Aspects of Oddity

Emily has asked me to tell share with the world (or, rather, the 5-10 people who occasionally visit us here) 5 strange things about myself. Because of my deep and enduring love for Emily, here we go:

1- I have some strange habits regarding words. One is that I like to say them backwards. This started in middle school, when I was on the softball team and we had to run laps, which I found torturous. To take my mind off of the situation at hand, I began singing songs in my head, but saying the words backwards. Required more concentration, I guess. I've continued the habit over the years, but now with children and a foreign language taking up so much space, I don't do it so much anymore. Also, when I learned to count syllables in elementary school, I found myself doing it compulsively, with many words I encountered. I still do this sometimes. I'll count syllables of a word or phrase (in my head), and sometimes I even (this is really odd) count them on my fingers over and over until I reach a multiple of 5.

2- I love to bake chocolate chip cookies. I mean, I really love to do this. I just enjoy the process of putting it all together, and eating the batter is great, too. If I had a Friday night all to myself, a book and butter, sugar, flour, etc. is all I would need for a great time.

3- Nothing gets me going on a run like listening to All Things Considered on NPR. (I found that in my adulthood I had to take up running so that I didn't get enormously fat from all of those chocolate chip cookies.) I've tried those cool music programs where you can download music with certain beats per minutes to get you revved up, but it doesn't work for me. But give me a good report on Bird Flu in Asia and I can go for miles.

4- I always think the plane is going to crash. I know all of the statistics about driving vs. flying, but when we're boarding a plane, it always seems very likely and logical to me that this will be the one to go down. This is not a good mindset to have when you're living overseas, and thankfully I don't get panicky about it at this point. I really do trust God with it.

5- I love the way my children's breath smells. This may be common for mothers, I don't know. But I think their breath is just the essence of their sweetness (one recent exception was when a well-meaning lady at church gave Asa some smelly squid snacks. I couldn't get his teeth brushed fast enough!). I imagine I won't feel this way about their breath when they're teenagers:). In addition, I felt similarly about our dog Bonsai (but not to the same extent, and not when he had eaten something disgusting, which was fairly frequently). This was really repulsive to Tim.

If I had more time, I would mention my longstanding love for Randy Travis, or the fact that I've had the same stick of deodorant since we came to Thailand almost two years ago, but I guess that's it for now!

Keri and Cousin Amy, you want to give it a try?