I am a catalog freak, just ask my husband. While I don't normally buy a lot through the mail (because we're broke), I do love looking.

I saw this




in the holiday edition of the Oriental Trading Company, Inc catalog, and I have 2 things to say...

1) Is this sacrilegious?

2) There are only 30 shopping days until my birthday. They're not available online, only in the catalog, so contact me if you need the ordering info!

What you've been waiting for since the last post...

Update 0ct 23, 2006... this was posted last week, yet when I logged in just now, it was saved in my drafts... hmmm.....

1. I’m 5’3 ½” tall, exactly 1 foot shorter than my husband.
2. My hair is naturally curly.
3. My favorite color is green.
4. My eyes are a light golden-brown with hints of green around the pupil.
5. My favorite movie is “The Godfather”.
6. And speaking of movies, I hate “The Wizard of Oz”.
7. Deep, deep down, I’m still in love with my first love.
8. I like ketchup on my macaroni & cheese.
9. My ears are pierced a total of 9 times.
10. I have 3 tattoos: the Chinese character for ‘courage’, a peace sign, and the Celtic-version of my parents’ zodiac signs.
11. My favorite memory from childhood is going to the library with my mother.
12. I have never read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
13. Roller coasters scare the crap out of me, but I love them (as long as they don’t go upside-down).
14. I’m still angry at my father for giving up on life after his stroke.
15. My paternal grandparents were Presbyterian missionaries in the Cameroon’s, in West Africa, for 41 years.
16. The pinky finger of my right hand is crooked.
17. I’ve played the flute since I was 10 years old.
18. The sound of people eating popcorn at the movies drives me crazy.
19. Pat Conroy is my favorite author.
20. My teeth are almost perfectly straight (naturally), yet I wanted braces as a child because all my friends had them.
21. I am constantly terrified that something terrible will happen to my son.
22. I love peppermint stick ice cream topped with hot fudge sauce.
23. Sometimes I resent my husband for getting me pregnant.
24. Daisies are my favorite flower.
25. I’d rather have strawberry jam than grape jelly on my peanut butter sandwiches.
26. I think most of the people I work with are idiots.
27. I don’t think there’s anything beautiful about the childbirth experience, other than the baby that you get to take home from the hospital with you.
28. The perfume I wear comes from Ireland.
29. I took 3 years of Latin in high school (Veni, Vidi, Veggie translated means “I came, I saw, I had a salad”)
30. I have an unnatural fear of dead fish.
31. My favorite song is ‘Jungleland’ by Bruce Springsteen.
32. I slept through most of the 3rd ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie… in my defense, I was 8 ½ months pregnant at the time.

My guilty pleasures are…
33. 7th Heaven
34. Julie Garwood books
35. Potato salad (carbs are not a friend of the diabetic)
36. Selected songs by artists (and I use the term loosely) such as The Backstreet Boys, Vanessa Carlton, Jesse McCartney and Sixpence None the Richer.
37. Good shampoo that you can only buy at the salon
38. Opi nail products
39. Good chocolate (although I will never turn down a Snicker's bar)

40. I was adopted when I was 2 months old.
41. I’ve never broken a bone.
42. I’ve been to two concerts: Bruce Springsteen and the Dave Matthews Band.
43. I start my Christmas shopping in July (seriously... and yes, I know it's sick).
44. My date to the Senior Prom flew to Ohio just for the occasion.
45. On Thanksgiving Day (this year) I will be 37 years old.
46. I fessed-up to my parents both the first time I got drunk and the first time I had sex, because I was afraid they’d find out from someone else and be twice as mad.
47. I used to get tonsillitis 3-4 times a year when I was little, but I’ve never had my tonsils out.
48. I can name all of the state capitals.
49. I’m sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to know my mother-in-law better.
50. I’m hooked on Burt’s Bees Beeswax Lip Balm.
51. I’ve never had a cavity.
52. I prefer driving a stick shift over an automatic transmission.
53. I love opera.
54. My pizza toppings of choice are green olives, onions and bacon.
55. I listen to National Public Radio.
56. I am still mostly afraid of the dark.
57. I can’t sleep unless I’m facing the doorway of the bedroom.
58. I can’t (literally) go through haunted houses – I get so scared that I turn around and walk out before I get through the first room.
59. I’ve always been fascinated by the Mafia.
60. The ringtone on my cell phone is the theme from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.
61. Sometimes I like to just read the dictionary.
62. I have tendonitis in my right shoulder.
63. I can only wear earrings that have genuine gold posts (otherwise, my ears get infected… was that too much information?).
64. My favorite book as a child was Amelia Bedelia.
65. I rarely iron my clothes.
66. I’ve worn my mother’s wedding rings on my right hand since she died 8 ½ years ago.
67. I have a freckle on the bottom of my right foot.
68. I’ve seen every episode of M*A*S*H
69. Sometimes I don’t think I believe in God
70. Apples are my favorite fruit
71. When “Pretty Woman” first came out on video, I watched it so many times I had the dialogue memorized.
72. I genuinely like rhubarb pie.
73. I only buy Crest toothpaste.
74. My first car was a 1985 Chevy Nova… I loved that car…
75. I like making jam.
76. I screen my phone calls 90% of the time.
77. I don’t like the taste of alcohol (although I did drink quite a bit in my early 20’s).
78. When I grow up, I’d love to be a photographer… or own my own book shop… or coffee shop.
79. I have a collection of the pens that drug company reps give the doctors’ offices.
80. I’ve traveled as far north as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, west to Missouri, and south to Florida and east to Washington D.C.
81. The first album (yes, vinyl!) was the soundtrack to ‘Footloose’.
82. I still have a scar under my chin from a bicycle accident when I was 8.
83. I don’t understand basketball, the game of Bridge, or calculus.
84. I was once in the same hotel lobby with Lou Ferrigno, but I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to meet him.
85. I prefer diet Coke over diet Pepsi, and like a squeeze of lemon in it, too (real lemon, not that fake-already-in-the-diet-Coke stuff they tried to market a while back).
86. I have never been able to do a cartwheel.
87. I was in my high school’s marching band, and loved every minute of it.
88. I’m usually in bed by 8:30 – 9:00 pm.
89. I wish my in-laws would move to Florida, now that they’re retired.
90. Sometimes, I still sleep with a stuffed animal.
91. I could not stay sane at my job without my iPod.
92. I have unbelievable stage fright (I threw up both before and after both recitals I had to give as a music major in college).
93. Sometimes I can be conceited.
94. Sometimes I get bored when my husband is talking to me.
95. I will always feel guilty for not pushing my mother more to see a different doctor before she died.
96. Most people are surprised to learn that I wear a size 10 shoe, because my feet really don’t look that big.
97. I refuse to buy cheap toilet paper.
98. I’m scared to make out a will, because I think it will make my mortality that much more real to me.
99. I wish my older brother and I were as close now as we were when we were younger.
100. After listing all these things about myself, I’m not sure I’m any closer to knowing who I am than I was when I started.

"One of the things that started me on the path artistically that I've been on was because I was adopted I had no real identity. It's something I still struggle with because it's taken me a long, long time, much longer than most people I know, to actually find my own identity, because I can't really look to biology and I can't really look to ancestry and I can't look to a context I think unconsciously I wanted to fit in. My mother likes to say I was a practically perfect child, getting great grades and trying to be good all the time and being nice and cute and sweet and all that kind of stuff, and I think it just built up in me, and there was this huge sense of a disconnect between the role I was playing and how I really felt inside."

Liz Phair iTunes Original "Adopting My Own Identity"

Who'd have thought Liz Phair could sum up so well what I've been feeling lately? Go figure.

When my dad died, I felt as if I'd been flung out into space, completely on my own. It's a weird sense of not lonliness, but aloneness, once that second parent dies. It's strong... almost overpowering, and I think the fact that I was adopted made it even stronger. It was as if, somehow, what validated me as a person was suddenly gone. And this has left me, for th e last year and a half, wondering, guessing, pondering, contemplating, obsessing over who I really am. I hate that because it sounds like pop-culture psycho-babble cliche to me, but there's really no other way to say it. And I hate the fact that at 36 years old, I don't have a better sense of myself, but there you have it.

It's exhausting.

It's not an original idea, but I've been putting together my list of '100 Things About Me'. I've seen it on several other blogs, and decided it was time to put together a list of my own. Some things are interesting, some maybe not. We'll see...