100 Things About Me!

I've seen this on a few blogs that I have randomly visited over the last few months and have wanted to do it for some time but then just got busy with other things.  I'm starting to think that I just need to jump in and get as much done as I can in one sitting and keep coming back to until I get it done.  So here goes...

1. I am mommy to the most amazing little boy on Earth!
2. I struggled for a long time about being a single parent.  It was a very tough decision to make to parent alone.  I'm so glad I fought through my fears and views on what constitutes a family.
3. I teach mathematics, computer, careers and science to middle/high school aged students.
4. I am the 2nd of four children and the only girl in my family.
5. I will be starting my 14th year of teaching this fall.
6. My summer job in highschool and college was lifeguarding at our local outdoor swimming pool.
7. My middle name, Joanne, was my grandmother's (dad's mom) first name.
8. I am a first generation Canadian.  Both my parents immigrated from Holland to Canada in 1954.
9. My favorite food is ginger beef with chow mein noodles.
10. I have just started buying "Stampin' Up" stuff and making my own cards.  I'm sure this will become another of my many addictions!
11. My favorite show as a child was "Little House on the Prairie".
12. The novel book I ever read was "Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing".
13. I love to crossstich but never find much time to do it.
14. I scrapbook although I am way behind.
15. I cannot dance... AT ALL!
16. I took three years of guitar lessons when I was in grade 4, 5 and 6.
17. I was in girlguides from grade 1 through grade 10.
18. I've owned 4 vehicles since I was 17 years old... three of the 4 have been Chevy Cavaliers.
19. When we were teenagers, our family started skiing and for a lot of years I managed to get about 40 days of skiing in per season. 
20. I have not been skiing now for over 8 years!
21. When I was in highschool, a local party store phoned me up and asked me if I wanted a job as one of those clowns that go around to kids birhtday parties.  I had never applied for a job with them!
22. My dad is a twin!
23. My grandma (dad's mom) would be older then my great-grandma (mom's grandma) if they were still living.
24. I have kept a journal since I was in Junior High school and I still have them all packed away in my basement to this day.
25. I love sappy movies with the overcoming and coming to accept one self and history type of story line.
26. I bought my first home 3 years ago.  In the years before that while I was going to University and teaching in Kelowna, I put about the equal to amount of my mortgage for that same house into rent.
27. I would love to go on a cruise some day!
28. Toilet paper being put on the rolly thing so that it comes over the top drives me insane.  I've actually changed other people's toilet paper rolls in their house a time or two (but I had had a couple of beers).
29. I coach basketball at my school.  I have coached basketball for 13 years now.  Always girls teams but various levels.
30. I dream of buying a little motorhome and loading it up at at the end of June and spending the summer months on the road with Mikey - driving around and meeting all our online friends and seeing all there is to see.
31. When I first started my education degree I had planned to specialize in Special Education but changed my mind mid-way through and just went for a general education degree.
32. I was on  "academic probation" after my first semester of University.  I was given one semester to get my marks back up to an "acceptable level" or they were going to give my spot to someone who could use it!  This was a shock for me as I had been a decent student in highschool.
33. I would like to some day run my own little web design side business from home.  This would require me to get some training though so I'm thinking its a ways down the road.
34. I love to nap.  I could take a one hour nap everyday and my life would be heaven.
35. I tend towards perfectionism with a lot of my work-related things.  This sometimes gets me trouble as I also tend towards putting things off if I can not get them done the level that I desire them done.
36. I am usually really good at starting things but then fizzle out as I go along and don't always do a great job of finishing the things that I start.
37. I don't like marking!
38. My favorite decorating color is hunter green.
39. When I did my room when I moved in to this house, I went away from the bold colors of the rest of my house and went for pale greens, blues and mustards.  I love it but it is very different from the rest of my house.
40. I grew up on a farm and loved riding my motor bike around the farm as a child.
41. I am a reality TV addict.  I love pretty much any reality TV show but cannot get in to "The Amazing Race" ever.
42. When I was in university and working in Kelowna, I hardly ever watched TV.  I never had cable hooked up.  I started watching more TV right after I adopted Mikey and started spending more time on the couch for things like cuddling and bottle feeding and then when he was down just becuase of total exhaustion.  This happened to coincide with the first season of Survivor and I was hooked.
43. I would never go on any reality TV show because I'm afraid I would lose it and start beating on someone!
44. I love the show "Extreme Home Makeover" and I sit on my couch and bawl for almost every single show.
45. The only non-reality TV show that I enjoy watching is "Seventh Heaven".  I watch old reruns of it all the time!
46. When I started my teaching degree, I intended to go into Special Education.  As I went through school, I decided I would like to teach primary school (grade 1, 2 or 3).  I ended up teaching junior and senior high.  Now my dream job would be teaching only grades 5 through 9 although sometimes I think it might be nice to go down to grade 2, 3 or 4.
47. I love buying cute little outfits for Mikey!
48. One night close to the end of my grade 12 summer, a group of us decided to jump the fence at the local pool and go for an illegal midnight swim.  We got caught by the police because someone phoned in a noise complaint.  3 of the group that got caught, including me, were lifeguards from the pool.  Oppps!
49. I hate putting laundry away.  Most of the time, I have at least a couple of loads of clean laundry sitting on my spare room bed waiting for me to put it away.
50. I own a treadmill and hardly ever use it.  I sometimes get in to it and use it for a stretch of time and then break the routine and it sits doing nothing again until the next urge hits me.  An urge needs to hit me soon!
51. Everything that I've learned about computers is self-taught.  I have never taken any formal training in computers and yet have some how ended up teaching computers right through to the grade 12 level!
52. My first experience with online discussion groups and chats was when I was suffering from depression some years back.  I found a great support site that really helped me to cope at that time.  That site has since been bought out by a larger corporation and was never the same again.
53. If I won a whole bunch of money, I would begin homeschooling Mikey and hit the road for a couple of years and show him the world and go and meet everyone that I want to meet in real life.  Then I would come back here, buy a house and adopt more children or provide respite and/or foster care.
54. I would love to take courses and learn more about adaptive technology.  There is so much great stuff out there!  If I ever did my masters degree, I think this is where I would like to specialize.
55. I have no desire to ever go through pregnancy or childbirth.  Even if I met someone and married him, I think I would be perfectly content to look at adopting more children rather then doing the childbirth thing.  I have a bit of an irrational fear about the pain of it all!
56. My favorite numbers have always been 2 and 5... there is just something about the way the numbers look!
57. I ordered a really great, simple red dress for my high school graduation and it never came in so I had to go find something off the rack at the last minute.  I ended up wearing a butt-ugly very frilly, poofy-from-hell light purple dress that dipped way too low for my comfort level!  To this day the whole thing still horrifies me!
58. I had an outit that had a shirt with shepards and sheep on it and then a green vest and big arsed bell bottom pants that my mother used to make me wear when I was about 6 years old.  I can still remember spending hours fighting with her about wearing that outfit!
59. I could be a candidate for TLC's show "What Not to Wear" although I'm pretty sure that the hosts would not be able to convince me that stlye is more important than comfort!
60. I drink a ton of diet coke.  I go through close to one 2 liter bottle of it everyday.  I need to stop!
61. I used to drink a ton of beer.  I don't even want to write how much.  I believe that it was the classic "self-medicating" that you hear so much about as I never needed to after I treated my depression.
62. I am hoping to do a major overhaul of my house next spring.  Depending on the quotes I get, I will for put in new windows, reside, redo the roof, redo the entire yard and put some kind of deck out back.  I would like to put an extension on make a larger bathroom with a nice big tub and a larger master bedroom.  We will see what the costs are and how much money I can secure to do it all!
63. My mom is a really good golfer.  She wins a lot of local tournaments.  I hate golf and can probably hit the ball as many times in one hole as she hits on the entire course.
64. I live a half mile from the farm that I grew up on.  I'm right on the edge of town and if I look out my front window, I can very clearly see that farm.
65. I teach in the same school that I attended for grades 1 through 12.  When I started teaching here, the grade 12 students I taught were the same students that were in Kindergarten when I graduated from the school.
66. I had a big helmet looking perm when I was in highschool.  It was frizzy and did look exactly like a big motorcycle helmet except the color!
67. The first time I ever died my hair was when I was 29 years old and I did it just for kicks.  I did not and still do not have grey hair.  My mom is just starting to get grey hair now.
68. I cried when my youngest brother was born because he was a boy.  I was 8 and desperately wanted a sister.  I asked if there were anyway we could trade him in for a girl.
69. At one point in my teaching career, I was sure that I would some day teach overseas.  I do not think that will happen anymore. 
70. I used to collect little sayings and quotes and poems and keep them all in a box.  I still have the box and still pull the stuff I collected out.  The stuff in there and my reaction to it though really does tell me how much I've changed over time as a lot of it doesn't touch me the way it used to.
71. If I could turn my life back and make changes to it, I know that I could save myself and others around me a lot of pain and suffering but I would choose not to change a thing as I believe that whatever I changed would have a direct impact on where I am today.  I believe that everything happens for a reason.
72. I went to University in a town that is only an hour away from where I grew up.  It was a small univeristy (only about 3000 people) but still twice the size as the town that I grew up in.
73. I wear granny underwear!  Okay... so I'm running short on ideas!
74. I worked in an alternative education classroom for a couple of years in Kelowna.  The program was based on the concept of student directed learning and learning beyond the confines of a classroom.  We spent 3.5 weeks on the road with a group of about 20 students the last year I was in the program.  It was an experience!
75. I love to laugh!  My sense of humor is pretty dry and sarcastic.
76. In my last years of highschool and first year of college, I read my horoscope every day. I would even buy those little scroll things that had your horoscope written on them for each day of the month and post them on my bulliten board.
77. I would like to learn some woodworking skills.  I'm scheduled to teach a class on it this year and I'm figuring that will motivate me to learn as that is always what it seems to take for me to learn something new.
78. I was fascinaed with the idea of "Whole Language" when I was in University.  It was the going philosophy.  I still am fascinated with the way philosphies in education come and go.
79. I tend to do things in spurts... I will get really motivated, get a lot done and then move on to something else and ignore whatever it was I was just doing.  My struggle in life is to find balance and not let things get out of hand in regards to not getting things done.
80. I am a pretty cautious person and do not like to take risks but have a particularly hard time with physical risks.  It takes me a long time to pick up physical skills.
81. I would like to someday write a novel - probably about someone overcoming some struggle in their life. 
82. I was born in 1969.  For a while I used 69 in as part of my username for instant messaging programs but got way too many messages from slimey men who interpreted the 69 differently from what I did!
83. I love going to a bookstore all by myself and browsing through books for hours.
84. I love going to office supply stores and looking through all the stuff in them.  I would perfer this to shopping for clothes or shoes anyday!
85. I have never had my nails professionally done... and I'm thinking I never will!
86. I hardly ever wear make-up.
87. Contrary to what Rhonda thinks, I do wash my hair regularly.  LOL
88. We had a closet full of board games growing up that we would often play.  I love board games and am so sad sometimes that video games and computers have taken the place of them in so many ways.
89. We used to spend almost every Sunday afternoon at my grandparents house.  She lived an hour away and we would pile in the car and go there.  My dads six other brothers, his sister, their spouses and all their children would go there too.  Things were busy, crazy and wonderful there.
90. I took a couple of philosphy courses in University and I really loved them although I didn't really see a purpose for them other than amusement.  One of the ones that I really liked was the philosophy of mind.  Interesting stuff!
91. My least favorite course that I ever took was Astromony in university.  It was a very hard course to stay awake in.
92. I live in Alberta, Canada.  I've lived in this area all my life except for 6 years that I taught in British Columbia.
93. I enjoy going to live theatre but do not get the opportunity very often.
94. People tell me that I'm a good listener.  I never feel like I know what to say so I just listen.
95. I like McDonalds cheeseburgers.  I enjoy going there almost as much as Mikey.
96. I love taking long hot baths and talking on the phone with friends while I'm doing it.
97. I hate the smell of coffee.  In fact, I hate it so much that I've never actually tasted coffee because I gag when the smell gets that close to my nose!
98. I hate having my picture taken!
99. I have smoked twice in my life and I have never done drugs.  I was probably too busy drinking too much!
100. I have asthma although it is very controlled now.  When I was young, I spent about 10 days a year in the hospital because of it.

Okay... I'm done :).  I had almost forgotten that I started this as it had fallen off the bottom of my front page on my blog.  I moved it back to the top in case anyone was interested in reading the rest of the stuff. I can't believe how hard it was to come up with the one hundred things!

Comments

[Gwen]

Oh I love this idea! I haven't seen it before but I think I will have to do it too! I need to finish my adoption story first though. After that I have two more adoption stories to write but I don't feel I have to do them right away! LOL!!! More than you needed to know! HAHA! Anyway, it's great to read tidbits of your life!

[Katrina]

I love these! I am very picky about my toilet roll too! LOL, and I find most people do it the other way (coming from the top instead of behind) and it drives me nuts! LOL I frequently change it at my parent's house. LOL

[Katrina]

I love board games but can never find anyone to play with me! LOL. If you ever come down this way, you should come over for a board game party! :)

[Lisa]

Hey Mon, I enjoyed reading your list :) I am glad you got the phone tub chats in there LOL..cause I was going to add it for you if I didn't see it!
lol
Too bad the sheep outfit doesn't still fit ;)

[Julana]

My husband's background is also Dutch. Immigrated to Chicago in 1850's, I think. Both sides.

[Tara Marie]

I'm so glad you did this because I so enjoyed reading and learning more about you!

[Monica]

Tara Marie: I loved writing it... even though it seemed to take me forever. Afterwards, I went and read other people's and I was thinking that I missed a whole bunch of stuff. But I also think what you choose to put up is a reflection of who you are as well :).

Julana - Wow... that seems to me like a long time back to come to this part of the world. Could you imagine what it would have been like to just pick up and go at a time where there was no way to really know where you are going. Our world has changed so much and it is just overwhelming to think of what it would have been like a short 150 years ago! I've enjoyed reading people's responses to this because you start to see what you have in common with other people.