101 Things About Me

I'm more than a little late with a list like this, but I've only been blogging about three weeks now and I'm still catching up..

1. Growing up, I was always called by both my first & middle names - Mom still does. .
2. I lost my Dad in June of 2003 - it still hurts.
3. I have coffee every morning with Mom who now lives a block away.
4. The rest of the day I drink caffeine free diet Coke.
5. I take my Mom to bingo at the Sr. Center on Tuesday afternoons.
6. I love my DH.
7. I've lived in this house with my DH since 1985 - I hate tri-levels.
8. My left knee hurts when I climb stairs - arthritis, I guess, hence the dislike of tri-levels.
9. My hair is "naturally frosted. "
10. I have blue eyes that turn green or grey sometimes depending upon my mood.
11. I've been told that my eyes "shoot sparks" when I'm mad.
12. I don't get mad very often.
13. I wear tri-focals.
14. I was carded at age 42 - the clerk honestly didn't think that I was 21. WHOOPIE!!
15. I had my ears pierced before I started teaching so I could wear earrings and look older than my students.
16. It didn't work.
17. I haven't used makeup in over 20 years.
18. I live in blue jeans - Mom wonders if I'll ever grow up enough to dress right.
19. I like extra large t-shirts with pictures on the front.
20. My favorites are my half-dozen Grateful Dead T's.
21. I love cats - a house without a cat or two is not a home.
22. I'm owned by three cats - Moki, Tiger & Callie.
23. I had dogs growing up and loved them too.
24. I hate doing housework - it shows.
25. I like to cook ethnic dishes - Thai, Lebanese, Indian especially.
26. I mostly cook from scratch as it's cheaper than prepared food at the grocery store.
27. I drive a 1988 Dodge Colt that has just over 58,000 miles on it.
28. I hate to drive.
29. I grew up on a farm where my parents lived for 62 years.
30. I had a pet cow - Crazy Quilt.
31. I've lived in Michigan all my life.
32. With the exception of my maternal Grandmother's family, all my ancestors have lived within 45 miles of where I'm sitting now since the late 1830's.
33. I was ranked 3rd in my high school graduating class, but they wouldn't count an A in an elective class.
34. I was the only girl in my Jr. class not nominated for the Homecoming Court.
35. I was also the only girl who took the drafting class - and had to fight to get into it because I was a girl.
36. My college major was history, my minor was art.
37. I graduated with honors from the history department.
38. I did most of my studies in English & Chinese history.
39. My senior research project was on 4000 years of Chinese land tenure & land reform.
40. I designed Printed Circuit Boards for 25 years
41. My job was sent to China 2½ years ago.
42. In another 9 months, I'll qualify for early Social Security, but I'd rather be designing PCBs.
43. I wrote pages and pages of ISO 9000 documentation in my last two jobs.
44. I love rhubarb pie and / or cobbler - I have a 30 foot row of rhubarb in the garden.
45. I grow tomatoes, basil & green beans every year in the garden.
46. I got hooked on genealogy about five years ago.
47. I have a genealogy website that has had close to 850,000 visitors in the last four years.
48. One of my ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
49. I'm mostly English with a touch of German.
50. I've been searching for the families of two of my great great grandfathers for over 5 years now.
51. I learned to knit when I was 8, crocheting at 19, counted cross-stitch at 33 and quilting at 39.
52. I'm a member of the K4 group (Krazy Kool Knitters & Krocheters) at the local Senior Center. We make hats, scarves & afghans for charities.
53. I've made over 50 hats, a dozen scarves & 5 afghans for charity since the group started in October 2004.
54. I've worked in the yarn department at Hudson's and in a quilt shop.
55. I rarely took home a paycheck from the quilt shop because I'd take my wages in fabric & books.
56. I have over 30 years of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine (my mother-in-law gave me the first 10 or 12 years).
57. I made my first quilt blocks in 1958 - 3" Baby Bowties.
58. I made my first quilt in 1982 - a True Lover's Knot, an 18" block.
59. I've made 52 quilts so far, all but two or three hand pieced & hand quilted.
60. I have at least another dozen quilts in various stages of completion.
61. My fabric stash is 95% reproduction fabrics from the 1800s or early 1900s.
62. My stash fills two large cupboards, a four large drawers, a bookcase, three under-the-bed containers and a laundry basket.
63. I love to find a photo of an antique quilt and reproduce it as closely as possible.
64. I browse the antique quilts at Ebay and save photos of the ones I like - my own private quilt "magazine".
65. I like teddy bears and have made a dozen or so.
66. When we moved to this house in 1985, my yarn stash filled two of the 6 cubic foot garment boxes, plus a couple book & record size boxes - it's bigger now.
67. I have probably two dozen knitted vests of one style or another.
68. I've knitted over a dozen circular yoke fair-isle & 7 or 8 aran isle style sweaters.
69. I've lost track of how many other sweaters & afghans I've knit, but it's probably between 200 & 300.
70. I like knitting with acrylic yarns that don't get messed up in the wash.
71. I don't have the patience to fool around with laundrying wool.
72. I have McCall Needlework magazines dating back to 1950 when I learned to knit.
73. I have stacks of other knitting magazines collected over the years and never throw any out.
74. I love to read - science fiction, mysteries, historicals, political novels - and go to the library every week or two.
75. I have 15 books out of the library at the moment.
76. I have books or magazines on most horizontal surfaces.
77. I could read before I went to kindergarten.
78. My spelling used to stink, but it's getting better thanks to spell checker!
79. I can knit and crochet without watching, so I do it while I'm reading.
80. I watch Desperate Housewives, three versions of Law & Order, Medium, House, NCIS, West Wing, Lost, ER, Without a Trace, & JAG - I knit or quilt through all of them.
81. I love reading knitting blogs.
82. I built my first computer - an OSI - in 1976 or 1977.
83. I helped run Aardvark Technical Services, a software house for the OSI computer until 1981.
84. I've programmed in four flavors of BASIC.
85. I taught myself HTML to develop my genealogy website.
86. I hand code all my pages - saving Word or Excel in HTML takes too much room.
87. I enjoy transcribing records (births, marriages, cemeteries, etc. ) for my site.
88. I type pretty fast with all the practice I've had doing the above, including the number keys.
89. I can't sing.
90. I took belly dancing lessons.
91. I love opals - my engagement ring is an opal.
92. I'm not too fond of diamonds.
93. I have 30+ pair of gold hoop earrings - all different.
94. I like going to garage sales.
95. I don't like shopping at malls.
96. I bought 4 skirts, 5 tops, and a pair of shoes for under $25 total at garage sales last summer.
97. I have 5 pairs of shoes and 2 pairs of 30 year old dress boots.
98. I'm only "dangerous" to the bank account when I'm in a yarn or quilt shop (or in front of the earring rack at the dollar store).
99. My grandmother once told me that I could hang onto a dollar "until George yelled for help. " I took it as a compliment.
100. When I visit my daughter in California, she takes me to this wonderful store that carries 100% cotton fabric for $1. 97 a yard. I fly home with a lot of fabric.
101. I had trouble limiting this list to 101 things.