25 Random Things

I got tagged on facebook to write 25 random things about myself. I thought I'd post it here to, since Mom and Dad don't have facebook pages.

1. Dark chocolate, hands down.
2. I used to dream that I could swim underwater without needing to come up for air. I wish I still had that dream.
3. One of my biggest regrets is not going out for the high school swim team.
4. One thing I will never regret is taking a typing class in high school.
5. I love to travel! I am very happy when I have an airline ticket and am anticipating a trip.
   
6. I want to live in another country and immerse myself enough to really learn another language.
   
7. I am not a morning person. But I so wish I was.
   
8. Seeing the ocean at least once a year is a need, not a want. Seriously. It's a soul thing.
   
9. I wish our house had a substantial, welcoming front porch.
   
10. The summer after my freshmen year of college I walked the banks of the Seine in Paris, heartbroken because I missed my boyfriend who I wouldn't see for more than a year. Too bad my angst did not produce anything profound.
11. After Roger finished his first grad program, I quit my computer industry job and we ran away from home for a year. In our little red Jeep Wrangler, we drove all over the country, up into Canada to Alaska and down into Mexico.
12. I really, really, really miss our bookstore, which seemed to give me a hug every time I walked through the front door. It enabled us to meet so many interesting people and contribute to our community in so many fun ways . . . 
    
13.  . . . Like hosting live music! We had more than a hundred concerts at our store and one of my favorite projects was producing a CD of some of the performances. 
    
14. I was very relieved when Jack showed signs of developing a good sense of humor at an early age.
    
15. I started reading novels to Jack when he was three (The Mouse and the Motorcyle), and we've read almost every single night since then. One of the best decisions I ever made!
    
16. I took up yoga once and it did amazing things for me. So why don't I practice yoga these days?
    
17. It never fails that when the movie Joe vs. the Volcano comes on tv, I get sucked in--even though we own the DVD and we can watch it any time.
    
18. I love teaching my college class, but I don't love grading papers.
    
19. Once I got a professional pedicure and I thought, "I actually have nice toes!" I need to get another pedicure one day.
    
20. I play too much spider solitaire. But only when I'm listening to informative, thought-provoking podcasts.
21. I have an irrational dislike of Indian food. I think it may somehow be connected to bad behavior in a previous life.
22. I love seeing inside people's houses as I drive by at night. I don't want to see the people, but I do want to see their houses. I'm an architecture and design junky.
    
23. One of my favorite times of day is when Roger, Jack and I are all hanging out in bed together in the evening--reading, talking, laughing, and surfing the internet. It's nice. I love those guys!
    
24. Roger is watching a Flight of the Conchords video as I type this. They make me laugh.
    
25. I have had so much fun connecting with old and new friends and far flung relatives on facebook!
    

This One Always Makes Me Cry Just a Little Bit (In a Good Way)

This video has been around for a while, but for those of you who haven't seen it, it's so worth watching. Every once in a while, I watch it just to make me happy.

Believe

When we owned our bookstore, we thought it would be fun for the store to be in a movie. Loki, a musician who played several times at our store, wrote and directed a mockumentary called Believe (click here for more info). Lucky for us, he needed to shoot a scene in a bookstore. 

Loki and his crew were there for six or seven hours one evening to get the glorious eleven seconds that appears in this clip (spoiler alert!).

Five Interesting Conversations

I've had lots of conversations with people over the holidays, getting together with family and friends, working at the museum, etc. But I've chosen the five most unusual ones for this post.

• I met a bookseller and his wife visiting from Norway. We had a fine time talking about finding treasures in the book world. I told them I was convinced of genetic memory when I went to Norway and felt completely, utterly connected to the land, the people, the aesthetics, the whole feeling there.
  
• I met an elementary school art teacher who also teaches art classes at Utah Valley University. I told him about the new writing assignment sequence for English 1010 there (the course I've been teaching), and how it is designed primarily to develop critical thinking skills. One of the goals is to break students of the habit of deciding their thesis before doing any research and then simply finding quotes to support it. In fact, they don't write a full blown research paper. Instead their final paper is an exploratory research paper in which they write about their experience engaging with the content of their research. I was excited about it. He was excited about it. He even gave me his email address so I can send him more information (which I still need to do). Kindred geeks.
  
• I went with five friends to see Doubt, a movie about a nun (Meryl Streep, amazing) who believes a priest is abusing boys in her school. We had an energetic conversation all the way home. How can you really be certain about anything? And yet we are. I felt bad that they dropped me off first. 
  
• A sales rep at a store we visited recently shared wildly personal information with us. It started with a comment he made about his fifth grandchild being born, and when we expressed disbelief that he could have five at his age, he confessed that he became a grandfather at 36 because he became a father at 18. He then regaled us with stories of subsequent marriages to women and partnerships with men, some of whom had various troubles with various licit and illicit substances. But he seemed nice enough. We'd have bought something from him if we could have rationalized it.
  
• The last one isn't technically a conversation, but I thought it was an interesting encounter. And talking was involved. Whenever I stop by the art museum, I'm never quite sure what I might end up doing. The other day Roger and I stopped by to check on a couple of things and the director turned up with a huge bronze moose statue on a cart. He needed our help getting it off the cart and onto a pedestal. Crazy!

Out with the Old

I am totally overwhelmed by how much "stuff" we have and how disorganized it all is. We are hardly big shoppers, but we haven't dealt with everything that came home with us when we closed the bookstore. And the other two members of my family are collectors (and I sure love them!).

My new year's resolution is to get rid of at least one thing every day (throw away, give away, return to proper owner, or sell). I promised Roger and Jack that I wouldn't get rid of anything they own (at least not without their permission).

So far I'm on track! Of course, we're only four days in . . .