100 71 things

The obligatory 100 things meme… up to 71, anyway.

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1. I am INFJ.

2. I have OCD.

3. I don’t like PB&J.  I think I OD’d on it as a kid, when my dad would have me whip up triple deckers to eat with him.

4. I love cheese. (Except for one month many years ago, after I saw some science show about the living, squirming microbes in cheese. Thank goodness I got over it.)

5. I heart baby animals. (Growing Up… series on Animal Planet, one of the best ideas *ever* for a tv series!)

6. I went through at least 5 Lite-Brites as a kid.

7. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 6 years old.

8. My sister, Edie, and I got into a knock-down, drag-out fight as kids that included us smashing many innocent Twinkies in each other’s faces.

9. I am very much an introvert.  I’d like to hand this article out to everyone who meets me.

10. I am Sofia’s mom.

11. Prozac and Zoloft have saved me.

12. I *love* chocolate. Really GOOD chocolate.

13. I’m cuckoo for puffins.

14. Back in the day, I won a voguing contest with my dance partner, Lily.  I met him through my hairdresser, Lance.  Both were divine.  (Lance eventually died of AIDS. Don’t know about Lily…)

15. In 5th grade, I was the spelling bee champ of my school. I placed 3rd and 2nd the two previous years.

16. I will drink my coffee black, with cream, with cream & sugar,… but never black with sugar.  Unless it’s espresso.

17. I HATE diet beverages! Keep that fake sugar away from me!

18. I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi.  (I’m a Coke gal.)

19. I almost attended the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. (Bob Dole wrote my letter of recommendation.) They finally stopped calling me when they called one too many times and my mom yelled at the officer, informing him I said I was no longer interested and he better stop calling.

20. In a reversal of roles, I gave my first boyfriend MY varsity letter in high school. (He didn’t have one.)

21. I have watched the movie Grease over 50 times.

22. My childhood (i.e. before age 10) ”movie star” crushes included Shaun Cassidy (Da Doo Ron Ron, baby!); Moosie Drier (I loved you in Bob Newhart, but did you really have to do Kids Incorporated?); Jackie Earle Haley (I like motorcycles, Kelly Leak!); Jonathan Scott Taylor (I loved you, despite the whole 666 thang!); Anthony Perkins (not typically what one envisions when talking about the “bad boy” type… but I loved Norman, even though he did come out of the closet years later); and Matthew Laborteaux.

23. My first vacation, if you can call it that, was as a teenager riding in the back cab of a semi from KC to Detroit.  I recall awesome truck stop dining along the way.

24. I still have the fortune from a fortune cookie I got at a Chinese restaurant in Petaluma, CA back in 1987. It reads, “As one gets older, one doesn’t care, like just yesterday, Jimmy cracked corn… and I don’t care!”  Sheer poetry.

25. The first album I chose and bought entirely on my own was The Pretenders Learning to Crawl.

26. I only went to one dance in high school… Winter dance, senior year. Girls asked guys.

27. I was a varsity cheerleader.

28. As a kid, I made up a dance routine to Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu, and taught it to my sisters. They still remember parts of it to this day.

29. I took roller skating and ice skating lessons as a kid.

30. I don’t often read books. My OCD usually gets in the way in that if my eyes don’t fix on every single word clearly, I have to go back and read the page until I am satisfied I haven’t missed or misread anything.  Needless to say, reading takes forever and is usually too much of a commitment.

31. At my peak, I owned 300+ pairs of shoes.  And not cheap ones.  (I’m a shoe snob.)

32. I don’t really know how to swim. Well,  I kinda can, but am not confident about it.  And the ocean? Ewww.  The fish chase after me!  Really!

33. I get motion sickness.

34. I HATE hot weather! I much prefer cold (rainy) weather to hot weather.

35. I still splash in puddles.

36. I’m a really good cook… I just hate cooking.

37. When buying ice cream to have at home, I almost always buy vanilla bean.  It’s a yummy blank canvas upon which to concoct all sorts of frosty delights.

38. Three of my 5 dresser drawers are devoted to socks. And even then, I still have an additional box of socks that don’t fit in the drawers.

39. I do NOT speak Spanish.

40. Snails FREAK me out!

41. I have had Herschel, my stuffed (plush) bunny, for 30+ years.

42. The first time I had Chinese food, I was 18 and ordered mu shu pork.  (I don’t care for eggs, and didn’t realize it had eggs in it.) I was in NYC with G, and he kindly showed me the way of the mu shu pancake as we dined on top of a giant metal turtle we climbed in a park somewhere in the Village.

43. I do NOT like brussel sprouts.

44. I hated beer until I met Dave in 1987. I left campus (the now-defunct World College West in Petaluma, CA) one weekend and went with him to his home in Berkeley.  He bought me a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale at a liquor store on Solano. Beer was suddenly redefined for me.

45. Day 1 I learned to ski, I was in Tahoe on a bunny slope. Day 2, I was unwittingly taken up a black run, and there was only one way down.  I then got separated from my party, finding myself on the side of a mountain, all alone, except for a warning/danger sign. I continued onward, falling into that little sign… crotch first. Tim was in BIG trouble when I finally met up with him again.

46. Mardi Gras, NOLA. 1990, I think?  Kat and I stayed at the Hummingbird Motel and Grill on St. Charles for $17/night.  We shared the room with a GIANT cockroach we named Bubba.  I was a total bead whore. During the Zulu parade, I lifted my shirt and was given the prized painted coconut from one of the float people. The envy of all women around me, they asked how I got it. Suddenly, with great hope, everyone around me started lifting their shirts.  Alas, none of them ever got a coconut.

47. I did not drink on my 21st birthday.  The day before, however…  champagne. Rodney and the aforementioned Lance climbed on a piano and serenaded me with New York, New York at an underground gay cabaret joint in KC. I flew out to NY painfully bright and early the next morning.

48. I totally crashed a wedding reception in Cairo.  (The food was good!)

49. In my junior high years, I sometimes got kicked out of Sunday mass for goofing around too loudly with my friends. The priest would stop mid-sermon and, in front of the congregation, ask us to leave.

50. I’ve dined at Paul Bocuse.

51. Tim proposed to me at Masa’s November 1996.

52. I like the colors green and brown.  And orange.

53. I once shaved my head. (I talked Lance into doing it. Despite his better judgment, he tried his best to support me, saying I looked more beautiful than Sinead O’Connor.)

54. I started making soap (using lye… no melt-n-pour here…unless it was glycerine) in 1995.

55. In 1986, 18 year old Regina gave her 11 year old sister, Elysia, a videotape of Pink Floyd’s The Wall for Christmas.

56. I REALLY like Lego. A longtime lifetime goal is to make the pilgrimage to Billund, Denmark.

57. I met Tim in 1991. We began dating in 1992. We moved in together 1993.  He proposed 1996.  We moved to Santa Barbara 1997.  We got married 1999.  We had Sofia 2006.

58. I had to sleep in Penn Station once, since I missed the last LIRR train for the night.  Apparently, someone stepped on me while I was sleeping (I was on the ground), because I awoke to find a big boot print on the t-shirt I was wearing. I had just gotten the shirt at the now long-gone Unique Boutique in the City… It had Godzilla depicted on the front, with an anatomical diagram of his inner organs, all written in Japanese.  The boot print never washed out.

59. When in Vegas, my favorite game is craps.

60. I like Hello Kitty, but I REALLY like Chococat.

61. When it comes to photography, among those artists I really like are Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Lee Friedlander.

62. I wear a size 8.5 or 9 (generally 9) shoe. 39/40 Euro.

63. I REALLY hope to go to Rapa Nui/Easter Island someday.

64. I will ONLY eat an entree of eggs if scrambled (with lots of salsa to camoflauge), in an omelet (again, the salsa), or a quiche (camoflauged preferrably with cheese, ham, spinach, etc.).  Not a big fan… mostly a mental thing.  The whole concept of ‘em weirds me out.

65. I won a city-wide (KC) hopscotch championship when I was 9 years old.

66. When I was 16, I had a serious eye accident while playing soccer. Eddie Bolt kicked the ball accidentally into my right eye, and tore my retina. I was taken out of school for the remaining 2 months of the academic year, had to wear a metal eye shield, and faced an 80% chance of going blind in that eye. I didn’t lose my sight, thankfully, but it was certainly placed on a faster track for deterioration… I have ever since seen floaters and flashers in that eye.

67. I’ve had a gun held to my head. I was 19, working at a five-and-dime store. I went to the stockroom to clock out for the day, and was rapidly approached by a guy who proceeded to put a gun to my head. He walked me into the breakroom, where his buddy guarded the store manager and big male coworker who were bound, and another coworker and her 12 year old granddaughter were ordered to sit.  Gun still at my temple, they eventually locked us all in a tiny bathroom, barely bigger than an airplane lavatory, got their loot, and left.

68. I LOVE bacon.

69. I was never a fan of Barbie dolls. I invariably received them for birthdays &/or Christmas.  Since I had to learn to live with them, I made up a game: holding the doll in my hand, I’d jump up and down on the bed and chant “one-two-three-BLASTOFF!” On the final word, I’d pop off Barbie’s head and blast it off into the air.

70. I’m totally a kitty person.  Mind you, I do like doggies, but kitties are where it’s at.

71. I cycled 330 km (~205 miles) in 5 days through the Loire.  All the more impressive considering:

• I am NOT a regular cyclist;
• there was much consumption of wine along the way;
• one of the days found us pedaling through a torrential downpour;
• thanks to the three English hairdressers (all named John) in our group, I was practically comatose from imbibing all manner of things on our one rest day;
• AND I was on a much heavier bike than everyone else in my party, unbeknownst to me until we reached our final destination. The bike I chose to ride, well, I (inadvertently) stole it - it did not belong to the group, also unbeknownst to me until we reached the end.

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