7 things about me

Sunday, Jane from Spain Daily posted a list of seven things about herself and tagged any of her readers willing to do the same, so I figured I'd give it a go.


1. As a child I was enrolled in a lot of extracurricular activities. For nine years, I was in a class that combined ballet, tap, and tumbling all into one hour. I was also in majorettes, violin, swimming class, cooking class, 4-H, and girl scouts.

2. When we were 19, a friend and I drove an orange Volkswagen Beetle, with no heat and a big hole in the passenger side floorboard from Elgin, IL. to Madison, WI. in January. We stole a real estate sign to cover the hole and used my student I.D. card to scrape the frost off the inside of the windshield. When we stopped in Whitewater to get hot chocolate at the McDonalds, there were a bunch of the college students from there, wearing shorts, hawaiian shirts, and leis.

3. I met my ex-husband in a Western Civilization class at Elgin Community College. He sat in the seat directly in front of me and our first communication was when he passed me a note that said, "Celibacy is not hereditary."
Afterwards, he told me that I just looked like the kind of girl who would take it as the joke it was meant to be, instead of getting offended.


4. When my daughters were little, we lived in an old Southern Bell Utility van and did migrant work, well mostly my husband did the migrant work. I have picked apples and raked blueberries, but I'm not very good at either. I would do childcare for blueberry rakers and sell them coffee and breakfast. I think my tree planting career lasted 2 days. I don't have the upper body strength for it when I'm in peek health, but I had just driven all night and the hard labor made me very sick.



5. I started dying my hair about 10 years ago, when I returned to college, because I was afraid of looking like the oldest student in my classes ( I think I had plucked three gray hairs at the time).



6. I was working at the University bookstore's warehouse, while attending horticulture classes at the University of Missouri, when I met DH. I was asked to train him on his first day of work at the warehouse.



7. I moved out of Columbia, Missouri a couples days sooner than I planned, because someone had begun entering my house when I wasn't home. The first time, a box I had left empty, was packed when I got home from work, so I thought it was my daughters helping me to get ready to move (they were living with their dad a couple blocks away, but would come over to help me with housework sometimes), but it wasn't them. The only things missing from the house were some antique silver dollars that I had in my jewelry box (none of the jewelry was gone). The next day, when I left for work, I hung a sign on the back door window, explaining that those coins had been gifts when I was born and asking for them back. That evening, the coins were sitting on top of the cooler outside my back door. The really creepy thing, though, was the day I came home and all the clocks and light bulbs were gone. That was the day the police suggested that my son and I not sleep in the house. I already had the car packed to leave for Kansas City before they even told me that.