My Seven Things

Thanks for the comments on yesterday's post. I'm doing better today; obviously, ostriches have the right idea. (BTW, Leslie, so sorry to hear about your husband's condition, but how wonderful that he's doing all right.) I just find the phrase "congestive heart failure" so intrinsically scary that I was warping out over that as much as anything, I think. Who names these things?

Now for something completely different. Last week, Annalea tagged me with the seven things meme, so I've been trying to think of 7 things about me that haven't already been revealed. Let's see how it goes.

1. I never got over my first love. It was a '69 Cadillac convertible, red with a white top and red leather seats ... I loved that car! I'll have to dig up a picture and teach myself how to use the scanner, but if I get into that tonight this meme will never be finished.

2. I'm not just a Bruins fan, I'm a life-long Bruins fan. Proof?


According to the date on the back (where I added names as I heard them during broadcasts), I was 6 years and 4 months old when I started to document my love of all things Bruins.

I wish I knew if this idea came out of my mind or was prompted! I do love that after leading with the obvious (Bobby Orr), I went on to Gilles Gilbert (though I spelled it wrong). Speaking of spelling, though, on the back I spelled Bucyk correct, right after spelling John as "Jhon". Hmmm.

3. I spent a year in England between high school and college, at an all-girls boarding school. It was a very interesting experience, and I'm still in touch with my two closest friends from that year (although with one, it's more an e-mail every year or two than close touch).

4. I have traveled outside the US many times, including before I can even remember (Brazil, Grenada, Guyana). The countries I remember are:

• Austria
  
• Barbados
• Canada (though only in the Maritimes)
• England
• France
• Israel
• Italy
• Norway
• Spain
  

Looking at a map of Europe, I can see that since I took a bus to Austria, we must have gone through either Switzerland or Germany to get there. However, I don't remember which (it was 21 years ago, in my defense) so I won't put it on the list. Probably whichever one it was, was the border crossing we made in the middle of the night, where they came on the bus and woke us and told everyone to hold their passport over their head. Then someone took mine, and only mine, and walked off with it, while I struggled to wake up and figure out what was going on. (Everyone else had a British passport, except for one Malaysian diplomatic passport.) Of course they brought it back in a few minutes, but I did come close to panicking.

5. I am almost absurdly oversensitive to noises, smells, and other such phenomena. I almost went mad when a vent near my desk was rattling perpetually. I have headphones at work for when I just can't take the noises made by people thoughtlessly working around me :) and I could never work in trash collection. If you walk by me and took a cigarette break 10 minutes ago, I know. I know if the driver of the car in front of me is smoking. I've never smoked pot because the first time I smelled the smoke, I almost threw up.

6. I enjoy reading comic strips, cartoons, graphic novels, and so on. The comics are one of the reasons I get the daily paper. My brother and I used to read the Doonesbury collections when we were kids and enjoyed them greatly, despite how much meaning we had to be missing. We can still crack each other up with cryptic statements like, "I'm a reasonable man, MacArthur, so I know that this isn't snow." Or, "Actually, I spent the whole week watching TV, but he thinks I'm a genius." And I can tell you in excruciating detail why I say, "Oh, wow, look at the moon" whenever I notice it.

Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or For Worse, Baby Blues, The Far Side, Bloom County ... One of my new favorites is Little Dee, which is a comic strip of the familiar in-the-newspaper format, just your basic story of a little girl who got lost in the woods, being cared for by a bear, a dog, and a vulture. Oh, and they talk but she doesn't.

What?

There's a button on the right side of the page. Go on. You won't be sorry. The vulture, Vachel, knits. During an extended sea shanty, he's knitting straight from the sheep. Don't you have to see that? (He put it to music, even, and it's wonderful. To get to that, go here and scroll down to 11/07/07, or search for mp3.)

Even more recently, I've found* an online graphic-novel type comic called Girl Genius, which I just love, though it couldn't be more different from Little Dee. Why are the Jaegers my favorites, and their accents? For that matter, why Vachel, and not sweet Ted? My mind is a mystery even to me.

*Google Reader will make suggestions of other blogs I might enjoy, based on the ones I already subscribe to. Sometimes this means that they're recommending things I totally don't want (other Boston sports, or Boston news in general, or gluten-free interests since one blog I subscribe to is such). Most of them I turn down (the button actually says "No, thanks", so I get to be polite about it), but sometimes I quite like them, and Girl Genius I love!

7. I hate to tag people, in case anyone doesn't want to do the thing and is irritated or whatever by the tag. Though I have done it a few times, for some reason I'm not feeling up to it tonight, so I'm going to do the cop-out tag: if you're reading this, and you're interested enough to start thinking about what your seven things would be (and you have a blog), then do go blog about it, won't you? And comment here that you have? I love seeing inside people's heads (only metaphorically, though, uck). The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

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Finally, about the weather (more snow today), I really, really agree with this guy, whoever he is/was:

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
--Patrick Young

That's it in a nutshell.