25 Things

In following with the chains going around blogs and Facebook recently, I thought I’d share my own personal list of 25 random things about me:

1. My “happy place” has been the beach, dunes and sandbars of Sandy Neck (Barnstable, MA) my entire life. If you’re on tippy-toes in the winter (when the trees are bare) you can see it from the upstairs of my parents’ home.
2. I’m a sucker for stationary and journals. But I never want to use them because I love them so much.
3. I never follow recipes. If the cook book is open, I’m still not mentally or physically capable of adhering to the rules. Sometimes I combine recipes that are side-by-side.
4. I hate condiments that are not the same temperature as the food they’re on. That leaves me with pesto, gravy, oil & vinegar and hummus. The only exception is ketchup. I’ll gag on mayo, mustard, sour cream, relish, etc.
5. I don’t watch many movies, and I can NEVER remember a movie by just its name. You’ll have to give me a summary plot before I can join you in laughing or conspiring about the movie.
6. I worked at a local Cape Cod ice cream store for ten years. The pay was excellent, but the benefits (ice cream and socializing) were the best.
7. I love languages and pick them up very quickly. I’m fluent in German, decent in French, and have a working knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Oddly, I’ve used all four of them in my job at the ice cream store.
8. Along those lines, I lived in Austria for one year when I was 15-16 and New Zealand for seven months in college. I hope to live and work abroad again soon and don’t care where.
9. January 2009 marked the first time I ever trusted the red lever of a water cooler to provide me with hot tea water. Low and behold, it does work.
10. I cried at the end of my first-ever yoga class in 2007. I cried one more time but that’s just because Danielle told me a sad dog story right beforehand!
11. I’m a very slow coffee drinker. I tend to add ice to my morning cup to finish it after lunch, no matter if it started as hot or iced coffee that day. I don’t actively seek out coffee these days, and only have herbal teas and the occasional soy cappuccino.
12. I have hobby-attention-deficit disorder. Right now I’m addicted to sewing, yoga, bread-making, road-biking and going crazy with my own vegetable gardening this spring.
13. I dated my now-husband from 1998 to 2000 and got a tattoo of his design on my back. We didn’t speak for several years, but eventually rekindled and got engaged within 5 months. Phew. The tattoo is of the tide going in and out with the sun and moon.
14. I love dogs more than any other creature on the planet. I want to do everything I can to help dogs, but I have an abnormal inability to hear any stories of abuse or mistreatment. The best way for me to help turns out to be photographing shelter dogs free-of-charge for their adoption websites.
15. I can’t even walk by a pet store with dogs in it. This all dates back to an unsealed pamphlet I pulled out of our mailbox as a young child. It had about ten photos of abused dogs in it, and they have been etched in my mind ever since. I’d like to sue that organization, but it would take money away from the dogs themselves.
16. I couldn’t live without RSS subscription to blogs, and I don’t understand how so many people can continue on without it (I’m also very dramatic). I wish everyone was on Twitter, but Facebook was hard enough.
17. I can’t afford kids because I buy too much outdoor gear. Bikes, skis, snowshoes, kayaks, backpacks, tennis rackets, tents, sleeping bags, boots, helmets, trek poles, CamelBaks, crampons I’ve used once… I won’t even get into camera gear.
18. Contrary to what my husband thinks, I’m not into bags and shoes. I have shoes and a bag in each basic color, but I leave the shoes in my desk at work and I stick with one bag for months at a time. I DID have a weakness for finding the perfect commuting bag, but I found that about three years ago. That’s like bag-eternity!
19. I have a biological brother who died when he was a month old. I have a half-brother in Florida that I met for the first time recently. I have a step-brother, also in Florida, who I grew up with and share all the funny family memories with. I wish we were as close today as we were the morning we snuck downstairs to watch Thriller on MTV.
20. I don’t understand why anyone would want the Kindle or any form of eBook, but because it’s “technology” related, I’ll probably buy one on impulse soon enough (new one is about to be announced).
21. I eventually plan to own a bed & breakfast with a doggy-daycare attached… and a yoga studio, Gary’s brewery, a gift shop of homemade crafts… mountain-bike trails behind it… probably some tenting sites or yurts… and charter fishing also led by Gary. You know, our own personal Disneyland.
22. We don’t really plan to have children, and both of our grandmothers have confirmed that it would be a bad decision if we did. That’s weird, but they ARE older and wiser, right?
23. I have a strong urge to use Cesar Millan’s (Dog Whisperer) methods on friends’ dogs, but so far have resisted. I believe in Cesar Millan more than I believe in Jesus. Which, (24b) I don’t, so I guess that’s not a strong statement.
24. If I hear the word sushi, I must have sushi. In fact, just typing it now means I’ll be getting it for lunch today. Mmmm sushi.
25. I often type blog posts on the bus commute, or schedule them to pop up in the middle of the day. If this posts at 11am on a work day, you assume I’m not doing my job. Today you might be right, however, because I’m probably on Amazon tracking the arrival of my new camera lens. There ya go, that’s the real #25: Hearing UPS drive down the street causes my heart to flutter.