Tagged: Six Unimportant Things About Me

Ann tagged me with this.

1. Link back to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six unimportant things about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your blog entry.
5. Let the tagged people know by leaving a comment on their blogs.

1. I lived as a child on a street sandwiched between a mall and a high school. Between, in other words a lake of concrete and a lack of asphalt as the parking lots were nearer the street than the buildings and took up more square yards by far than the buildings.
2. My brother and I raided the Wards dumpster area for appliance boxes i.e. fridge, oven, dishwashers, dryers etc. We dragged them home and built forts in the back yard with them. Two story affairs with complex mazes leading to our individual personal rooms and a common area where we played chess and monopoly by flashlight on summer days.
3. At age four I was playing hide and seek with my nearly three year old brother and hid in a large aluminum garbage can with the grass clippings. I heard our mother calling us in but was determined that I would not come out until I was found. But nobody came to find me. I finally was forced by nature's call to go in the house. Only to find that nobody was home. I only had a few minutes or even less than three minutes to feel scared though as my best friend, the neighbor girl five years older than me, had come at my mother's request to hunt for me and bring me back to her house where my Mom and gone with my brother to do a fitting of an outfit she was sewing for my friend's mother.
4. That was the friend who taught me how to ride a bike. In secret in the high school parking lot behind her house. And then she walked behind me as I rode it around the block to the front of our house where my Mom was working in the flowerbeds. I called out to her as I zipped by. "Look, Mom!' and as I zipped by I also kept my eyes on her instead of the sidewalk and as I looked to my left I aimed the handlebars to the right and zipped on out into rush our traffic all the way across to the mall parking lot, darting between the bumpers of cars stopped for the red light a block away. That little stunt, pulled to convince my parents I was big enough to have a bike of my own may have contributed to me not getting one until I was eleven.
5. A few years before that, at not quite 2, while playing in the sprinkler in the front yard, I stripped down to my birthday suit.
   
6. I began exhibiting signs of hoarding as early as five when our bathroom was remodeled and I rescued several pieces of the decades old flooring out of the garbage and put them under my mattress. At the head of the bed. I cried when they found them and threw them away, calling them 'nasty'. I could just not wrap my brain around the idea that anything that pretty shade of blue could be nasty.
   

I tag Jamie, And anybody who sees this and wants to play. I know that is not the rules but I also know that everybody I can think of to tag is overwhelmed with duties and deadlines right now and/or has just been tagged by someone else. If you want to play, let me know and I'll come see and link you right there next to Jamie.

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Should I Go Hide Under the Bed?

I was tagged by Adelle. This was the first time for me so I'm not sure which is the worse in blog etiquette: to not accept the challenge or to impose it on the next ones. I'm not even sure I 'know' enough bloggers well enough to fill the quota on this tag. Having fretted for two days, I have decided that just doing it is the only thing that will shut up that indecisive 'should I? or shouldn't ?' litany and give the whole thing closure for me.

At least this isn't any more imposing of a challenge than a Thursday Thirteen so I am selecting my victims from TT and Monday Poetry Train participants who have commented more than once on my my TT and Poetry Train posts. At least I know they enjoy memes and don't hate visiting Joystory. It goes without saying that I love to visit every one of their blogs and do so frequently. Which isn't reflected in my sidebar only because I have not been updating my sidebar since I started participating in TT last October. (see #4 below) To sweeten the pot for them I am also going to link their names to their blogs when I tag them even though it is is not one of the rules of this meme. (Personally I think it should be as that would be a better motivator for participants, and appears to be one of the points of viral memes. But I didn't write the rules for this one.)

So here goes:

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1. I am legally blind due to RP aka retinitis pigmentosa a genetic degenerative disease that progressively destroys peripheral vision. I have almost zero night vision and even in the best lighted conditions am limited to less than twelve degrees vision in each eye out of the 180 degrees of normal peripheral vision.

2. We can only trace it back five generations from me because my mother's mother's father's mother did not know her own family history. She was raised by the Indians from age three, when the leader of the raid on her parent's farmstead found her in the pickle barrel where her parents had hidden her after the rest of her family had been slaughtered. He was in awe of her blond curls. She was raised as his daughter until she was at least eighteen and returned to the White man's civilization as the bride of a missionary/trader with the tribe. (Umm. Does that count as a fact about me?)

3. I fret a lot about big and small stuff. Lot of wasted energy and time. It is part of the Anxiety/Depression mood disorder I've had since at least age four but wasn't diagnosed officially until I was nearly forty.

4. I am such a procrastinator! I should spell it in 20pt font but then I would hate they way it looks on the page. Which leads to:

5. I am such a perfectionist! I should spell it in 28pt font but....well you get the picture. And it isn't the kind of perfectionism that actually produces order and well-made finished projects. Rather....

6. I am easily discouraged by mistakes or the inability to make a project turn out the way I envision it or stay on schedule and then I stop working on it and let it set, taking up space in my environment and mind for weeks, months or years, unwilling to give up on it entire but only returning to it maybe five percent of the time. The major successes that have resulted from a small percentage of those makes it that much harder to say a final bub-bye to those that really are dead in the water.

7. This includes staying organized in my environment, including my workspace and schedule. I crave organization, I visualize it in great detail but can never seem to achieve it. And of course my being a hoarder of all kinds of ridiculous stuff does not help at all. You can find the post that lists said stuff via labels if you dare. Hoarding was bad enough when I had my own home but...

8. Since August 2001 we have been living with my husband's parents in the small second bedroom of a single-wide trailer house. With two cats on leashes: Gremlyn and Merlin. Until we lost Gremlyn in March. With the litter box, cat's food and water dishes, bed, entertainment center and my jerryrigged office made of stacked cardboard boxes and a board, there isn't enough standing room for two people. This room has not been thoroughly cleaned since I started spending race day Saturdays watching my husband's elderly grandmother two years ago instead of using that time with the family out of the house to do a major cleaning. I'm fretting about this now because we are about to inherit a new bed from his grandma, who passed on earlier this month, and I am nervous about having to take down my 'office' and put it back together, as interrupting my projects has repercussions (see #6 above) and freaking about what we might find under the bed.

So I'm tagging:


Rhian / Crowwoman
Susan Helene Gottfried
Wylie Kinson
Robin L. Rotham
Tink
L^2
Gattina
Candyminx

Sorry gals. Should I go hide under the bed?

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Obsession

You would be pardoned for thinking this is just another post about our local library closure since I've admitted to being obsessed about it and well over half of my posts in the last four months have been about it. But I've been tagged by Selena Kitt to admit to five obsessions. 5!! Now any other time in my life, I would have been hard pressed to narrow it down to five as obsession is practically my middle name. It has been suggested to me by those with expertise in the field that I have more than a touch of OCD going on with me. See my post, Hoarders R Us.

But this week, with the library closure only four days away, I can barely force myself to think about anything else and feel stressed whenever I am unable to have my eyes glued to the page of a library book or the laptop screen as it plays one of the library DVDs. The kind of stress like that experienced in a dream when being chased by the bogey man. So when I got tagged, I was tempted to just post something to the effect that I'd get back to you on Saturday when I had time to think about it. But the concept intrigued me and I decided if I could come up with four more things that I spent significant time doing or contemplating in the past month, I would go ahead and post tonight. It took me less than three minutes to make the list. In fact I came up with five besides the library. Just know that if font size indicated the ratio of attention, then the library thing would have to be 44pt font while all the rest would be in 14pt and smaller.

Following are the five things other than the library capturing a significant amount of my attention.

1. Nuzzling, cuddling, huggermuggering, teasing and playing with Merlin as we adjust to life without Gremlin. Huggermuggering is a word I use to mean mugging hugs, something I started doing a couple years ago because, unlike Gremlin who wasn't content unless she was snuggled against me, Merlin didn't care for being held or even sitting on your lap. By playing the game huggermugger I have increased his tolerance from about two seconds to almost two minutes. He comes when I sing out "huggermugger, huggermugger' and a couple of times since Gremlin's passing, he has voluntarily climbed into my lap and gone to sleep.

2. Story is the over-riding passion of my life. And my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld is one of my favorite mental playgrounds. I have discussed it in several of my Thursday Thirteen posts but especially #25 on the 22nd of last month and #13 on the 28th of last December. All three of my NaNoWriMo attempts were based in it. My two entries in the WriteStuff Creative Carnival were based in it. See: Kicking the Bucket and A Tail of a Wail.

(Oh, I totally forgot to post that I won the contest last month and received the prize Fiction Writer's Brainstormer by James V. Smith, Jr. The day I learned I won was the day Gremlin got sick and the day the book arrived was the day my 13 year old niece arrived to spend five days of her spring break with me and her grandma during which we watched about fifteen movies and walked to the library twice and chatted about stories--reading, watching and writing them.)

My niece has read several of my stories and is very irritated with me that I am not writing more. She thought I was overdoing the library thing even before the upcoming closure was announced in early December after which....oh, just scan the last four months of my blog and you'll get the picture. Anyway, it is partly because of her interest that I began to become re-enchanted with my FOS storyworld again, after a several year hiatus precipitated by the loss of my manuscripts and notes in 2001.

3. Stat watching. After I met the challenge my husband set me at the beginning of March to post five times in a single week and he followed through on his promise to start using his know-how to promote Joystory, I started refreshing my stats pages at Sitemeter several times per day. And there was a week there when it was at least once an hour. I couldn't get enough of wondering who all these people were and especially what motivated them to visit multiple pages and hang out for 5, 10, 30, 60 and more minutes.

Before I started participating in Thursday Thirteen last fall, almost no one visited multiple pages and few besides my sister and niece left comments. I'm still not getting many comments outside of TT. That didn't used to matter to me but now my curiosity is severely piqued and I dearly wish some of those who visit more than two pages or stay more than ten minutes would drop me a comment to tell me what has snagged their attention. Like, right now as I compose this paragraph someone from China has been on for over twenty minutes and visited 7 pages. Now who wouldn't be curious about that? Or when Monday morning someone from the Midwest US visited 40 pages in 31 minutes?

There is more to this obsession then just curiosity or gratification. This is part of THE obsession that will replace the library obsession beginning next week as I throw myself into content creation, design and promotion of the three sites I already have up and two more I have planned. My husband has two up with plans for a couple more too and I will probably return the favor by helping him with promotion. We think we have figured out a way to make income via the Internet by combining our two skill sets. Stay tuned for that story as it unfolds.

4. Riddles, puzzles, puns. I've always loved these but ever since I encountered Weffriddles last November, I've been obsessed in a completely new way. I gave up almost all computer gaming along with almost all prime time TV after learning of the immanent library closure. I can't wait to get back to solving the Weffriddle maze. I quit just after finishing batch 1 shortly after the New Year. I couldn't trust myself to play without getting sucked in for 3, 6, 12 hours. That probably cost me the NaNoWriMo win this year.

So I knew that I had to let it alone until after the library closure, if I wanted to get as much as possible of the essential research and movie watching done before the library closed. I quit playing but I didn't stop thinking about it. And I began to notice that everything I encountered during each day became inspiration for a riddle, puzzle or pun and I began to itch not only to play Weffriddle but to create my own levels and batches and dare I admit it? To put up my own riddle site loosely modeled on Weffriddle but imprinted with my own passions: story, wordplay, reading, writing, thinking, movies and more.

Watch for this before the end of spring. If this concept interests you, leave a comment; with contact info if you would like to be notified when it launches.

5. National and World News. I get almost all of my news online and more than eighty percent from non MSM. I used to read news and editorials and political blogs for several hours per day. I dropped it down to one the past four months. I do a lot more thinking about it than that. Many of the library items I have spent time with in the last four months were first encountered while reading news online.

~~***~~

OK that about covers it. Now I am supposed to tag five people. This is going to be harder than writing the post. There are only two that I feel comfortable tagging without checking with them first.

1. My sister
2. My Niece
3. My Husband.
4.
5.

I'll have to get back to you with three more after I check with them first. But anyone who sees this and wishes to play, consider yourself tagged. Leave a comment with your URL and I will post your link above.

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