WARNING! WARNING! Long-winded post about absolutely nothing important ahead! Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Last week, CityStreams tagged me for a meme. I was in the final stages of getting ready for Annalie’s birthday party, so I didn’t respond to that one right away. And months ago, Comfortably Crazy tagged me for a different meme and I never did get around to doing that one. So I thought I’d try to knock them both out tonight.

Edited to add: How weird. I did not realize before I wrote this post that Jennie just happened to tag me for a very similar meme today! So I guess this first one is pulling double-duty.

First, CC’s 7 weird or random things about me…and She Likes Purple’s 6 (+1) random things you may not know about me:

1. When I was about 6 years old, I would sometimes pour dill pickle juice into a glass over ice and drink it. I did this solely because my cool 10-year-old friend Jenny did it. It didn’t taste that bad, but I might as well have just eaten a spoonful of salt and been done with it.
2. When I was 23 I flew across the Atlantic for the first time with my dear friend Erin for a two-week whirlwind tour of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. We stayed with friends of Erin’s, ate cheaply at bakeries, and recorded commentary everywhere we went on a little tape recorder. Listening to those tapes still makes us nearly wet our pants laughing.
3. I don’t like stuff in my Jell-O. I am a Jell-O purist.
4. I like climbing on things. If I’m walking down a sidewalk and come to a retaining wall, I walk on top of it. If the thing you need is in the highest kitchen cupboard, I’ll hop up on the counter and get it. When I visited the Rhode Island State Library once, and the librarian assured us that the stacks were open to the public, I headed straight for one of the spiral staircases so I could climb up it.
5. I’ve never been much of an athlete. I like soccer as long as I can play defense, but that’s about it. I think it’s because I am not very competitive. And I’m totally okay with that.
6. I love to play Centipede, but only if I can play with a trackball.
7. I used to hate apple pie. I always thought it smelled delicious, but I gagged on the texture. I wanted to like it, and would make my dad an apple pie (his favorite) for his birthday and try a piece, hoping every year that maybe my tastes had changed. Finally one year I liked it! I still can’t stand applesauce, though.

And now, CityStreams’s…uh…I don’t actually know what this meme is called. It looks like it maybe started out as a five-things list, but it got muddled. Anyway, here it is:

What were you doing ten years ago?
I was 23 years old, and working as a middle-school tutor in San Diego. Troy was halfway through a six-month deployment on the USS Mount Vernon, the first long separation of our marriage, so I was spending a lot of time emailing him and keeping our website updated with information about where he was, what he was doing, and ports the ship was visiting (it was a pre-9/11 world). It was also right about that time that I started running for the first time ever and loved it. Wow, that was ten years ago? Time flies.

What are five things on your to-do list?
Write thank-you notes with Annalie for her birthday gifts.
Read my library book before the due date.
Remember to take bracelet to Lynn’s house so we can fix it.
Send my best friend’s son Conner a very late birthday card and gift.
Send very, very, VERY late Christmas presents to about five people.

(That last one is in serious danger of moving from the to-do list to the I’m-so-far-behind-I’m-gonna-cross-this-off-and-forget-about-it list.)

What are five snacks you enjoy?
Cold apples cut into slices, cheddar cheese with Ritz crackers, popcorn with butter and garlic powder, a bowl of Cheerios with milk, and pretty much anything with sugar. Recently I made these crispy salted oatmeal white chocolate cookies and they’re heavenly—and I don’t even like white chocolate.

Name some things you would do if you were a millionaire.
Invest wisely, pay off high-interest debts, all those boring things. Donate a bunch of money to worthy causes. With whatever’s left I’d travel to visit friends and family I don’t get to see as much as I’d like (i.e., anyone who doesn’t live in Omaha). I’d buy a new living-room couch, and a king-size bed. And I’d hire someone to clean my house and fold my laundry.

Name some places you have lived.
In a trailer court in Irvington, Nebraska; the Florence/Minne Lusa neighborhood in north Omaha; Smith and Abel North Residence Halls in Lincoln, Nebraska; Camp Luther in Schuyler, Nebraska; just west of Mount Helix in La Mesa, California; the Sandy Hill neighborhood of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; near Stumpy Lake in Virginia Beach, Virginia; one block from the south edge of the ASU campus in Tempe, Arizona; our current location in Southern Maryland.

Name some bad habits you have.
Staying up well past midnight even when I have things to do and places to go the next morning. Leaving laundry in the washer and dryer for days. Not returning phone calls right away and then forgetting to call till days later. Interruping people in mid-sentence.

Name some jobs you have had.
Baby-sitter, pet-sitter, library page, assistant at a neighborhood after-school program, Imagination Crew member at Omaha Children’s Museum, assistant teacher with before- and after-school programs, summer camp counselor, Resident Assistant, middle-school AVID tutor, homemaker, stay-at-home-mom.

I’m supposed to tag some people, but I’m going to be lazy and say, if you want to play consider yourself tagged.

Recently I made a quick trip to a dollar store in my town, thinking they would have microwave popcorn in single-serving bags. They didn’t, so I decided to walk over to the large grocery store in the same shopping center. I’ve been to this particular shopping center hundreds of times in the last three years, so you can imagine how surprised I was when I rounded the corner and saw a tiny cemetery.

I don’t know how I managed to miss it all this time. I suppose I don’t shop at the Fashion Bug, which is the store it’s closest to. And I usually don’t walk in that direction from the dollar store. But still…a cemetery! Right there, in the strip mall!

There was a wrought-iron fence around the plot, and on two sides rosebushes were planted all along the fence. There were two trees growing in one corner of the square. It was a lovely, peaceful place, as cemeteries often are. I spied a gate on the other side of the fence, and it was unlocked so I let myself in.

Most of the headstones are very weathered, some of them worn almost completely smooth by time and the elements, some of them broken and almost buried under the grass. Others are still readable, and from those it’s clear that this was a family cemetery.

I wondered, as I brushed my fingers over the carved names and took photos, if any Hammett relatives ever visit to pay their respects. Or maybe when they sold the land to the developers and added the clause that the family graves had to be left intact, they felt they’d done their best to honor their ancestors and never looked back. Maybe it’s just too weird to think of your great-great-great grandfather being laid to rest in a shopping-center parking lot.

I lingered a while longer, trying to read the faded headstones, smiling at the absurdity of life. Then I put away my camera, latched the gate carefully behind me, and headed over to the grocery store.

For the whole set, go to Strip-mall cemetery - a photoset on Flickr

I have a couple of posts in my head but I have a headache. So, with apologies to Brenda for being a copycat, here are some photos of Annalie playing in the sandbox a few days ago.

These photos were taken the day she got her very first wood tick, on her tummy a couple of inches above her right leg. We were able to easily pull it off with tweezers. Annalie named the bug Tick-Tack; waved and shouted, “Good-bye, Tick-Tack!” as I dropped it in the toilet and flushed (I know you’re supposed to keep the tick in a jar of rubbing alcohol for the doctor, but I didn’t have any rubbing alcohol); and made up stories about Tick-Tack while she was taking her bath. I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t traumatized.