5 Weird Things

Nicki from Bringing Home Baby tagged me with the challenge to write 5 weird things about me. So, here goes: in no particular order:

1. My dream car. Weird part one is that I have already owned it. Part 2 is that it was broken nearly as often as it ran. Part 3 it was my first car. Part 4 I bought it with my own money that I earned babysitting (no cushy allowances in MY childhood!)when I was 14 (and I bought it in Georgia, while we were visiting my grandpa and my dad had me drive it all the way back to Michigan myself). My husband Chris says only men have dream cars. Only men love their first car (or any car). Hmph. Clearly he never met my car. It was a 1972 SuperBeetle convertible, the last year they made the super beetle. My Bug was beautiful. It wasn't dented or rusted or anything. It was a lovely Periwinkle color. Not everyone adored their box of crayola 64's so the world at large called it "purple" or "light purply-blue" but it was exactly, perfectly, periwinkle.When I was 15-almost-16 and getting ready to be the *legal* driver of my car I added magenta (hot-pink to the crayon haters) polka dots the size of paper plates and magenta rims to the wheels. There was a hole in the floorboard, so I cut the bottom out of a trash can and duct taped the trash can in place over the hole. I added a sticker "thank you for not littering" Yeah. THAT was a CAR! When I am old and no longer driving so many people around I positively ACHE to own a periwinkle bug with magenta dots (oh! You can use poster paints and put little holiday touches on the dots! You can turn them into ornaments at Christmas, eggs at Easter, pink pumpkins for Halloween! cakes on your birthday! ask me how I know).

#2. Peanutbutter sandwiches. Its not the peanutbutter part, its the OTHER slice of bread. Lovingly slathered in Hellman's Mayo. MMMMMMM. But I know this is weird. I know there ARE other pb-&-mayo eaters, but we are a rare breed. The rest of the world doesn't simply "not eat that" they are horrified by the thought. Tell a non-eater about it and they will feel sick for days. I know this. So when I married I gave them up. The non-eaters would never ever kiss someone who ate a pb-&-mayo sandwich. A year and a half into my marriage Chris was rummaging in the kitchen late at night. I was in bed, but barely. Hmmm, a snack, I wonder if it's anything good? I went to investigate. He looked SO guilty when I saw him. "what's that?" I asked. "Uhh peanutbutter?" he said. And then I saw it- pb and WHITE OOZE! No wonder I loved this man! He's an eater too! And we have bred MORE eaters :)

#3. my hair. I started greying in my teens. I covered it with dye in many interesting shades. If you dye your hair plum the greys stay a rosy pink. I'm going natural. 90% of my greys are concentrated in a cluster in the front, on the side on which I part my hair. I look like EVERY Evil Villianess Disney has penned. Just call me Cruella.

#4. The thing with pets. Oh sure LOTS of people have pets. I grew up, and still live, right outside Detroit. Not right outside meaning 20 minutes away, right outside meaning super-easy walking distance some years, literally within a stones-throw other years. Not remotely rural. But we had pets. My parents had a dog. They let us have a goldfish. A 5-cent feeder fish. Our fish NEVER died. They grew and grew until they looked like Koi and then the pet store wouldn't take them "uhh orange carp? no thanks" and we had to free them in the lake. But we liked animals. We rescued baby birds (one KMart- all he said was "cheap cheap"- kept flying back to us). We resued 4 baby squirrels when their mother became roadkill. Then we had pet ducks. Ritz and Keebler (they make good quackers dontcha know), Chitter, and then Dinner (everyone loves a duck Dinner). There were frogs, turtles, hampsters (beware: they eat their young and if they get full they just kill a few and stuff them under the newspaper where they turn green), the usual suspects. After my parents divorced my mom let us get a cat (we had one named Peeve, our own pet peeve he was so cute). But then I was on my own. I had a box turtle, I got him a 90 gallon tank. Then I thought, why not add a friend? Turtles stay on the ground so I added a gecko to the top half of the tank (adorable cartoonish lizards that stick to glass, walls, ceilings, etc). The gecko kept hitching rides on the turtles shell though and making the turtle neurotic. So we got another tank. And started adding more geckoes. And breeding them. It was fun and I was GOOD at it. I have had a hedgehog, toads, tadpoles, skinks, etc too. Currently we have a dog, cat, Dust the bunny, a couple hermit crabs, tadpoles (Sue NaFrog and Ben A. Tadpole), frogs, fish, bearded dragon, and a leopard gecko.

#5. My tattoo. You can't tell by my flashy car, but I was fairly quiet and shy in my youth. I wasn't a stand-out gal at all. So its a little weird that I have a tattoo at all. But I was 19, it was Good Friday, and I spent it at a trailer park tattoo party (of course!). I was persuaded to get a tatt (see blog title). But what to get? I decided on a gecko. MY gecko. I went home and got a picture of my little momma gecko, the one who laid an impossible number of healthy egg clutches. Inside my hip bone, in a space that could be covered even by many bikinis, I got my tatt. I was 90lbs then, so it was cute. Baby #1 added the fat that made it no longer fun to show off the tatt. Baby #2 added a stretch mark through the tail. Baby #3 added a c/section scar right through the head. So now I have a Frankengecko. Sigh.

I'm tagging Squid.