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This meme has been running around facebook and because of it I’ve learned some cool new things about people.  So I’ve decided to give it a try.

25 Random Things About Me

1.  I never wanted to live in Utah or raise my kids here, but after 15 years I’m so firmly rooted that I’m not sure we’ll ever leave.

2.  Remember that one Calvin and Hobbes comic that was done in a Picasso-esque style where multiple perspectives of the same objects were shown?  The inside of my head is like that constantly.  I sometimes have trouble shutting out alternate perspectives so that I can make decisions.

3.  When I was a child, I frequently worried about the feelings of inanimate objects.  I made sure that none of my toys felt neglected.  I had trouble getting rid of things because I didn’t want them to feel unloved. I still sometimes think about the feelings of inanimate objects.  When I restock books, I add to the bottom of the stack so all the books get a turn to be sent out.  I know that this is silly, and sometimes I don’t think about it at all, but other times I do.

4. I am the middlemost child of seven siblings.
5.  I was an assistant in the Junior High library when they were switching from pocket card tracking to barcode tracking for checked out books.  I got to put barcodes on many books and help with all the cataloging.  This was the same library where I misused my assistant powers to sneak books out of the library without checking them out so that I could keep the books.  I later repented of my book stealing ways, returned as many of the books as I could find, and made a cash donation to cover the cost of those that I couldn’t.

6.  Last year I wrote over 80,000 words in my blog.  That is more words than some novels.  Apparently I am wordy.

7.  I know first-hand that skin really does peel off as a result of radiation burns.  (I had six weeks of radiation therapy in 1999 to kill a tumor.)

8.  I love birds, flowers, and books.

9.  I turned 36 this year and will argue with anyone who tries to make jokes about anniversaries of my 29th birthday or who deliberately guesses me young.  I earned those years, don’t try to steal them from me.

10.  I love looking at clothing, mostly on people.  I’m constantly analyzing what I think looks good and what does not.  This is not about thinking less of people for what they are wearing, it is about analyzing combinations of lines and fabrics and patterns and shapes. I want to be one of those people who always looks good, and yet I almost never wear make-up or jewelry and I’m extremely prone to forgetting to brush my hair before going in public.  Also, I like being comfortable, so I’m pretty sure that I’m not doing so well on the “always look good” thing.  I think I do all right for events such as church, it’s the daily stuff where I get distracted and forget to do it.

11.  In my 5th grade yearbook I declared my intention to be a lion tamer when I grew up.  Now I’m the mother of four kids which is almost the same thing.

12.  I am most comfortable in friendships that build gradually from lots of friendly interactions over an extended period of time.  Proximity makes a big difference, fortunately for me the internet has provided proximity between me and people all over the world.  My circle of friends is now much larger that I would have imagined possible a decade ago.

13.  It still feels weird to be able to say “a decade ago” and be talking about something that happened to me as an adult.

14.  I am fully capable of drawing other people out to help maintain a conversation.  This is a carefully learned skill, not something that comes naturally to me.  I am far more comfortable sitting on the edge of a lively conversation and just listening until I have something useful to add.  Conversations are fascinating to watch.  All sorts of social power plays and nuances are there to be seen.

15.  I like small children and babies, but I’m really glad not to be taking care of one 24/7 anymore.

16.  Most of the flowers I love best remind me of someone or some place in particular.  Marigolds, roses, and sweet peas are my mother.  Petunias and lilacs are my grandmother.  Tulips a college roommate and my cousin.  Bougainvilla is Africa.  Poppies are California.  Day Lilies are a neighbor who moved away years ago.  Hyacinths and Lilies are springtime, particularly if I can get them to bloom indoors mid-winter.  The list goes on, but I’ll stop now.  My gardens are full of memories.

17.  I still have my baby blanket from when I was a child.  I occasionally loan it to one of my kids when they’re in need of extra comfort.

18.  I never had a favorite color growing up and was always frustrated that people kept making me pick one.  I didn’t want just one color.  I wanted them all.  I still like all of the colors, but I have preference for green.  Not sure when that changed.

19.  I never used to have a favorite season.  I liked them all.  I know exactly when this changed.  Now I don’t like Winter at all and I love Spring.  I need to practice liking Winter again because I’m going to have to deal with it periodically for a long time to come.

20.  I grew up hating math, now I do all the accounting and book keeping for our family and two (tiny) corporations.  And I find joy and satisfaction when all the numbers line up.  I get stressed when I’m having to juggle depletion of reserves rather than accumulation, but that is just the financial squirrel in me.  I find great joy in stashing money into savings accounts or in paying off big bills.

21.  I love sourdough bread, but my efforts to make it have had very mixed results. 

22.  I rarely express my opinions about politics or social issues on the internet.  The lack of body language and voice tone cues make me very leery about offending people or starting an argument.  I’m much more comfortable discussing these things in person.  But someday there will be a time or an issue when I feel I must make a stand.  I don’t look forward to it.

23.  I am terrified of riding ferris wheels.  The last time I went on one, my oldest child was four.  She had a great time.  I spent the whole ride in white knuckled prayer that I would survive.  Roller coasters are fine, but ferris wheels are scary.  Not rational, but true.

24.  If you name a Disney movie made prior to the year 2000 I can probably sing you a song from it.  I actually played this game once with co-workers at my college job.  I challenged them to think of a Disney movie that I didn’t know a song for.  I won. I’m not sure I could still win that competition. During my childhood years I learned songs without even thinking about it and I saw lots of Disney movies.

25.  It took me two weeks to create this list.  I had to weigh each item to find the perfect balance of things that might be interesting to others but which will not be embarrassing or too revealing.

This morning was great. I was focused and got piles of stuff done. I assembled the final cover layout for Scrapyard. I also did a tweaking pass through the innards. I even filled up some more white spaces with art that I’d scrounged from Howard’s office. I also handled email and contacts for several ongoing communications. Howard and I were handing each other tasks constantly all morning long. I love how we’ve learned to work smoothly on collaboration. I never would have believed it in high school, but group work is fun when I have the right team. It is all coming together and so are three or for other behind the scenes business things.

For all the good work I got done this morning, I still have hundreds of things left to do. Unfortunately I can’t run hot like that indefinitely. Around 2:30 PM I fizzled out. The rest of the day has been spent drifting with the exception of some critical mommying tasks. Fortunately my parents provided Chinese food for dinner. Yummy food that I did not have to cook first is always a good thing.

January was devoid of happy news. There wasn’t any bad news either, but with it being mid-winter I really felt the lack of good news. Apparently all the good news was lurking and waiting for January to be over. Paperwork that I’ve been waiting for since last September finally arrived. Scrapyard is nearing completion. Howard had an interview with a newspaper reporter for an article which should appear in a local paper in the next couple of weeks. Sales in the store are back up. So I’m feeling pretty good about business stuff.

Add to that the fact that my parents are staying with us. This makes the kids very happy. As far as they are concerned, having grandma here is like having a live-in Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. What child wouldn’t love an adult who gets down onto the floor with them, plays whatever they wish, and has an endless supply of stories for their entertainment. Grandpa is a dispenser of electronic delights. He has cool gadgets in his pockets and he will sit and read the word bubbles in Animal Crossing for Patch who can’t read them himself. The kids are going to miss Grandma and Grandpa when they have to leave on Wednesday.

Sometime in the past two days Howard and I bowed to the inevitable and we gave a name to the cat I rescued from under our deck. She has taken up residence in a nook out in back of our house where we provide her with food, a cozy box for sleeping, and Gleek and Kiki both spend extended periods of time out there supplying her with the attention she craves. The girls are delighted to have a lap kitty. The cat is delighted to have warm laps with petting. It works out really well. So far the kids have all been very good about washing their hands as soon as they come in and changing their clothes if necessary. I’ve only had minimal reactions. This makes me glad. I’ve felt for a long time that Gleek and Kiki would really benefit from having a pet. The boys think the cat is nice, but they don’t spend much time with her. Buying cat food felt odd though. That is not something I ever expected to do.

This next week is book crunch week. Howard and I have decided that what we’d like to give each other for Valentines Day is a completed book. This means Howard needs to color the bonus story, finish the cover elements, approve the layout, write some extra notes, write acknowledgments, and perhaps draw a couple of margin art pictures. I need to double check the layout to make sure everything is working, shift around the sections which are not working, find margin art for all the remaining white spaces, assemble all those fiddly footnote boxes, make all the recommended copy edit changes, send a down payment to the printer, create a color print out of the final version, then ship it all off. Oh, and then there are the tasks to finish up the slipcase layouts for the boxed sets. We’re going to be busy this week, but it is the happy busy of “almost done.” By March 1st we should be ready to dive into working on book 6.

I have a houseful of people. This happens fairly frequently as various family events occur locally and my family needs a place to stay. I love that being in a central location means that I get to see most of my family frequently. The down side is that, being an introvert, I start feeling overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of people and noise. Then I go hide in my room for awhile. Fortunately most of my family are also introverts, so no one gets offended when I hide, they all understand. In fact, they do some hiding themselves on occasion. I just find it hard to feel like a good hostess when I am hiding from my guests.

In the chaos of today, I forgot to monitor Patch. Of all my kids, he is the one with the strongest need for silence and the lowest tolerance for chaos. He loves to have friends or cousins over. When they come, he will play very happily right up until he melts into a puddle of abject sadness over some small incident. This happens when his tolerance for noise and crowds are passed. Sometimes he can sense the need in himself and he will seek out a quiet place to play. Other times he’s having too much fun to stop himself before the tantrum arrives. This evening I recognized that he was in need of quiet. I took him to my room and the two of us had a quiet time together. We talked about needing to be away from people, about needing calm. I think Patch was relieved to know that both Mom and Dad have the same need. Even better, he was glad to know that if he ever needs an empty space, he can come to us and we’ll make one for him. He sighed with contentment and lay his head on my arm, hugging it tight. I hugged him tight too and we lay in the quiet for awhile.

Final stages of book layout + family in town = no brainspace for blogging.

This evening I opened my door to discover my parents standing on the front doorstep. I knew they were coming, but didn’t expect them until tomorrow. The mix-up was due to my own faulty internal math. It went like this. “Parents are leaving their house on Tuesday. They’ll spend a night on the road. This means they’ll arrive on Thursday.” Somehow my brain skipped Wednesday in the calculation. Anyway they’re here now and they’ll be staying for a week. The kids are all thrilled. Having Grandma and Grandpa just show up is about the coolest thing ever.

I heard the meowing through the heating ducts. This puzzled me quite a bit since I’m allergic to cats and we have never owned one. Then I realized that the meowing was merely resonating in the heating duct and was in fact coming from outside. The vocal cat in question must be underneath our back deck, up against the wall of our house. I could tell because I was in the unfinished basement storage room. This was the point where I went rushing upstairs and threw on my coat because I’ve been hearing the same meowing sounds off and on for over a week. When I’d heard it before, I’d been standing on the deck in question, but unable to locate the noise. The poor cat was stuck under our deck for at least a week. I suspect that the crack it had wiggled through then froze over, trapping the poor animal. I had to pour hot water over the hose hatch to get it to unfreeze enough to let the cat out. I’ve never seen such a grateful and friendly animal. She is skin and bones. She must have gotten adequate water from the melting snow, but she was starving. I fed her tuna for starters because it was the only thing I had, but we switched to dry cat food as soon as I could acquire some from a neighbor. The cat was as hungry for touch as she was for food. She kept walking away from the bowl to be petted and if I walked away, she followed me. (I’m not actually sure the animal is female, it could be a neutered male.)

Unfortunately my allergies quickly started acting up, so we transferred the cat, the bowl of food, and an old towel to our sunny front porch. Kiki has been out there with the cat for over an hour. The cat is completely uninterested in leaving the porch and is very interested in coming back into the house. This animal has obviously been someone’s pet, but either got lost or abandoned. This same cat came begging to our back door several times last fall, so she has been on her own for awhile. Now the kids are all hoping that we get to keep the cat. I’m holding the “we need to ask around for the owner” line, but I honestly don’t hold out much hope for finding the owner. We may have acquired a cat. Not something I had on my list to do today, but I couldn’t leave the poor thing trapped. Then having rescued it, I could not fail to feed it.

This picture does not show how skinny this poor cat is. When you pet her you can feel every rib and every vertebra.

I’ve been in a funk for nearly a week. It is the low-level kind of a funk where I still function. No one but me can tell that I have the funk, but it sucks the joy out of just about everything. I felt like hiding from everyone. I felt like cutting my hair or dyeing it. I even did research into seasonal affective disorder and matched my feelings to the symptom list. I kept trying to wrap my head around it, re-frame it, describe it, talk myself out of it. None of that worked well. I was fairly certain that a large part of the problem was that I’d overdrawn my emotional reserves for several weeks in a row. But I was having trouble figuring out how to put anything back in.

And then I went to church. I wasn’t expecting church to help much today, because I spend the first hour wrestling with my own kids on a bench and the second two wrestling with an entire class of active four-year-olds. I was expecting church to be draining, not filling. The opposite occurred. I found myself filled with energy and hope and happiness, because I knew I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons. There is one child in my class who has the same high-energy and distractibility of my Gleek. Handling him takes all of my attention, but it is well within my capabilities. He is the reason I was put with that class. I can give his mother, my friend, a break from managing him. I can give that same break to the other mothers as well. I know how desperately I needed that break sometimes when all my kids were home all day. I came away from church exhausted, but happy and peaceful.

There have been times in my life when I have routinely come home from church wondering why I bothered to go. Those were the years where I attended merely because I wanted my children to learn that church is what we do on Sunday. Sometimes there were years when church was my respite, my break from the rigors of 24/7 mommy duty. Now church is my chance to give to others the gift that I already received. No matter what, I’ve known that attendance at church is right for me and for my family. And even on a day like today when I did not get to listen to much of what was said there, I still come away more whole than I was before. Now that I am home it is like my head is clear and I can see the things I need to do to refill my emotional reserves. I can also see that the refilling has begun, I just need to keep up the good work.