Seven Things About Me

I was tagged by a few different friends several weeks ago, but I've been busy and haven't had the chance to respond. So, after much thinking, I've come up with seven things about me.

1. I love to take road trips and have driven cross country on my own, or with our daughter, several times (DH prefers to fly and meet us at the destination!). The love of road trips comes from my childhood. My dad had a job where he traveled a lot, and he saved big trips for the summer and my mom and I would go along. I got to see a lot of the country that way, and with those trips, combined with ones I've taken in my adult years (some flying and some train travel, too),I've been in 45 of the 50 states, a few different places in Canada, a few different places in Mexico, and on the island of Guadalupe in the Caribbean.

2. Most people love warm sunny days. I'm the opposite and love snow, dark rainy days, the night time (I'm a real night owl!!), and a real favorite is the Atlantic Ocean in winter on cold windy days (and if it's snowing, that's even better!). Unfortunately, I now live in a place where it's warm and sunny almost all year long :(

3. Only children "runs" in our family :) My parents were both only children, and so was my maternal grandmother. I'm an "only", and I only had one child, a daughter, so she's the 4th generation only child (all females) on my mom's side of the family. If you look at pictures taken of all four of us when we were around two years old, all four are almost identical.

3. I've had several pets throughout the years: an alligator, several gold fish, two turtles, a parakeet, a horse, six dogs, and 42 cats (I won't even begin to explain, lol).

4. Our daughter and I are huge NBA fans. Each year we get "League Pass" so we can follow all our favorite teams and will often watch two to four games a night. Great time for getting caught up on my needlework and crocheting :) Although we've been Spurs fans living here in Texas for awhile, our favorite player has been Pau Gasol for years and we've followed his career (Grizzlies, the summer games in Spain, and now with the Lakers). It's fun to see him with a great team :) I also see problems for us in deciding who to cheer for come play-off time.

5. My first (late) husband and I owned a 36-foot wooden Chesapeake Bay style Skipjack sailboat. We bought it on our first anniversary when we found it at a marina on our vacation in Connecticut, and the man who built it wanted to sell it ~ and quickly. It needed lots of work so the price was great. It was about a 5-hour drive from where we lived, but we had lots of fun going up every weekend working on it and getting it ready to sail home. That ended up to be an exciting trip, since we ended up in the tail-end of a hurricane that had just gone through "unexpectedly" by Montauk Point, around the Long Island Sound and Atlantic Ocean area. Years later after he passed away and I remarried, I donated the boat (which was in need of work once again), to the Clearwater Association. They invited me to come and christen the boat with a bottle of champagne when they had finished the work and renamed it, which was a lot of fun.

6. I learned to sew and bake from my paternal grandmother, crochet from my maternal grandmother, and knit and do needlepoint and stamped cross stitch from my mom. I still enjoy all those, along with quilting and counted cross stitch that I learned on my own.

7. We homeschooled our daughter from third grade through high school graduation, and those were some of the best years ever! We really had a great time together. She graduated summa cum laude from college last May, is teaching part time, and is taking more classes after enrolling in grad school last fall.