Lovely lovely holiday

This was probably the best Christmas/bday season I've ever had. It was just lovely from start to finish in spite of being terribly, horribly busy and the sadness of Chris' dad and Melissa's mom just passing. All-in-all, we gave the kids great stuff they really love and Chris totally absolutely outdid himself with my prezzies. :) Plus, the bday prezzies were on the hot tip, so everything is hunky dory in my life.

However, the other day I askidentally did the FB thing which is something I deeply resisted but felt curious about and finally acquiesced to, all of which has left me scratching my head over the shameless self-promotion of brother dear. 72 friends, hellow!?!? You are just friending everyone apparently. For shame. Ray, I hate to say it, but....you've become an FB ho. You need to find out what is happening with your book, after all moving to 2nd shift was about "writing" not "FB-ing." And no I am not jealous that I don't have mad hours to play and make friends on FB. I am just too busy in my quaint little life anyway. So nyah. ;)

What I won't read

Some co-workers and I took one of our Chinese suppliers out to lunch a couple weeks ago. I work with a Project Engineer who is drier than sawdust, and of course he accompanied us which frankly worried me from a conversation standpoint. His idea of a good story is how his sandal squeaked, and he thought it was a kitten. Yeah, that is one of his rather more involved stories and takes him at least five minutes every time he tells it.

So we are at lunch, and he begins telling this involved story about a comic book he read where Superman crash landed in Russia during Stalin's reign and became a proponent of Soviet Communism and the Marxist Party et al. He's sitting there telling us this - and why I haven't a clue except maybe the presence of a Chinese national who lives in a Communist country spurred his recollections - when finally I couldn't take it anymore. You know my political views; I burst out and said, "Well, I simply couldn't read a book like that-" and my co-worker said, "Why, because it has pictures?"

Har-HAR! I laughed really hard at that one. Sometimes even simple people can stumble into a really, really good joke. But now you know everyone, don't get me any books with pictures. ;)

We're all weirdos

Somehow last night we got onto the subject of weird, random things we do in our own mind that actually drive us nuts and make us feel like we're bizzare, crazy or just plain obssessed.

It started with Grace talking about writing, and it reminded me of when I was a little kid I used to write - as a story - everything that other people said and did. For instance, if we were sitting having a conversation, in my mind I'd be writing '"I just don't know," John said and turned to look out the window.' I did this constantly, almost obssessively, and I felt so strange for doing it that I eventually confessed with tears to my Uncle Brian that I thought I was crazy.

We all laughed, and Chris said he used to work for a company where he would have to count plants with a clicker. So, for hours during a certain part of the year he'd walk up and down rows clicking, clicking, clicking. Well, soon he began counting the clicks. Next thing he knew, he was counting everything - the number of signs on the side of the road, the number of times someone blinked, the number of times someone said "um...." until finally he thought he would go crazy. Luckily he was saved by a career switch and the counting stopped.

So Grace pipes up and says when she is in a car, every time she goes by a sign she clicks her teeth and every time she clicks her teeth it means the sign disappears, no longer obscuring her view of nature. Like, wow.

And all this talk just got me thinking, what kind of weird, random things do you do in your mind?

Trivia or not?

There's this book that says you are truly your best when you focus on your strengths (and not focus on trying to eradicate your weaknesses), and it offers a super-extensive on-line questionnaire to help determine which of the 35-plus personality traits are your strengths and goes into something like 250 sub-categories of the strengths. So, you take this quiz, and at the end it spits out your strengths, and you are supposed to be thrilled. I wasn't.

One of the things it said I excel at is collecting things. What!?!?! Me, collect things? I think collectibles are the biggest waste of money, and collectibles usually look really stupid, so where the heck do you put all the crap while it is supposedly accumulating value? I would never collect things! Ever!

But then when I started reading about this particular trait it said that some people don't collect things, they collect knowledge or books or quotes. Hm, I said. Perhaps this is me after all. Check, check, check, I do all three.

So, I've had to get real with myself. I never considered myself a trivia buff. Trivia bores me, I would always say. And yet I find myself constantly throwing out "interesting tidbits of information" to my family and friends. This information never entered the realm of trivia in my opinion, as I preferred to consider it practical knowledge. Or perhaps general knowledge....or even miscellaneous knowledge. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that the only thing that distinguishes trivia from the rest of the knowledge pool is whether you personally consider it worthwhile or not. Because I consider it interesting and worthwhile to know does not entail that you find it so, and if in fact you do not, you could accurately call it trivia; it is in fact trivia to you.

And that's when it hit me. I really am a nerd. As a matter of fact, I just hit the spell check and it said, "no misspellings found." And that's my strength?!!?

I can ace any trivia quiz you bring on

I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon