Me: Part the Third

51. They tell me I’ll change my mind after knitting with the color for a bit, but my most often worn color is black. Though it’s not my “favorite” color.

52. I must be a closet Christmas-freak…my favorite colors are actually deep burgundy and hunter/forest green. Bring up the brightness and you have xmas…

53. It must have been 4th or 5th grade, I’m thinking of the style of pants I had on that day…my teacher lined me up with a slew of other girls from my class. It was “free dress” day at my little private Catholic school. (I think it was 4th simply because Mrs. Ruth didn’t seem the type to line you up for this). Ms. Gomez asked us all what our favorite color was. NO QUESTION. I was wearing purple pants, and a purple and black striped shirt that my mom had JUST bought me that weekend…

54. Remember “disc” cameras? The kind that had the film in a squarish-flat disk? And the negatives were on a spindle disk? Yeah, I can’t really tell what my friends from grammar school look like as most of the pictures I have come from that grainy little camera.

55. That is, of course, unless you took the picture really up close and personal. As you did of the guys you had the total big crushes on. Aaaahhhh, I still have it, somewhere in the mess that is my “picture box” at my mom’s house.

56. My mom’s house is the repository of all my crap that I’ve not elected to cart around with me. She keeps telling me it’s okay to have it there. Guilt-free storage.

57. I’m a Harry Potter geek as well. I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies.

58. I actually own two of each of the books, except for the last one, due to having my first set stored at my mom’s house and my intense need to read them for the 4th or 5th time.

59. I was in Mexico when the first Harry Potter movie came out. Of course I had to see it! It was dubbed in Spanish, as it was a kid’s movie. (If you already know this trivial fact, sorry to bore you but: kid movies are generally dubbed into the prevailing language of the kids, where as adult movies will have subtitles.)

60. I’m a “sabilotodo” that’s what Professor Snape accuses Hermione of being when she won’t stop raising her hand and trying to answer his questions.

61. I’m not really a know it all, but I do tend to sound like one (I think it’s the “teacher” voice I fall into when dictating information). So if I’m, like, wrong or off, I get pounced on a whole lot.

62. I’m terrified of storms. Well, loud ones. I really don’t like thunderstorms. That’s when I want to crawl into bed with the sheets over my head.

63. In Hilo (HI) it rained a whole lot, but we got very few thunderstorms. Sometimes it rained so hard while I was teaching, that I had to stop talking and wait for it to pass. It never took very long.

64. I don’t think the kids liked thunderstorms much either…well, they were middle schoolers though, and that meant that whatever drama they could cook up, they’d use to their advantage. Thunder and lightning racing across the sky was a good time for them to NOT want to learn English and scream like little kids, IF I’d let them :). I used to let them depending on how my day had gone. Stormy weather does not make good teaching weather.

65. Snow storms I can handle. They’re pretty quiet. It’s not until the snow starts flopping off the trees in big bits that it gets noisy. You don’t even realize it’s stormy out until you open the curtain. WEIRD.

66. I used to freak out during storms when I was living on my boat.

67. Did you know a mast is a great attractor of lightning bolts? I did. I would imagine the bolt hitting my mast and destroying every piece of electronic gear available. So I used to throw the GPS into the oven. I’d have thrown more in, but I had a tiny “easy-bake” sized oven on that boat.

68. When we were anchored near other boats, I used to scope out for a boat, any boat, with a taller mast than mine. If we were it, I’d get rashes if it started raining, cuz, well, we were the tallest thing around. This was rare as most people went cruising on 40’ boats with 45’+ masts. We were itty bitty at 32’ with a 34’ mast.

69. When I lived on the water I had many morbid thoughts about the way I’d end up dying. Most of them had to do with drowning in one way or another. Not the boat sinking, though, never, more often my falling off the boat and swallowing lots of water.

70. On the Big Island, living on land, changed my sick thoughts to dying by getting hit by a car while on my bicycle. I’m not all that morbid, honest, except that I did get into a couple really bad accidents on my bike. Neither of them was my fault, which made it worse.

71. Funny thing, haven’t had those thoughts recently.

72. I’ve been accused of “thinking too much” by my family.

73. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t have such a clear memory about my past because all the new thoughts have kinda squished them away. You know, like the new digital cameras will do to your pictures if you’re getting too close to filling up the memory chip.

74. Or maybe the memory problems stem from the bonks to the head from past accidents? I fell off my bicycle pretty hard when I was younger, you know, PRE-HELMET LAW for kids days? I was almost concussed (but still hit pretty hard) by the boom of my 26’ O’Day sailboat. My current housemate kept me from falling into the water that day. And how well do those bicycle helmets really protect you? I mean, how hard to you have to get hit to damage yourself, really?

75. So if you haven’t realized it by now, I’m not the most graceful of people out and about.