Thirty One

1.  I don't have a favorite color.  My favorite color to wear is red.  But it has to be the right red, or I will look like death warmed over in it.
2.  I have brown hair and brown eyes.
3.  My brother's wrestling coach used to call me "M&M Eyes". 
4.  I asked my husband out on our first date.  Sort of.  It was the first week of August 1994, and I was 17.
5.  We went to a concert: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.  Or maybe not Young.  I'm not sure.
6.  Neither of us was really sure that it was a date at the time, but looking back it definitely was.
7.  I drink a lot of tea.  This is our tea drawer:

8.  My favorite teas are Constant Comment and Earl Gray.  Yum.
9.  I also like this tea a lot.  I bought it in Korea and I have no idea what it is:

10.  Before I had kids I was a morning person.  Now I sleep as late as I can.
11.  I miss the quiet of the early morning, the simple thrill of being the only person in the house who is awake.
12.  When I cannot fall asleep at night I imagine myself walking or driving through cities I have visited or lived in, trying to remember the proper streets to take in order to reach a favorite coffee shop, book store, or beach.  It works every time.
13.  The hardest trade-off for living close by our families was leaving the ocean. 
14.  I think that fog is one of the most interesting aspects of living near the ocean.  When the fog pours in off the water on late-winter mornings, the whole world goes milky white and everything familiar disappears.  Sometimes you can even see individual water droplets float by your face, but you can't see your fingers at the end of your outstretched arm.  That is cool. 
15.  I used to work in daycare and I hated it.
16.  I currently work in daycare and I (mostly) love it.
17.  It would be the perfect job if I didn't also have to worry about housework, cooking meals, and letting the dogs in and out 300 times a day.
18.  I wrote my first book when I was in grade school; it was about my teddy bear, who currently resides next to my son's pillow on his bed.
19.  I still wind him up and listen to the plinking tune of Teddy Bears' Picnic when I am sad.
20.  Someday I hope to write my second book.
21.  I am hoping I will have something more universally interesting to write about than my teddy bear.
22.  Yesterday I found two old, junky paintings in the basement and let our kids finger paint over them with acrylics.  I hung them in the living room when they were dry, and I secretly think they are better than any of the works I produced when I went to art school. 
23.  Watching them paint inspired me to try it again, and I have been sketching all morning. 
24.  When I went to college I spent far too much time worrying about the cost of my art supplies and far too little time worrying about my subject matter and technique.  I had all of the time in the world to paint back then; now I have the money for good supplies and lots of ideas, but very little time to paint.
21.  I once dropped a class after two weeks because I hated the way the professor wore her glasses on the end of her nose, such that she was always looking over her glasses and down her nose at us.  My last boss wore hers the same way and I tolerated her for a year and a half.
22.  When I was little there was a field of ferns behind our house that were taller than me, and I used to like to sit beneath them and pretend I was living in the jungle.  They aren't there anymore, but I can still close my eyes and remember what it felt like to sit there and listen to the woods around me, watching the fern fronds sway and lift in the breeze.
23.  One day I hope to visit an actual jungle where the ferns seem just as tall as they did then.
24.  I want to see the world, but if I don't start soon I fear that I will never get beyond New York.
25.  I don't like breakfast foods for breakfast.  I prefer soup, a salad, or leftovers from dinner.  I also think that breakfast foods make a perfectly acceptable dinner.
26.   Yesterday I spent an hour looking at pictures of birds on flickr.  It never got boring for me.  Really.
27.  I want to build a tree house in our backyard for me our kids.  I think every child should have one.
28.  When we do build the tree house I will try really hard not to cringe every time they use the ladder or lean out of the window.  I will also try not to hog the tree house the way I hog the building blocks.
29.  When people ask me how old I am I often have to stop and think about it, because I still feel like much the same person I was when I was twelve, or eighteen, or 21, or 25.  I wonder if everyone feels that way to some extent, like they are still their 5, 7, 15, and 23 year old selves just quished into an older, perhaps wiser body?
30.  The sound of Harry and Emma laughing together is one of my two favorite sounds in the world.  The other is the door opening at the end of the day, which means Brendan is home and we are all together, the four of us.
31.  Today is my birthday.  I am thirty one.