Post number one hundred

In keeping with blogging tradition, for my 100th post, here’s 100 random things you never really wanted to know about me.

1. I eat my french fries two at a time.

2. I firmly believe all cats belong inside. (Unless, of course, they are barn cats in the country.) It's better for the cats and it keeps their "deposits" and disease out of my yard.

3. I like clothes pins. They make me happy.

4. I think beautiful music peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

5. Not that I don't enjoy music from then on because I do. Very much.

6. My favorite songs with lyrics are hymns. Hands down.

7. I wish I could play the piano beautifully.

8. And the violin.

9. I love watching other people play the violin. And listening, of course, but it’s just so cool to see.

10. I buy hot dogs from Whole Foods because normal grocery store hot dogs don't taste right.

11. When someone almost kills me with their car and then flips me off, I've found that the funnest way to deal with that is to stick my thumbs in my ears, wiggle my fingers, blow raspberries at them, and imagine all the ways they could react to that if they would stop being cowards and look at me being just as childish, but much less dangerous, than they were.

12. Getting something I want on a fantastic sale gives me a big high.

13. I wonder what it is about Muppets that captivates all ages.

14. If I had an extra $1000, I’d go hog-wild on Christmas decorations from Michael’s and Shopko. They’ve cornered the market on my taste in decor.

15. If I practiced no restraint, I could also easily spend $1000 at a bookstore, a children’s clothes store, and a movie store…each. Good thing I’m a cheapskate or we’d be broke!

16. I’m a cheapskate. I rarely pay full price for anything.

17. I’ve been hospitalized three times; once for a nasty respiratory infection, twice for childbirth.

18. The scream of a child makes me want to bang my head against the nearest wall.

19. Unless he’s screaming because he’s hurt. It usually doesn’t bother me then.

20. I keep the A/C on in the car well into autumn because I like the chill.

21. I peel oranges to within an inch of their life and then break them apart and eat the little juice pockets. All because I don’t like pith.

22. I despise hypocrisy.

23. I realized my family was abnormal when I went to college. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal for families to get along peacefully and happily 99.9% of the time. I thought sitcoms and movies were major reality stretches, but apparently lots of people live that way. My abnormal family is the best!

24. I look like a teenager.

25. I suffer some consequences of looking like a teenager, but also get some perks.

26. I have horrible vision.

27. I’m right handed, but left eye dominant. So I write with my right and I shoot with my left.

28. Way back when I went to camp with the youth girls from church and totally fell for it on the snipe hunt. Three years later I got to play the part of a snipe. And two years after that I led the hunt and fully enjoyed passing on the con.

29. I can twirl a flag. I even went to color guard camp when I was 16. No laughing; it was done with dignity:)

30. The high school maturity level ended starkly for me midway through my senior year. I fail to understand why so many people can’t, or refuse to, move past it.

31. I do not think fast and so prefer written communication in matters of business.

32. I claim membership to “Pride and Prejudice” fandom.

33. I think I’m just as romantic as the next girl, but I do not like “Twilight” and I even think it’s a dangerously unhealthy obsession for many people.

34. I have auburn hair that hangs half way down my back and refuses to curl for more than 30 minutes.

35. I don’t like how shoulder length hair looks on me so it’s either short or long.

36. I wanted to grow it long in 2005, but kept getting fed up and cutting it until 2007.

37. I haven’t had a professional cut my hair since March ’08 (it was a trim and bang reconstruction).

38. I think I just made up a new hair term! Bang reconstruction. Or should it be bangs reconstruction?…

39. I gave myself a three inch “trim” this year. It was actually very fun to cut my own hair!

40. I play the barber in my family. Saves us a bundle (you know, for that cheapskate in me:)).

41. I’m not a good conversationalist.

42. I don’t like being interrupted.

43. I don’t like having to compete to talk.

44. Therefore, I prefer listening.

45. I enjoy people-watching.

46. Unless those people are doing inconsiderate things. Then people-watching just makes me angry.

47. I hate the word “potty.” My boys don’t (or won’t, as two are still in diapers) go potty, they use the bathroom. Silly pet peeve? Yes. But a pet peeve, nonetheless.

48. I’m a homebody.

49. I like my home. I made it so I would like it.

50. My favorite people live in my home.

51. People I like less are outside of my home.

52. So, obviously, home is my favorite place to be.

53. No, I am not a hermit. I very much enjoy getting out and about in the world. But home is my favorite and I’ll choose it 9.9 times out of ten.

54. I LOVE history and historical things.

55. I especially love being in places full of history. Museums, cemeteries, historical sites, and the like.

56. I love sentimentality and nostalgia.

57. I don’t wear jewelry.

58. I actually love jewelry, but I never wear it because I don’t want to ruin or lose it in my day to day life and it just seems to get in the way.

59. Bret loves and hates that about me. I’m less expensive during gift giving occasions, but I’m difficult to shop for.

60. However, attach some sentiment to a piece of jewelry and I’ll wear it on special occasions or days I want to think more about who it belonged to or, in the case of my wedding ring, I’ll wear it constantly.

61. I love nativity scenes.

62. I vote for real Christmas trees, but admit a temptation to go artificial.

63. Daisies are my favorite flowers. Gerbera daisies are fast becoming my specific favorite. They’re so big and colorful and happy!

64. I don’t like drinking milk unless it has chocolate syrup in it.

65. I haven’t been to the dentist in 4.5 years since that fateful August when I went in for a check-up, was told I had one cavity and three fillings that needed to be changed to the white kind, was scared into agreeing to change them, paid out the wazoo, and my mouth still isn’t the same. I went in with no pain and it took six months for the constant ache to go away, a year for the regular ache to go away, and I still get zings of pain.

66. I know I should go to the dentist, but my trust has been shot. I know…go anyway.

67. I hate being wrongly judged. It’s a pride issue. I’m working on it. But it’s going a lot more slowly than I’d like it to.

68. I like to take pictures.

69. One of these days, I’m going to take some photography classes.

70. I live next to a pond…which means I live under a main flight path for geese. They can get pretty noisy.

71. I took the ACT twice.

72. First time I took it, I thought I did great. I got a 26, not as high as I would like. The average for acceptance into my college of choice was 27. So I took a class (aka, “here, take these practice tests”).

73. Second time I took it, I thought I did worse than the first time. I got a 29. I thought maybe the trick was to come out of the test thinking I’d failed completely and I’d get in the 30s. I decided to leave well enough alone. And it turned out to be good enough to get me into that college. Crisis averted.

74. I never lived in the dorms. I went straight to apartment living.

75. I prefer to shop all by me onesies. Unless shopping is a date with Bret or Girl Time.

76. I wish I could, but I haven’t had my fingernails painted in years; too much chipping in my line of work.

77. I do manage to do my toes once or twice a year.

78. Some days, I long for a daughter. Some days, I want only boys.

79. There go those geese again.

80. I don’t have cable television.

81. TV is addicting for me. I’ve come a long way in keeping it turned off. I only really watch one show (and I watch it online with my husband since it’s never on when we can watch it. Who needs tivo when everything is online anyway???) and sometimes Seinfeld or Scrubs reruns. So why pay the outlandish price for cable when we don’t watch tv, it’s badly addicting, and everything we watch is online?

82. Yet, I’m tempted because our reception is crummy when I actually do want to watch something.

83. I (in co-ownership with Bret) have an amazing movie collection. It’s been the work of many years and It. Is. Awesome.

84. I heart Reese’s peanut butter cups. Deliciousness.

85. I’m not a big fan of chocolate. Sure, I enjoy it. But I don’t seem to crave it like most women do and sometimes I wonder if I received a faulty chocolate gene.

86. I take comfort in the fact that the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice is my favorite movie. Maybe I’m not so different from the rest of my sex.

87. I like fountain soda better than bottled soda. Same soda, same brand, same temperature…but for some reason it’s just more refreshing when it comes out of a soda fountain.

88. I call it soda. I used to call it pop. I don’t remember when I changed over. But I remember calling it pop as late as high school…hmmm, interesting.

89. I love the mountains.

90. …”I love the rolling hills. I love the flowers. I love the daffodils.”

91. That song always reminds me of my grandpa:)

92. I am a citizen of the United States of America. Proud of my heritage, but admit I’m a bit nervous about the pathway my country is on. How did Thomas Jefferson say it?…I looked it up. “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

93. I love reading about the founding fathers of my country.

94. I love reading.

95. I miss my stomach.

96. I really really miss my stomach.

97. I love being a stay-at-home mom.

98. I hate that being a stay-at-home mom makes me a mindless slave in the minds of many.

99. I love my husband! I thought I loved him more than anyone ever loved anybody when we got married, but even that can’t be compared to how much I love him now.

100. “…All the gold in the United States Treasury and all the harp music in heaven can't equal what happens between a man and a woman with all that growin' together. I can't explain it any better than that.”

Congratulations for makin’ it alllll the way through! I realize that’s not really 100 things; that some were drawn out into more when they should have been one, and that much of it is senseless rambling. But this is what you get:)

Ten points to the one who correctly names the movie that #100 comes from and an extra ten points for correctly naming the actor who said it.