with Jesus--those of us who visit here often already knew about the relationship anyway! Thanks for sharing a small slice of your life...
Posted by: Gene | January 28, 2005 at 09:14 PM
added to the list of things we have in common are numbers 29 (though at one point i think it was 16 cats, and all of them my favorites - we had three or four mother cats at one point), 38, 79, 80, and 88. : )
Posted by: steph | February 01, 2005 at 02:08 PM
Hi, it's so sad to hear about something like that of your dad. I basically don't think I'll ever go through a wedding in such tragedy. But I admire your bravery. It seems like you've put everything behind now but kept his memories.
Anyway, I'm also having the same problem as you do. I also am not done sending thank-you gifts to them till I realize that I can basically just settle for Leather Luggage Tags. They're much cheaper, classier, and useful.
Posted by: Shawn | June 17, 2007 at 12:04 AM