Awards!

So I'm very late on blogging about these. Several weeks ago, my wonderful and lovely friend Veronica Bartles nominated me for the One Lovely Blog award.

Then a little over two weeks after that, my wonderful and lovely friend Delia Moran nominated me for the Versatile Blogger award.

So I'm lovely and versatile! Yay! And since both awards instructed me to reveal 7 interesting things about myself, I've decided to kind of cheat by combining them. Because I don't know that I can think of 14 interesting things on such short notice. Granted, short here means several weeks, but whatever. Here goes! Here are 7 completely random facts about me.

1. I love to bake. Especially pies. Naturally, I enjoy eating them myself. But even more than that, I enjoy giving them to other people. This is maybe a tad narcissistic of me, because my favorite part of baking is when other people tell me that it's the best pie they've ever eaten. Or that I should quit my job and open a bakery. This was especially exciting for me when I baked a mixed berry pie for Christmas with my father's extended family two years ago. Nothing from my childhood led them to believe I would have any skill at baking, and they were shocked when they tasted it. When they showed up the next year, every single one of them asked if I brought a pie.  :)

2. I have a very high tolerance for pain. My mother has informed me that I used to get these massive double ear infections when I was a young child, and I wouldn't say a word about them. Then all of a sudden the pain would get so bad that I would burst into tears or, on occasion, faint. Apparently, the doctor used to give her looks, thinking she was a terrible mother. (Sorry mom!) I've also been told that when I broke my arm (I was six), my mom noticed me frowning about five hours later and asked what was wrong. My response was, "My arm kinda hurts." And she took that to mean, "My arm is majorly broken. We need to go to the emergency room immediately." She was correct.  

3. I don't like the vast majority of modern music. If you look at the CDs (yes, I still have CDs...I don't even like modern ways of listening to music!) in my car, I would venture to guess that 85% of them are Broadway/musical movie soundtracks, 10% of them are Disney, 4% of them are music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, and that final 1% is music from this millennium.

4. I spent a large part of my childhood on a farm. This farm, to be specific. My grandparents lived there (my grandfather is a farmer) until I was 6 or so, and then built a beautiful home on the property behind it. Those two farms are my favorite places in the world. And it's because of my time there that no one in my father's family believed I could bake. I was always outside, climbing trees, wading through creeks, and just basically getting into trouble. (By that I mean disappearing for hours and making everyone worry, or getting things like poison ivy, Lyme disease, or rocky mountain spotted fever.) My sister was always the one who helped my grandmother in the kitchen/house. 

5. For my 9th birthday, I desperately wanted a Felicity American Girl Doll. Instead, I ended up with one of those dolls who you get to look like you. Only I guess they didn't have curly hair as an option back then, because mine had straight hair. And I was upset about it for about 15 years. I don't mean to say that I literally thought about this doll for 15 years. But more like whenever I thought about American Girl Dolls (because I saw a store or a catalog, etc.), my resentment simmered. So then, 15 years later, I asked my mom to give me Felicity for Christmas. So yes, as a 24 year old, I asked my mommy to buy me a doll. And I've never regretted it.

6. One of my favorite activities is geocaching. If you don't know what this is, the tagline is that I use multi-billion dollar government satellites to find tupperware in the woods. Basically, it's like a treasure hunt. People hide things all over the world (there's also a cache on the International Space Station!), and post the coordinates online here. The "treasure" isn't usually anything special. Little plastic toys and the like. And sometimes, the cache is so small that no treasure will fit. I've found caches the size of a pencil eraser.

7. Since this is the last one, I'm going to give the most random fact I can think of. I have a great and resounding fear of static cling. Seriously. I carry around a dryer sheet in a ziplock bag everywhere I go. Then if my shirt gets all clingy with static, I wipe the dryer sheet around the inside of the shirt for a few seconds, and all is well in the world. My husband once had to look in my purse for something and saw my dryer sheet, and decided then and there that I was crazy. But I use it often enough that it's worth it to me. Though maybe taking it with me when I climbed a Mayan ruin was overkill.  ;)