That's why it took sooooooo long! (and that's why it is so long)

1. I follow only two professional sports – baseball and football. I do not wish to follow any more because I think you need a vacation from following stuff. I look forward to tossing out the sports pages in February, March, April. DH follows no sports. We once had a fight about what we were going to watch on Monday night. I wanted Monday Night Football, he wanted Ally McBeal.

2. In grad school, I managed to live on $550/month. I never bothered to take out supplemental loans. How stupid! I thought at the time. Now I say, “Whew!”

3. I owned a car for only 3 years of my life. During a very bad 6 week period, I wrecked and bought 3 used cars. I have not owned a car in 7 years.

4. I am the navigator on car trips. DH and I have a system that keeps us from going crazy. Default is straight, give at least ½ block warning, tell him the exit number, up to me to find and pick out landmarks and correlate to the map. We are actually quite good, even during advanced navigating jobs – Washington D.C. for instance.

5. Sometimes I have problems asking for directions.

6. I sleep like a rock. I have slept through: DH’s snoring, a category 3 hurricane, a typewriter blowing up (college roommate’s), a neighbor’s house on fire – okay my BF at the time woke me up and got me out of the house, but I would have slept through it. And I talk in my sleep.

7. That poem about driving in a blizzard through Reliance, South Dakota? All true. I believe that I was the closest to death at the time.

8. I cook, but do not bake.

9. I am the designated gravy maker during every Thanksgiving feast. Flour, not cornstarch.

10. I collect fortune cookie fortunes.

11. I have a very distinctive laugh.

12. At one point in the 80s, I lived in a shared household with my BF at the time and another housemate who later became my DH. Lawyer friend once asked me, “what do you look for in a man?” “Proximity,” I said with a sly smile.

13. I was a party girl in college.

14. My now nearly 20 year old cat knows his name. When DH and I lived in Arizona, we heard our neighbor call his dog. We came up and remarked that our cat had the same name. He told us that our cat always came before his dog did.

15. I did not talk to any family relation for 7 years.

16. I have learned to eat and enjoy asparagus.

17. To the best of my knowledge, I am not allergic to anything.

18. I am addicted to Sudoku.

19. I also do not, nor have any desire to own a mobile phone.

20. The worst grade I ever got in high school was in typing: a D. I hate to type on a typewriter – my fingers get performance anxiety. I learned computer skills starting in my sophomore year in college (1981) because I had the backspace key and you could send a print job to a laser printer and get a perfectly clean copy. My grades on papers suddenly went up at least one grade.

21. I have a PhD in botany. (Plant physiology/plant biochemistry)

22. One of my summer jobs during college was at Green Giant. I tested the sodium content of corn, and once in a while filled in for the canned corn taster.

23. Just like some people have a seasonal wardrobe, I have a seasonal mixed drink. My summer drink is campari and soda, my winter drink is an extra-dry dirty martini. Gin of course. What kind of lame-a$s drinks a vodka martini?

24. The house of my childhood – which we are trying to sell off as part of the farmette – is haunted by a ghost dressed in a fedora hat and 20’s garb that would go up the stairs. Anybody want to buy that house? It will be sold separately from the second property. Are you sure? One time only… Going, going, gone!

25. I take baths, very rarely showers. Not frugal, you say? Try taking a bubble shower! And if you are stressed and angry, a hot bath and a glass of wine is far, far cheaper than psychiatry (or bullets). I only take showers away from home – hotel rooms and in the gym.

26. I set my mp3 player to shuffle (aka random). A Julie Andrews song came up then one by Old Dirty Bastard. And no, it was not a mashup.

27. I taught DH one of my favorite car games: figure out the crop or the orchard. We farm families play practical games, none of this license plate nonsense. Sometimes it was easy – in North Carolina you could smell tobacco. Other times it would take us months to figure it out. When we were in Tucson, it took us until October to figure out what we had been driving through when we went to Phoenix: cotton.

28. I hate being photographed.

29. I once attended a botany class in college where I was the only registered student. The prof sighed at first but then brightened up and said, “if I’m teaching only one student at least its you. I can go as fast as I want because I know you’ll keep up.”

30. I am a night owl. My favorite hours to work are 12 noon to 8 pm. My best time to work is 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm.

31. I’m usually the cut-up during meetings at work.

32. The first time I ever had to use a key for a door was when I was 18 and in college in Chicago. The locks on the farm never worked. The first thing sister had to do when dad died was have the sheriff put padlocks on the doors of the house.

33. I can taste the difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk.

34. For the midwesterners out there: I find the smell of FleetFarm evocative. I walked into a FleetFarm in Montana, where most of DH’s family lives. One sniff and it all came back.

35. I like to find “found” food. Not dumpster diving, but blackberry brambles, plum, apple, pear, cherry trees, that sort of thing. When I find one in the neighborhood on someone’s property, I knock, introduce myself, and often will ask for a cut of their bounty. I used to pick and cure the olives along Olive Way on the University of Arizona campus.

36. Stores that have a lot of fiddley-stuff in them are catnip to me. Office supply stores, CD/DVD stores, kitchen equipment stores, five and dime stores, the dollar store, bead store…you get the idea.

37. I have more male friends than female friends. I have more gay friends than straight friends.

38. I have no wisdom teeth.

39. My hands are steady and I am good with them, which helped when I did experiments. I like to do crafts and work scissors quite well. However I cannot for the life of me cut a right angle.

40. Most dogs make me nervous.

41. My sister and I sound alike. I used to play a trick on my boyfriends in college. When they said something “good” (use your imagination), I would pause and say, “hold that thought, let me go get my sister!”

42. I worry that I will develop some of the same mental illnesses my mother had – depression, alcoholism, hoarding.

43. For you real old timers on the Internet: I created a newsgroup on Usenet (rec.food.preserving), then developed its first FAQ file. One year after I created the FAQ, I received a note that that FAQ file was one of 7 files left and lovingly saved on the last working computer at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia during the Bosnian civil war.

44. I can usually make any piece of electronics work.

45. I find window shopping boring and stupid.

46. My first scientific love was astronomy. I used to amaze my college friends by telling them what star that was in the sky. (It was Chicago – only 12 stars are bright enough to be seen with the light pollution. Not rocket science.) Even now I can identify all of the constellations. The JPL and NASA websites are amazing to me.

47. DH keeps two rifles and a pistol in the bedroom. All unloaded. I have no desire to handle or fire a gun.

48. For 14 years, through 5 bosses, the name of my boss alternated between David or Bob.

49. I have never been outside of North America, yet if someone tells me they are from a foreign country, I know what countries that country is next to and its capital.

50. I totaled a 1975 Datsun with my face when my bike brakes failed on a hill. (Very cheap car – replacing a busted window cost more than the car was worth.) I have a noticeable scar on my upper lip from that accident.