Tag, I'm it! And so are you!

“THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”

Six weird things about me:

1. I have been engaged 6.5 times, married twice, and am the bemused owner of perhaps the world’s best radar gun for picking men who are unavailable: temporarily or otherwise. [Yes, I’m back in the convent again. Wait, maybe I'm not. After a week of silence, which I sortof expected but didn't particularly enjoy, we had a good if brief chat this morning as I finished getting ready for church and the girls tapped their feet and pointed at their left wrists.]

2. Five daughters; they would probably take exception to being called “weird”, but apples don’t fall far from their tree. Also three granddaughters and a whozit, sex yet to be determined. The only sons are the wonderful men who have married my daughters.

3. For three years after divorcing the girls’ father, I slept on a Victorian fainting couch as visible evidence that I took [and still take] old-fashioned morality quite seriously, for myself as well as for them. We call it the Chastity Bed, and it now occupies the space beneath the dining room window, along with a pillow adapted from a Kaffe Fassett design, the face of a medieval woman, fondly referred to as “the nun I am living like”. The fact that I now have a queen size bed with a feather mattress atop it and lots of pillows and a down comfortor, which we sometimes call the Muffin Bed, should not be construed to mean that my views on What Is Right and Proper have changed. This makes me very weird in modern circles. I don’t mind at all.

4. I have craters, one per thigh and one per arm, from smallpox vaccinations that failed when I was a kid. My high school boyfriend used to call me “Crater Leg” [like Crater Lake, in Oregon]; time and avoirdupois have made them less visible.

5. I was extremely shy as a child, so shy that if you asked me what time it was, I would blush. I can now speak to 200+ people or more [yay for a lay ministry and 30 years of giving talks in church!], sing a capella to them if I take off my glasses so I can’t actually *see* them, and I participated in the Taos Poetry Circus in June 1998. And at church today, I signed all three verses of "Silent Night" while the choir and congregation sang, and I didn't start weeping from joy until halfway through the benediction.

6. I used to love talking on the phone when I was a married, stay-at-home mom. It was my lifeline to the outside world. Now that I am a receptionist at a law firm, I’d prefer not to talk on the phone unless I’m talking to somebody who might be Brother Right. For some incomprehensible reason, I don’t mind that at all. Otherwise, just shoot me an email. Interesting that the brief, lovely flurry with Brother Abacus was [is apparently still being] conducted the old-fashioned way: by phone and in person, though I did learn to text-message.

I'm tagging Jeri, Jo, Wanda, Elizabeth, Taya, and MsKnitingale. And I'm very proud because I *finally* figured out how to do the link-by-name thing.