Scattered-Day Saturday

I only have a few minutes before I run out to get groceries and then cook an early Thanksgiving dinner for my MIL and SIL, and I have very little knitting to blog about. So I'm going to consider myself tagged by mamacate and give you 85 Random Things About Me. (Okay, she only did 20, but I wrote a slightly different version of this list for a different purpose a few months ago and I'm recycling it. Sue me.)

1. I lived in one small town for the first eighteen years of my life (and in the same house for sixteen of those years).
2. I was blessed with fabulous, generous parents whom I still adore (even when they occasionally drive me crazy).
3. I have an older brother and an older sister.
4. My dad had his first heart attack on New Year's Eve when I was five or six years old (before he was forty).
5. He had his second heart attack the day before Thanksgiving when I was eight.
6. I have very vivid memories of spending that Thanksgiving with family friends (without my mom and siblings), and being absolutely miserable.
7. I am grateful every day that he is still alive, becase I never thought that he would live to be 65.
8. I taught myself to read when I was four.
9. I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book.
10. Madeleine L'Engle was (and is) one of my favorite authors.
11. I went to a sleep away YMCA camp for 2-4 weeks every summer for nine years.
12. I was a cheerleader in high school. This surprises people who meet me now.
13. I had the lead in a very bad high school production of "My Fair Lady."
14. I always thought that I would grow up to be a writer.
15. But I didn't.
16. Where I grew up, my family was considered to be financially "well-off."
17. Where I went to college, I was considered to be rather poor.
18. This gave me a lot to think about.
19. I was a radical feminist in college.
20. This worried my family.
21. I still consider myself a feminist, but I'm a little more tolerant. (Sometimes.)
22. After college, I worked in a women's shelter as part of a women's collective.
23. This was one of the hardest and most valuable experiences I have ever had.
24. I am pro-choice. But some of my friends are not. We deal.
25. I have a Master's Degree in Social Work and I currently work in a children's mental health clinic.
26. I joke that I'm not really a therapist but that I play one at work.
27. I still haven't decided what I will be when I grow up.
28. I spent two semesters living in Stockholm, Sweden while I was in college.
29. I traveled to Denmark, Norway, the former Soviet Union (Moscow & Leningrad), Germany, Hungary, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria during that time.
30. I visited Berlin a month before the Berlin wall fell, and a few months later I returned and stood on the remains of that wall.
31. But I have never been to the West Coast of the U.S.
32. I have lived in four states, all of them in New England.
33. I have only been to NYC once, even though I now live only three hours away. This needs to change soon.
34. I am smart but often lazy.
35. And I am a big-time procrastinator.
36. I hate cleaning the house.
37. I have very little patience, and a quick temper.
38. I am generally not a risk-taker. But sometimes I surprise myself.
39. I was treated for clinical depression while in my twenties.
40. I wish I had sought out treatment a few years earlier.
41. Sometimes I am easily overwhelmed by the world.
42. I am a bit shy and I am terrible at small talk.
43. But my friends would not call me quiet.
44. I cry when I am angry.
45. I have a tattoo.
46. I am 5 feet 2 inches tall, but everyone tells me I seem taller because I have long legs.
47. You know that saying, "You can never be too rich or too thin"? I disagree. With both.
48. I almost always have a stash of chocolate hidden somewhere in my house.
49. I love chocolate, potato chips, lobster rolls, clam chowder, and mashed potatoes.
50. I hate anything with caraway seeds.
51. I drink my coffee with lots of cream and sugar.
52. My husband is a vegetarian, but I like to eat meat when we eat out.
53. I met my husband through a newspaper personal ad.
54. I proposed to him a year later by placing an ad in that same paper.
55. Meeting him is the best thing that ever happened to me.
56. He never tries to change anything about me, which is an incredible gift.
57. But sometimes it inspires me to try to make changes.
58. I was the first one of my college friends to be married.
59. Everyone was surprised by this, as I think they all thought I would end up dating women. ;)
60. There were times I thought this too.
61. But life has a way of surprising you.
62. I always knew I wanted to have kids, whether I had a male or female partner.
63. My husband is a cancer survivor and there was a chance he would be infertile.
64. We got lucky and we now have two young daughters.
65. I love them more than anything.
66. I always knew that parenting would be hard.
67. It is way, way harder than I ever thought it would be.
68. I love every other minute of being a mother.
69. And I am definitely not as good a mother as I thought I would be.
70. But I'm learning that sometimes "good enough" is actually okay.
71. I love to sleep, and I need a lot of it.
72. My children are terrible sleepers.
73. The sleep deprivation of the past few years literally brought me to the verge of psychosis.
74. I am not planning to have any more children.
75 I learned to knit in college, almost 20 years ago. (ouch)
76. I bought a spinnning wheel in 1998.
77. I can't read while I knit, so I listen to a lot of books on tape.
78. I knit when I should be doing other things.
79. But I don't usually feel guilty about it.
80. It's very important to me to have close female friends. But it takes me a while to get to know people
81. So after we moved to Massachusetts a few years ago I was very lonely.
82. Recently I found a new friend who is a "kindred spirit." She knits, she lives within walking distance, and she has a daughter the same age as my almost-two-year-old. I adore her.
83. Yesterday she told me that she is probably moving away soon.
84. After she told me that I went to Panera and cried into my caramel latte.
85. I'm dealing with it a bit better today.