Remember

In an effort to stir the pot a little, I've tagged what I hope is a wide assortment of fellow bloggers (seeing if I can break out of some of the same circles a little bit). Some old friends, some newer ones, and some with blogs where I've lurked but not said much. This was my twist on Natalie's tag of me, where I called 7 hopes and/or wishes. We'll see who has a chance to play along.

Heather at Bluhm Studios

'M' at Chocolate on My Cranium

Diana at Dented Thimble Quilting

Kahne at Life on the Run

My Little Mochi

Sarah at Joy for the Journey

Maybe there's someone here who's new to you, and you can take a look at what she's up to. But, ok, so I DID actually tag 7, but I can't remember who the last one was. I'll try. It's no reflection on the person or her blog, just on my own fuzziness of memory. Love this:

"I don't write things down to remember them later. I write things down to remember them now."

It's from a site that sells notebooks but, yes -- it's true -- I can't remember the name of it at the moment. {Edited to add: found it! Check out these great notebooks.) And here's a friend who had the chance to play along on a tag from a while back; she wrote such a lovely post....

Hopes, wishes

Natalie played along with a thoughtful list of seven habits/quirks/facts about herself and made me wonder, yet again, how she does it. How she comes up with these insightful, funny, meaningful things to say yet again? And then I saw that she had tagged me and I doubted I had it in me. Haven't I dredged the bottom of my quirkiness lake to the point where there's no muck left? And then I checked on her this morning and saw that her abuelo, her grandfather, had passed away and I thought, well, can't I find a way to make her laugh a little? To both honor her tagging of me but to find another way to approach it?

And I don't know -- I don't know if this will turn out to be funny, or not. But I thought I would make mine a list of seven hopes and wishes that I have. I thought maybe I will reveal some of my own quirkiness that I myself don't see very clearly but that will be obvious to others from my list.
Here goes:

1. When I was driving home yesterday, I wished that I would pass a driveway with a backyard soccer goal net down at the end of it with a "Free!" sign on it. Do people do this where you live -- put things at the end of their driveway with "Free!" signs on them? They do it around here, but I've never seen anything that made me stop. So I figure that if I start focusing on a specific wish, maybe it will happen. I'm not sure how I would wrangle it home in my car, but maybe THAT would be the funny part.

2. I wish I could arrange for Dean to have lunch and then maybe a training session with Fernando Torres. I figure it's kind of the least I could do, given that I can't make Dean's wish come true -- that Fernando Torres were his older brother. Dean's having trouble wrapping his head around my having told him that aside from our not living in Spain and my having never met Mr. Torres senior, I could be Fernando's mom (in that I am old enough to have a 24-year-old son). I have yet to turn up a photo of Mr. Torres senior, though, so I can't be completely sure that it would have been a possibility. Ahem.

3. When I see a movie like Speed Racer, I wish I could have been a racer car driver -- you know, like Danica Patrick or something (although please -- don't get me wrong -- I'm not interested in her whole glam/super model thing, just in the race car driving). When we watched all the Euro Cup matches, I wished I could have been a soccer star in my youth. It's not about being unhappy with my own life, but more about having some remarkable past under my belt that, say, my brothers could brag to their friends about or whatever.

At my old job, a couple of the guys on my staff were real football fanatics, and I don't remember exactly how it started but I made a joke that I had dated Jim McMahon back when I lived in Chicago. I want to say that one of the guys made some totally implausible statement, and I responded by saying, "yeah, and I dated Jim McMahon." So anyway, it turned into this thing -- that at least one of the guys thought I was telling the truth and then it got around in certain circles; for guys, knowing someone who knew a Super Bowl winning quarterback is pretty huge. I kept trying to dispel the myth whenever it came up -- "guys, seriously, I was kidding" -- but I think that for at least one of them, being able to go around saying, "yeah, my boss used to date Jim McMahon" made the everyday life just a little more interesting.

4. I wish I could sing. Really sing. Even that I could sing The Star Spangled Banner in front of the crowd at a baseball game. I do sing The Star Spangled Banner when we go to baseball games (at the appropriate time, thank you) but Dean begs me to stop.

5. I hope that I have cleaned up my last house-training accident. Given that the dog is only 7 months old, this could be unlikely. But still, I hope.
6. I hope that I'm on the "cool mom" list amongst Dean and his friends. I think they are actually another year or so away from those conversations -- you know, when you try to figure out whose house you want to go to based on the mom's coolness factor. It's not about being lenient nor oblivious; cool moms can be totally tough and impose major limits and rules. But it's about being the mom, or one of the moms, who can be trusted and counted on and who doesn't dress in such a way that causes embarrassment to the crew (this is probably where I'm going to fail the test, though).

7. I wish that I could stop time, be invisible, read minds, and run five miles. All seem as equally attainable to me.

Tomorrow I will tag seven bloggers, and I'll put it out there as a hope/wish list. Hope that's legal.

D, deciduous

My latest contributions to the ABC-Along 2008. "D" was also for "deadline" and I squeaked just under this time. (Quick review: I am taking photographs in nature -- two for each letter of the alphabet; one that suggests the letter form itself and one of something that begins with the letter.)

So Helen tagged me and there were quite a few rules along with this one so I better go get them and present them here:

Once you are tagged, link back to the person who tagged you. (OK, so that was Helen, above!)
Post THE RULES on your blog ( this be them! )
Post 7 weird or random facts about yourself on your blog
Tag 7 people and link to them
Comment on their blog to let them know they have been tagged.

Now the challenge is whether I can think of 7 things I haven't said before. I see that I need to do a much better job of indexing my posts since I know I've done a list like this once if not twice before but I can't find those now and can't remember for sure what I've already revealed. So, pardon me if any of this is old news.

1. I am nearly incapable of choosing a single "best" or "favorite" of anything -- it requires more context for me since I love so many things for so many different reasons. I'm much better if I can be given the latitude to at least name my top 5 or 10 of something.

2. I can make balloon animals. I decided (and this is SO like me) that it was an important parenting skill to have (!?). It is also so like Dean that he's never permitted me to perform at any of his parties.

3. If I had it all to do over again, I wish I'd have known how much I love food, cooking, and writing (well, I always knew I loved writing) so that I could have pursued a food-related career. I would have liked to have been a pastry chef when I was younger (so that I could better handle the physical demands of the job) and then to have been a prolific cookbook author after having achieved acclaim in the kitchen(s).

4. I rarely, if ever, use an umbrella anymore in the rain; as long as there's no lightning, I enjoy being out (for a bit, anyway) in the rain and don't mind getting wet. On rainy days at school I am the only person (besides Dean, usually) who doesn't RUN from the car to the front door. I'm not sure how this transformation happened, since I used to always carry an umbrella with me just. in. case.

5. My dad used to say that people have, ingrained, one of two reactions when something drops/falls -- they either instantly pull back or reach out to grab/catch the thing; I'm a reach out and grab type and rarely miss, even if someone else did the dropping.

6. My parents seriously considered naming me "Montana." My mom wanted to name me "Guinevere" but didn't want me to be called "Gwen" so they settled on "Jennifer" because they were just fine with "Jenny," for short, which I hate. I wish I had been named either Montana or Guinevere. It is an interesting aside to me to note that these days, parents have (wield) full control over what their children are called -- parents who name a child "James," for example, who want him always to be called "James" simply do not allow people to say "Jim." Parents didn't used to think they could control nicknames like that.

7. I wanted to be taller. I am 5' 8", which in my younger days made me tall for a girl, but I really wanted to be 6'.

That took me longer than you might imagine. So now I tag these people, with the understanding that if they don't want to play along then that is their prerogative:

Raesha
Susanna
Alice
Alison
Mary
Dawn
Sam