100 Things

I realized that NaBloPoMo would be a great time to try to complete that 100 things about me list that is all over the Internet. I hadn’t done it yet because finding 100 things at one sitting was daunting, and I didn’t want to have “filler” lines like some people have. So I’m just tossing out whatever comes to mind, in smaller chunks.

When this is all done, I’m sure I’ll reorganize them into a more organized list. I’m sure.

Update 4 December 2008: 46 down, 54 to go!

1. I am the oldest of four girls. 
2. I exhibit every single quality of first children, both the good and the bad. (Responsibility? Absolutely. Perfectionism? You got it [actually, I got it, but you know what I mean].)
3. The women in my family have moved with their families to exotic places, where they didn’t speak the language, and made a home for them there: My grandmother and grandfather moved to the Belgian Congo with my father and uncle; my mother and father moved us to the United States. 
4. I suppose by moving with my family to the wilds of the Midwest, I am following in their footsteps 😉
5. I can’t take a bath without washing it out first. I wouldn’t be able to relax thinking about the soap scum and sloughed off skin cells and hair that would be floating in my water, otherwise.
6. The only recipes I know by heart are crepe batter and pizza dough.
7. The sex is much better at 40 than it was at 30.
8. I have a very good memory. It gets me into trouble sometimes.
9. I have a very powerful sense of smell. If I were a dog, I would probably be a bloodhound. 
10. I also have really sensitive ears. If something in the house is making a repetitive noise, I will hear it: in the middle of the night, down two flights of stairs, behind three stacks of boxes. I will hear it and it will drive me nuts!
11. My godmother was a super cool woman, and I loved hanging out with her when I visited Belgium. She kept me sane through crazy times, even though I saw her for only 4-6 weeks a year and didn’t write or talk to her in between.
12. It makes me sad to think that I’ll never be someone’s godmother, because I would have loved to share that gift of specialness to someone else.
13. I love word games.
14. So when I see a personalized license plate, I stew about it until I figure it out.
15. I worry about Alzheimer’s, so I do the New York Times sudoku every day. It’s my brain calisthenics.
16. I love making lists.
17. I hate IVs. When I interviewed the obstetrician for my first pregnancy (Impera), I told him that if I were in a car accident, I would rather die in the street than be given an IV. He got the message.
18. I delivered both girls vaginally, without pain killers. (Impera was 10 pounds, 4 ounces; yeah, I like to brag about that one.)
19. I was the only non-Asian patient of the OB who delivered Impera. He was a young Japanese doctor, and we lived in Palo Alto (home of Stanford University) at the time. All his other patients were wives of Japanese professors/professionals who had moved to the US and wanted someone who spoke their language to deliver their baby. He was the best OB I could have had. You were great, Dr. Inouye!
20. I love to sneeze.
21. I was four years old when we left Belgium. It was supposedly for a 3-year posting. Thirty-seven years later, we’re all still here.
22. We moved to New Jersey. First an apartment in Hackensack, which was crappy back in 1972 (which is why I still can’t get my head around that Hackensack is now a yuppie enclave), then a rented house in River Edge.
23. I don’t have an accent. But when people would learn that I was from Belgium, they’d then say, “Oh, yes, you sound like you’re from Canada”. Baloney. I just didn’t speak with a New Joisey accent.
24. I worked REALLY HARD not to have a New Jersey accent. I never wawked a dawg acrowss the grayass. Never.
25. We are Walloon — southern, French-speaking, Walloons. From Liege, which is a 1,028-year-old city. Now that’s a city!
26. During the 1970s-1980s, tensions were really high between the Flemish and the Walloons. There were times during summer visits when relatives would ask me tongue-in-cheek (but not completely) to speak English, rather than French, when in a public place.
27. I consider myself a true child of the 1980s: I started high school in 1982, college in 1986.
28. Growing up when I did, I was absolutely sure the world would end in a big nuclear showdown between the US and the USSR.
29. Well, it was the time period, and the fact that I loved James Bond/spy/armageddon-type stories.
30. I also knew enough about the fallout from nuclear warfare that I decided if a bomb fell, I would run towards it. A quick death seemed much more palatable than life in the aftermath.
31. Once we became a serious “item”, the Consort argued against that philosophy. He said he really wanted us to be together through anything, and didn’t want me to die.
32. It took a while for him to convince me, but I agreed.
33. Because I love him.
34. When I was a teen, my Girl Scout troop participated in a winter survival weekend, taught by Green Berets. (See? Apocalypse was the theme of that decade.)
35. (I got my Girl Scout First Class Award, by the way. Back when First Class was the Girl Scout equivalent of Eagle Scout. Now they’ve gone and messed things up. Just because men couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that a Girl Scout First Class was higher than the Boy Scouts’ First Class Award.)
36. During the survival training, we learned how to build a snow shelter (and sleep in it), how to provide emergency first aid, how to try to communicate with “civilization”, how to use a compass, how to find food, and how to skin a rabbit.
37. At the end of the weekend, we were each given a “wounded” Green Beret (*sigh* flutter *sigh*),and directions to a stash of food and bandages. We had to start a fire with no matches, administer first aid, prepare the food, purify water, and get a message out. All in the deep snows of winter.
38. Part of the food package was a rabbit to be skinned. They had been killed on the Wednesday before the training, and we had to do the skinning on the Sunday. No one wanted to do it. My friend Lorraine and I figured, “what the hell, somebody has to do it”, and we skinned the rabbit.
39. OH MY GOD, that thing had turned green under its fur. It smelled bad and the skin was slippery under our hands. We cried, and bitched, and moaned, and ranted, and raved (and held our noses). But we did it. We skinned and spitted that darn lagomorph. Then told everyone in our group NOT to eat it — we didn’t want to have to deal with any real-life first aid issues.
40. I still plan for apocalypse (not in the religious sense, though).
41. That’s why I learned how to knit socks, you know. So I could keep us warm through the winters. Since I had promised to live through it.
42. Little House in the Big Woods is chock full of information on how to survive in the wild. I noticed this not when I read the book as a little girl, but when I read it to Impera and Trixie.
43. So when the world collapses, others may grab guns, or raid a pharmacy for medicine — I’m going to raid the library for a copy of that book.
44. I’ll also raid a yarn store for wool, and a seed store for seeds. I’m not stupid.
45. I notice that I am much more prone to crying at movies or books now than when I was younger. Hero? I sobbed. The last chapter in The House at Pooh Corner? (The one where Winnie tells Christopher Robin that it’s OK for him to move on and grow up) I cried as I read it to the girls. It freaked them out (Mommy? Mommy, why are you crying? … Mommy?) and I’m sorry, but it was just so sad (because that’s what happens to parents as their kids grow up, too, don’t you see).
46. I much prefer the original A.A. Milne Winnie the Pooh stories to the bland pablum that Disney has made of them. Eeyore has a sharp and witty tongue in the originals, he’s not just a whiner. Everyone should check them out, if they haven’t already.