i have been tagged....

i love answering questions about myself so this isn't a bad thing really.... however i am only part of a very small group of other bloggers and they too have all been tagged... so.... i am kinda at a loss as to who to pass this along to.... (note to readers: if you read this blog and i don't know who you are, and IF you wish to be tagged please leave me a comment and i'll totally willingly do so :))

7 interesting things about me:
7. I hate anything that is unorganized. on the outside my piles look like a mess. but i guarantee you that i know exactly what is in them and where to find that one little piece of paper with that important phone number scratched on it. chris doesn't believe me that these piles are organized but damn it they are.

6. i love food. any and all sorts of food too not just foodie types of food. i'll eat anything once and i really don't care how packaged or prepared it is. i do love fresh foods and gourmet foods as well, all i'm sayin' is that i don't discriminate against any food. i even like a good dose of Velveeta in a mac and cheese recipe, hell i even like boxed mac and cheese :)

5. i can't do math. and i never have been able to. i sure have tried and i've failed miserably. now ask me to remember little things like an exact amount of an item in a store? or exactly how much i spent at the grocery, then i some how can regurgitate those numbers without even questioning whether i'm right or wrong because i'm always right! lol because of this problem with numbers, i am not in charge of the family finances.... we would be in debt up to our eyeballs if i were.

4. i hate preying mantis's. here is why: in high school biology we had to create bug collections, for a few weeks we go out into the fields and woods behind the school and capture bugs and insects. there were millions of preying mantis out there and we were encouraged to capture them even though they are on a save the species list and are supposed to be preserved... so one day after school i head out to the woods with a friend, i find my preying mantis and was really excited because it was a really perfect specimen. i bring it back to the classroom, put it in a jar with some ether and wait for it to die so that i can pin him to my bug board for presentation. i had a few other bugs to finish pinning so while i waited for the mantis to die i finished those up. 30 minutes had passed, i undid the lid, my preying mantis was limp... the first pin that you stick is through the thorax. so i stick my pin through the thorax and he's now attached to the bug board, all is going well, until he springs back to life with a large pin through his thorax and while he's stuck to a bug board.... i shrieked! i mean there were teachers in classrooms on the same hall that came to make sure that everything was ok, it was loud. my bio teacher had to rescue me, he put a huge rag of ether over the poor guy with a jar over that and we let it sit like that over night. when i came in the next day, he was very dead and a little ragged... but i was finished with my bug collection and that's all i cared about. since then i can't see a preying mantis without thinking about that dumb bug collection in bio!

3. i procrastinate and i leave lots of projects unfinished. even projects that really aren't that bad, i usually try to skip a step or cut a corner just before i'm finished thus something gets screwed up and i drop it never to return to this said project again. case in point my college degree or lack of one.... yes, i went to sru for 5 1/2 years and no i don't have a degree, i'm only a few credits away. i struggled through my entire education. i was much better at learning hands on and in the field than i was out of a classroom. i excelled at my internships, i excel at making things with my hands... give me text to read and something to interpret, make me sit in a desk and listen to a prof drone on and on and forget it, and worst of all... make me take a test on that subject and forget it! regardless of how much i studied or tried to memorize it or whatever, i never did well with tests... ask me to discuss the topic and i would be ok, testing on the subject forget it! knowing this i wish i would have realized earlier that education in that form is not for everyone. i would have saved my parents a ton of stress and money for that matter.

2. i have a musical background. i started to play the piano when i was very little. i had/have tiny hands and short fingers so this was probably not the best choice of instruments for me but what the heck. i took lessons starting when i was in 1st or 2nd or something and then all the way until 7th or 8th. while in 7th grade i took up the flute as well. i started to play with the concert band, i loved it! i then joined the marching band and by my junior and senior year i was 1st chair in both. i also played the piccolo in teh marching band, i loved that! it was so cute and little but could be so loud!

1. 4 summers ago chris and i took a working vacation to Jackson Hole WY to work on a trail restoration crew. we flew in to Jackson Hole, stayed the night in a cabin with some folks that we didn't know (we knew two of them, one is a good friend of ours and invited us to join the trip the other was her sister) the next morning we gather our gear, we prepare our gear to be given to the mules to be packed in for us and we head to the trail head to find that they are short some mules and the mules have to pack in our food and kitchen gear and they won't have room for our other gear. chris and i and the rest of the group scramble.... we tried to lighten our loads, chris took the brunt of it. we didn't have the best gear so our stuff was quite heavy... and we hit the trail. we were told the hike in was about 6 miles. that's not THAT bad or so we thought... it ended up being just a bit less than twice that.... it was straight into the Grand Teton Wilderness area. we hiked in some crazy altitude that we were NOT acclimated to. we crossed the continental divide and followed the continental divide trail for a while. in fact the trail we were restoring was part of that trail. we hiked in 11 miles in one day. i have very acute asthma, it was flared.... i had a blister on my entire heal... it was bad. but i did it! and i'm proud because i persevered and hiking with a heavy pack, in the grand teton wilderness area on the continental divide trail is something that most people ever get to do in their lifetime and i did it! defining moment in my life.

this was fun! hope my interesting things about me weren't boring....