1. My favorite person in the world is John.
2. My next 3 favorites are my three awesome sons.
3. I'm a bit of a snob about literature. I only love the really good stuff (Dickens, Tolstoy, Lewis, Austen, Carroll, and many others,) and rarely can tolerate the other stuff.
4. Every time I use eggs I have to arrange the remaining eggs in symmetrical patterns in the carton. It's a cross between 1- creating order and balance, and 2- a continual art form.
5. I have a reocuring nightmare of being on stage, seeing the curtain open, and realizing I haven't gotten around to reading the script yet, and I don't know any of the choreography.
6. If I could go see a play or musical every day, I would.
7. I have a major in Linguistics and a minor in Japanese.
8. I was an art major for the first few years of college and loved it.
9. I'm fascinated by language: phonetics, etymology, language acquisition (1st language and 2nd language,) semantics, speech articulation, morphology, dialects, it's all super interesting and exciting to me.
10. I love rain storms. Thunder and lightning make me happy. And that heavenly sweet smell. . .
11. I think my favorite movie is Fiddler on the Roof.
12. My hair started to go curly when I was 12, peaked with ringlets by 22, and now is back to just wavy.
13. I'm often a little too thrifty for my own good.
14. I had a cyst the size of a tennis ball removed when I was 10.
15. I've never broken a bone. Thankfully.
16. My favorite foods are fresh peaches, corn on the cob, california rolls, raspberries, avocados, apple pie, ham, and saute'ed onions, peppers and mushrooms.
17. I have hypothyroidism, caused by an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
18. It hasn't been as bad for me as it sounds.
19. I went to 3 elementary schools and 3 high schools.
20. I'm especially grateful for the move that brought me to my second high school, because that placed me right around the corner from the coolest guy in the world, (who I fell madly in love with and finally married 5 years later.)
21. When I went to Japan for study abroad in college, I lost my return flight tickets at the airport where I landed in Japan, and didn't notice I had lost them until the day I was to fly home 6 weeks later. Miraculously, someone had turned the tickets in and the airport had sent them to the airport I would be flying out from. Who put me in charge?
22. I had an English Springer Spaniel when I was little that I loved. Her name was Bobby Sue.
23. When I fold my hands, my right thumb is on top.
24. I have a personal dream of having my art work displayed in an LDS temple.
25. I miss racial diversity.
26. I got my name on the board in first grade for not paying attention because I was showing the boy next to me my tricky way of holding a pencil - horizontally with one finger on top, one under, one on top, one under. I didn't get a skittle that day.
27. When I was little living in the desert I used to stay up late at night catching and killing cockroaches.
28. I can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious backwards like Mary Poppins. "But that's going a bit too far, don't you think?"
29. I have freckles in my eyes.
30. When I was 7 I used to ask my friends at school who got school lunch if I could have their green beans. At my house we ate garden green beans, and the canned ones that the school served were new and cool to me.
31. When my mom was 6 months pregnant with me she was picking fruit when the ladder slipped and she fell. She had a miraculous landing, and a priesthood blessing that I would be able to last full term. Through a series of miracles, I did, and even came a week late. I've always felt grateful for the priesthood.
32. Growing up I wanted to be an archaeologist or anthropologist.
33. Those fields still fascinate me.
34. I sang in the choir at General Conference the last year conference was held in the Tabernacle.
35. I've never sent a text message. Pathetic, I know. But the only person I would text is John, and I'm already online with him all day.
36. I plucked my eyebrows once and it totally wasn't worth it. John likes em the way they are, and I can't fathom spending the time (not to mention the pain) to change them.
37. John and I spend most of our evenings lately working on a quilt that we are making. It's going to have 1763 squares on the front. (41 squares x 43 squares, 2.25 inches each)
38. It's not uncommon for me to come home from the store with a new set of legos. I love legos and want to build an incredible collection. (But I don't like the sets with huge pieces that can only be one thing - the whole front half of a big ol' jet or something. Takes the imagination and creativity out of building things, and ruins the versatility that is key for legos.) Most days there are legos spread on the floor of my living room.
39. I'm named after my mom's best friend for my first name, and my great grandmother for my middle name.
40. In 4 years when I'm 32 I will have known John half my life.
41. I often add extra cinnamon to recipes.
42. I almost always cut back the sugar, unless John is cooking with me, and even then sometimes I try to do it discretely.
43. He almost always catches me.
44. I once ate breakfast with Richard G. Scott, and he gave me a print of one of his paintings. He's an incredibly personable and friendly person.
45. I've kept a daily journal for 9 years now.
46. I can't say how badly I wish that I had kept a better journal 12 years ago when I met John and we were having the time of our lives coming to know and love each other.
47. I can't really whistle.
48. I take a pill every night, in the middle of the night. It has to be taken 2 hours after eating and 1 hour before eating, and honestly, with how much and often I eat, there isn't a time in my waking hours where that would work. 3 hours without eating? Not likely. So I take it when I get up with Luke. I don't know what I'll do when he starts sleeping through the night!
49. John tells me I'm a yard sale diva.
50. I had a pretty hefty culture shock when I was 8 and my family moved from a tiny and wonderful farming town to a thriving metropolis. I don't think I had ever heard a swear word before.
51. I love wild flowers.
52. I'm lousy at throwing things away. Sometimes I really wish I were better at it.
53. I was raised on oldies music. I still have a nice place in my heart for Simon & Garfunkel, Hermann's Hermits, The Beatles, The Monkeys, Crosby Stills & Nash, Peter Paul & Mary, etc....
54. I spent a summer up the canyon with hundreds of kids under the age of two.
55. I worked that summer at a family camp, and when the families split into age groups, I had the youngest ones. It was amazing. 25-ish toddlers every week, and at naptime, over 15 babies sleeping at once in the same room. It was actually a blast. Not to mention being up there with all the other staff. Very fun summer.
56. I like to go on walks.
57. Bananas need to be a touch green on the ends to be good. If they have brown spots they are only good for banana bread.
58. The kid who sat next to me in kindergarten was named Josh and he wrote his s's very tall and narrow.
59. I really really want to go to Sea World.
60. I played viola for 4 years.
61. I became a Star Trek fan (the Next Generation, with Captain Picard) after I married John. We have all 7 seasons.
62. It's nice to have them because there are no commercials, and it's good for a short movie night if you don't want to stay up late.
63. I took 2 years of American Sign Language classes in college and LOVED it.
64. I played volleyball in high school. As I freshman I was on JV, then as a sophmore I was on Varsity. Then I moved, and was put back to the JV at the new school. When I moved again I didn't have the heart to try to fit in with yet another team who didn't know me, so I stopped. But I still love volleyball so much. Watching men's volleyball is truly amazing.
65. I have had a lot of fun with oil painting and watercolors.
66. I want to frame more of my art and put it up.
67. When I was a teenager I always wanted to go skydiving and bungie jumping, but after being a mom, I have zero desire to do anything risky like that.
68. Heights make me nervous.
69. I would always choose whipped cream over ice cream with my pie.
70. I still have stickers saved up from when I was 5. I love stickers but I think I treat them a little too sacred and have a hard time actually using them. So I save them.
71. Someday I will go to Central America and tour the ancient ruins. I've wanted to ever since I was little.
72. Someday I will go back to Japan with John. I would love to serve a mission there too.
73. I'll have to brush the dust off my Japanese skills before I can do that.
74. I used to sneak packets of Equal sweetener downstairs so my sister and I could eat them. Somehow I thought we were so hidden, being in plain sight in the downstairs family room, right around the corner from the stairs landing.
75. I really like games - cards, board games, party games, traveling games, you name it.
76. My little sister and I always used to sing this little number for talent shows and family gatherings, and I always had to play the part of the boy.
77. I have a fascination with how words are said. It's not uncommon for me to be repeating a word over and over (and over and over,) and listening to different ways it's said, or listening to specific parts of how it's said. I'm weird like that.
78. My family teases me for being interested in which syllables people emphasize in word pairs, like "taco bell," or "green beans."
79. I'm crazy about garden tomatoes.
80. I use the best crust recipe in the world.
81. My favorite book of scripture is the Book of Mormon.
82. I don't want to sand cabinets ever again. They did turn out really great though.
83. St. Patrick's Day is a special holiday for me because my wonderful Grandma was Irish, so St. Patty's Day is also a sort of Grandma Day.
84. I don't like war movies. It's too real and horrible to relive for movie night.
85. I recently signed up for a recycling garbage can, and I'm loving it. It fills up faster than our regular garbage can.
86. I've been in primary callings at church for the past 7 years. It's been great.
87. I've been to two James Taylor concerts with John. Very fun. :)
88. John spoils me rotten. I think I'm the most loved wife in the universe.
89. I had the lead in my Jr. High School musical. I was Luann in the play Luann. I loved every minute of it, especially my solos and monologue scenes.
90. I've been in 6 or 7 other plays since then, but never much more than "third girl from the left" or "human prop" as my friend used to say. I've always wished I had somehow done more in musical theater.
91. When I was little I considered myself a tom boy. I think I was afraid of being too feminine. I never wore clothes that were even remotely fitted until I was in college, and I don't think I wore pink (after elementary school) until I was married. Now it's one of my favorite colors to wear.
92. I'm an especially big sucker for clothes that are deep red, sage green or black. I have to consciously steer away from those items in stores because I always want to get them.
93. I've had 3 miscarriages, and each one has made me grow in huge ways. I'm a different person because of them.
94. I like internal rhyming schemes in poetry.
95. The best two candies in the world are Snickers and Peanut M&Ms. Hands down.
96. I don't follow recipes very closely when I cook. (Quite distantly sometimes actually.) As a result, I come up with some amazingly tasty food, but recreating a masterpiece tends to be tricky.
97. I love camping and being in the mountains.
98. I would like to travel the globe to listen to accents, languages and dialects.
99. Drawing is very rejuvenating personally for me.
100. I'm doing now exactly what I always wanted to do when I grew up. I'm sealed to my wonderful husband whom I love immensely, who makes me smile and laugh and who takes care of me in every way. We've been given excellent children and I get to be at home with them as they are growing. I could go on and on. Everything isn't always perfect and things are still getting better, but as for now, I'm grateful to be quite literally living my dream.
