Weird times seven

My friend Amy tagged me for another meme. This one is "Seven Weird Things About Me." Let's see what I can come up with.

1.) I cannot hear alarm clocks. I hear brand new ones for a little while, then I begin incorporating the noise into dreams, then I tune them out altogether. Before I married, I had to buy a new alarm clock every two to three months. Now, James wakes me up for everything. Even when he travels, he calls every morning to make sure I'm awake. If he's unavailable to call me for some reason (i.e., flying) and I have important morning plans, I will occasionally stay up all night long. I can hear the phone, thunderstorms, and children creeping down the stairs, but I cannot hear a clock screaming in my ear. (Even weirder, my mom is exactly the same way, so she has a clock that vibrates her bed. Who knew something like that was genetic?)

2.) I cannot sleep on airplanes, or on any other form of public transportation. From time to time, I talk in my sleep, and I've been told I'll hold complete conversations. As a result, I cannot bring myself to sleep in public. Generally, this not sleeping in public is not a problem, but when I traveled for mission trips, I always had terrible jet lag.

3.) I overslept on my first mission trip, and I still hear about it. My first mission trip was with a group of youth from various churches all over the state of Oklahoma. We went to England to share our faith in Religion classes in public schools, and we stayed in private standard rooms at The Strand Palace Hotel our very first night overseas. Because I can't sleep on airplanes, I had horrible jet lag. Said horrible jetlag coupled with the fact that I don't hear alarm clocks, and I overslept. Really overslept.

The entire team had been up and around for a long time. They'd eaten breakfast, repacked their belongings, and loaded on a double decker bus for a sightseeing tour. During the final headcount before departure, my youth pastor realized I was missing, so he came back into the hotel to knock on my door. I didn't hear him. He knocked louder. Still nothing. He actually had to go get the manager to let him into my room so he could shake me awake (all while the entire team waited on the bus).

As if I wasn't humiliated enough by oversleeping, and by having to have my room broken into, and by rushing to throw on clothes, pack up my stuff, and hurry down to a bus filled with people waiting just for me, my old youth pastor still thinks it hilarious to bring it up to me every single time I speak to him.

Though it's been fourteen years, and though I have the opportunity to see or speak to him maybe once a year, the fact that I overslept in London begins our conversation every time. "Hey, you been oversleeping lately? Snort, Snort, Guffaw." Apparently, some jokes never grow old.

4.) Lots of random weird things happen to me or around me, and I don't think they're at all weird. Weird is my normal. I have a somewhat distorted perspective, I guess, and I think that must be pretty weird. It's difficult to describe, but the frequent weirdness that is my life troubled James deeply in our first few years together. Now he's used to it, and my weird normal is a major source of entertainment for him.

5.) I worked as an eBay Powerseller for a while. Several years ago, James and I began selling some things on eBay for fun, and when we started seeing a hefty profit, he left a job in radio advertising to work full-time from home with me.

Many sellers specialize in certain things like books or boy's clothes, but because of the aforementioned weirdness that is my life, we specialized in oddities. We would buy and resell peculiar things, and had the very best time doing it. Though we sold all varieties of goods, our best selling items included polio braces, prosthetic legs, and silicone breasts. We opted to stop when our kids became obsessed with playing garage sale and post office, and James returning to a real job post eBay is how we ended up in Texas. I still sell things on eBay occasionally, but now I do it primarily for special projects.

6.) On a far too frequent basis, I make up weird lyrics to popular songs and sing them randomly. In fact, I do it so much that I just asked James on Sunday if my song-singing was weird. "It's quirky," he said. I hope that's better -- you know, cute, instead of just odd. Right now my strange lyrics make my kids laugh, but I know before I know it, that particular quirk will be the thing that makes them roll their eyes and sigh heavily.

7.) As a bargain hunter, I don't have a problem picking up generic goods. However, I'm particular and unyielding on two name brand grocery items: Peter Pan Creamy Peanut Butter and Heinz Ketchup. When I moved to France on missions, I took one suitcase and one backpack full of all of my remaining possessions on the Earth, and 1/8 of my suitcase was filled with Peter Pan Creamy Peanut Butter, which I ate on baguettes in Paris. You can imagine how ecstatic I was when I was recently able to stock up on my love for free.

As for the Heinz, I carry packets of it in a cubby in my car so I'm prepared at every drive-thru. However, when we go through the drive-thru, I seem to migrate towards restaurants that serve Heinz, like McDonalds and Long John Silvers. (I didn't realize that until just now.) Additionally, I keep a huge commercial-sized container front and center in my fridge because you can just never have too much. (Even weirder, when Gracie was a baby, she was afraid of two things -- cows and ketchup. She was screaming scared, which was so strange! Fortunately, she's outgrown those irrational phobias and my love for the Heinz can rule again.)

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.

So, thanks for playing along! Feel free to take this meme as your own. To be all official and whatnot, I tag my cousin Emily, my sister Christy, my husband James, and my friend Jennifer.