Six Points of Randomness

My dear friend Jovi has challenged six of her friends to a random personal fact-puking contest. Here's my purge. Thanks, J! It was fun!

1) I do not, as a practice, kill bugs that are in, on, or around my house, my person, or my children. What this practically means is that we own no flyswatters, and I have a healthy catch-and-release program going during the summer months when the backyard door is continually open. The one exception to this rule lies with those bugs that are a) vengeful and are clearly looking to attack (some wasps), which can be a big deal for a family with a history of sting allergies (ours), and b) looking to suck my blood (mosquitos, ticks, and fleas). I have no tolerance for blood-sucking of any sort, in fact. So if you're in my house and you're going to suck my blood, prepare to be squished. I won't like doing it, though.

2) I am a clean freak. However, I've lately had to relax my standards for the sake of sanity. This standard-relaxing drives me just about as nuts as the stuff piling up around here, though, so maybe that's a counterproductive move. Interestingly, I was not always a clean freak, and only acquired this habit upon marriage to Brian, who is rather tidy himself. As an industrial engineer by training, Brian has been known to periodically reorganize the refrigerator so that it's a more efficient food receptacle. ****heart****

3) In all things color, I tend towards featuring no more than one to two (occasionally three) bright or dominant colors in a room or on a body, surrounded by varying shades of neutrals, but particularly shades of brown, white, black, and gray. I have always found this to be a good rule of thumb when putting clothes on bodies and stuff in rooms. You gotta have both, but not too much of either one. And *why*, you ask, was I just thinking about this? Well, because a) I just bought a new lamp, b) my awesome friend Becky just gave me a 1930s settee, and I'm thinking about its reupholstered future, and c) I still, occasionally, wonder what it would have been like had I pursued that college whim of dropping the liberal arts stuff and going into interior design.

4) I was a member of a professional clogging team for almost 10 years, during my elementary/jr. high/early h.s. years. I have the scar tissue lurking under my kneecaps, as well as the calves, to prove it. Oh yeah, and I got the moves..... :) And did I mention that I had gold nameplates on above the heel on each of my clogging shoes?

5) I am a list maker, but not only that, a person keenly interested in the process of categorization. This is why I am loving this exercise. It's also why my paragraphs often contain lists (see above and below). In fact, I sometimes tend to see random, ordinary things in terms of their ability to be documented in some sort of hierarchy/list/chart. Put another way, when I walk into a situation, I often look for infrastructure. Not that lists and categories are necessarily the same thing, but the two do often go hand in hand............Now that's sounding a little OCD, no? :)

6) I miss California.

We moved to KC from California, where I was doing round #2 of Grad school. Although it was an amazing experience, I was eager to leave to be closer to family, to be able to buy a house, and because it never felt very comfortable. I suspect much of this lack of comfort had to do with the fact that my husband worked in NY most of the time we were in CA, and thus I was alone *A LOT*; I lived 45 minutes away from most everyone I knew in CA (and thus I made few close friends while we were there); and I found myself raising our daughter almost by myself for the first year of her life (again, in a place with few close friends and no husband around 5+ days of the week). But there is still something about the place that I miss desperately. I think often about the beach, the surfers, the smell.........