100 things

One of my discussion lists has a tradition of posting 100 things about yourself on your birthday. Since I’ll be away for my actual birthday and may not take my computer, I’ve posted it today instead. This is my several-th list, so it’s devolved into something a little more like babbling about myself with numbers interjected. Proceed at your own risk.

1. I will be turning 40 on Saturday
2. … in London.
3. The day before, I get to see Patrick Stewart in The Tempest.
4. The day after, I get to meet up with some online friends at a pub.
5. I don’t mind turning 40 (well, who would, with a weekend like that!)
6. But a bigger reason is rowing.
7. Every year older gives me a better handicap!
8. And when you see people in their 60s and 70s racing, 40 looks a lot less like The End of Everything.
9. We’ve been living in the Netherlands for 5 months now.
10. 7 more to go and then we move to Taiwan.
11. I’ve never been there
12. so I’m a bit nervous.
13. I expect I’ll love the food and dislike the warm weather.
14. The work should be exciting since it’s a new facility
15. And a new challenge for me.
16. My job there isn’t entirely definite yet so I don’t want to talk about it, but so far things look good.
17. It’s a little weird working in the same company as my husband Ted.
18. It will be weirder in Taiwan, with only a few hundred people at the site.
19. I don’t know if I’ll love the idea of living in Asia the way I do living in Europe.
20. Sometimes I walk around and think, “people have been walking on a road right here for a thousand years or more”.
21. It’s really the effect of spending my life reading books set in England or Europe and based on the history here. Even at the Pyramids, I didn’t have quite that sense of the history – I just don’t know it as well.
22. I kept thinking about Amelia Peabody instead of Hatshepsut or Nefertiri.
23. The Pyramids were wonderful in themselves, and so was the Sphinx, but I hated being pestered to buy something or take someone’s picture (for a fee) every few seconds.
24. I loved the Acropolis. There were lots of people there, too, both locals and tourists, but they were there to see the ruins too and left us alone. I kept hearing Keats’ line, “Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,” in my head.
25. On that trip, I also loved the National Museum in Athens, the Vatican Museum in Rome, and the old city of Rhodes.
26. Since last fall, I’ve been in the US, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Libya (sort of – as Americans we couldn’t get off the boat. But we were in their waters, on a docked cruise ship.
27. That reminds me: if any of you are considering a cruise, I really can’t recommend MSC. A cruise ship – especially an *Italian* cruise ship – ought to have food somewhat better than just OK. And the (lack of) security procedures were worrying, including a mix-up with my husband’s credit card that led to someone else (innocently) charging to his account. Originally an honest mistake, but far too difficult to correct.
28. In the last year, I’ve also been in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Kansas, New Jersey, and Oklahoma.
29. This involved travel over much greater distance than all those European countries.
30. The stop in Egypt meant that we’ve now visited all 7 continents!
31. Bythe end of this year I expect to have visited all continents except Antarctica within the year. (Unfortunately, I doubt we’l get back there any time soon.)
32. I’ve rowed in three countries: the US, Netherlands, and Belgium
33. But only raced in the first two of those – and have won medals in both!
34. In the US I’ve raced in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Massachusetts
35. Over distances ranging from 300 meters to 42.2 kilometers (26.1 miles).
36. I’m really not very fast (too short).
37. I’ve won medals, though – sometimes by being 1st of 1 (or 2nd of 2, 3rd of 3) but also by legitimately beating other boats (usually in smaller races).
38. When it’s a marathon, I think just finishing counts as a victory!
39. I’ve done four of those, two on the rowing machine, two on the water, in one double and one single.
40. In that double, I rowed with a 62-year-old man as my partner.
41. We were slower than molasses (not all because of him, I add) but he’d done several previous ones so I knew he’d finish.
42. And if you’re in a boat with someone for five hours and 43 minutes* it’s good to have someoen who’s excellent company – and Dave is!
43. That number is engraved in my brain.
44. (But I beat it the next year in my single.)
45. Same guy, once when I hadn’t seen him for a while (at least not while I was wearing rowing gear) and I’d been doing a bunch of weightlifting, took a look at me in my spandex top and said, “My God, you’re buff!”
46. I told that story to someone at work and she thought he was insulting me!
47. I just don’t understand people like that.
48. Despite being able to babble on for hours about rowing, I’m really not a jock.
49. I’m much more the bookworm type.
50. I enjoy rowing when I do it, but I confess having to talk myself into more than a few of my practice and traning sessions.
51. Curling up on the couch with a book comes much more naturally.
52. It was a bit painful to leae most of my books behind in the US but I brought enough to keep me from feeling bereft.
53. And enough bookshelves to give me room to buy a few more 🙂
54. Ordering from the US gets fearsomely expensive (not just shipping but customs) but I can order from the UK for reasonable prices.
55. And since most Dutch speak English the bookstores do have an English section.
56. I seem to be getting through books much more slowly lately though.
57. I think it’s partly that knitting while I read slows me down and partly due to a bad habit I’ve acquired of checking email and blogs far more often than I ought to.
58. I think it’s damaging my concentration and my introvert skills (I do have them, or reading, knitting, and rowing a single wouldn’t be among my favorite hobbies.).
59. So I guess I now have a goal for the next year.
60. My favorite fiction writers range from LMM to LMA to Robert Heinlein to PG Wodehouse to Jane Austen to Terry Pratchett to Dorothy L. Sayers to E. Nesbit.
61 Nonfiction subjects on my shelves include travel (big surprise!), biography, history, linguistics, and books about rowing and about flying.
62. Two unusual categories I have include books about books and reading (Nicholas Basbanes, say, or legendary book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach or Anne Fadiman
63. what I call “place” books, about living or spending time in a particular place. Growing up on an island off Ireland, or living in rural Alaska with dogsleds or The Worst Journey in the World, about Scott’s expedition to Antarctica.
64. For some odd reason, the Fadiman family is bizarrely well-represented in categories 61-63. You’ve probably heard of Clifton Fadiman; I have his New Lifetime Reading Plan. His wife Annalee (nee Jacoby) was an adventurous journalist in China during WWII and Theodore H. White (the Making of the American President guy, not the Sword in the Stone guy) talks about her in his autobiography. Their daughter Anne wrote the wonderful “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” which I highly recommend for anyone obsessed with books, and her husband George Howe Colt wrote “The Big House” about the house off the Massachusetts coast where his extended family foregathered in summers.
65. One thing that’s interestng, as I turn 40, is beginning to see the effects of age.
66. My memory is going – not so much for remembering trivia, which I still do far too well, but for remembering for example things my husband says he said to me.
67. (I’m privately convinced some of that is more due to *his* memory going!)
68. I’ve also been forgetting things a lot, like leaving a scarf or purse behind, but I was always bad about that – I think it’s just that in this colder climate I have more stuff to carry so more things to forget.
69. Physically speaking, I think my face is showing the effects of age more than my body – a few wrinkles, less even skin texture, a little bit of jowl.
70. I’ve been good about sunscreen but only for the last several years. Never wore any at all as a kid, but then I never burned, either. I’m trying to be good about moisturizing but I can’t really see any difference when I do or don’t.
71. My hair is still long and brown with only a few threads of gray. I don’t color it.
72. Not too bad below the neck. (Since this is an all-female list forgive me for indulging in a little TMI.) No sag at all, and no upper arm wobble either.
73. The one change I’ve noticed is that I do have a little cellulite in my butt/upper thighs. There’s not too much fat there, but what there is isn’t smooth as it is in your 20s or early 30s. 🙁
74. The nice thing about doing a lot of exercise as you age is that you still have a lot of aches and pains, but you have something specific to blame it on!
75. Today’s sore shoulders are from yesterday’s erg (rowing machine) power workout, for instance.
76. Another nice thing is that I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was three, and bifocals for a lot of that time, so bad eyes don’t feel like a sign of aging to me.
77. I’ve been keeping a blog now for 6 years this month – almost 2500 entries. That’s rather astounding, considering I never kept a paper journal past about the third entry.
78. One unintended consequence of having a blog is finding out with unexpected clarity just what you were doing at any past time. When looking back for previous birthday lists, I realized that my cat Beast died just this week last year 🙁 We miss him – I don’t think the other one likes being an only cat, and I feel guiltier leaving him alone so much.
79. I’d like to get a pair of kittens, but will probably wait until we’re back in the US. Transporting pets between countries is difficult.
80. I can read my own old blog entries and it feels as if they were written by someone else, even though I don’t really think I’ve changed much since 2001. Except maybe to become even more so.
81. I started at Diaryland, then moved eventually to my own site, Rise Again (named after a Stan Rogers song). I moved it to a new directory last September because I wanted to switch from Movable Type to WordPress and because there were so many entries in the database that updating was getting very slow. The current one is at , and there is a link to the previous site with entries all the way back.
82. I am not bad at making big decisions (two years in Taiwan? Sure!) but am terrible at small ones. (Where to go for dinner? What knitting to bring on my next trip?)
83. When given a choice of directions to go, say in a museum exhibit, I tend to turn to the left. This can lead to lots of collisions with people heading the other way, but it worked well in Australia, where people walk as well as drive on the left. (I didn’t notice that as much in England or Ireland.)
84. I prefer to multitask. Doing only one thing at a time drives me nuts.
85. I’m also not crazy about sitting up properly at a desk.
86. For these reasons, I don’t like working in an office all the time. I’d rather work at home most of the time, where I could flop on a sofa, eat what and when I want, even knit during teleconferences. On the occasions when I have been able to work from home for a day, I’ve gotten quite a lot done that way. I don’t think I’d like being alone all the time, though, so I’d still want to go in to an office a day or two every week.
87. There are lots of things I don’t like about living in Europe – shops that are closed in the evenings for example. So far, though, for each thing I think is better in the US, there is something else that’s better here.
88. I can’t drink coffee (I like it but it upsets my stomach) but I love tea.
89. Words and language are one of my big interests, so I’m very much enjoying the chance to learn Dutch. I love the English lanaguage and since they evolved from a common ancestor it’s fun for me to spot the echoes of Old English in Dutch.
90. I don’t really speak any other languages but English.
91. This is despite six year each of Spanish classes (grades 5-11) and Hebrew school (despite the name, we studied religion and jewish history, not just the Hebrew language. I know only a few words of Hebrew, but can handle Spanish just enough to help me get around when I’m a tourist, though not enough to have a real conversation.
92. I once thought of becoming a linguist and really enjoyed my linguistics classes, but I’d definitely have had to learn to speak and read a few more languages! Those classes, especially learning the history of English, have been a big help in picking up Dutch.
93. I just realized I’ve written almost my whole list without mentioning my husband once! I rarely dream about him either. There’s a good reason for both those things: while I don’t dream *about* him, I often dream he’s there by my side in whatever I’m doing in the dream, and to be accurate, you’d need to read this whole list and insert “with Ted” in most items – either I do them with him or we’ve talked about them.
94. In one week, we’ll have been together for 17 years, and we’ve been married for 13.5 of them. He’s much more entwined with my life at its roots than anyone else – I get along OK with my birth family but I haven’t lived in my parents house since I was 17 (except for summers during college) and that’s more than half a life ago, and none of my other friends are anything like as close as Ted.
95. I just found out today that in Dutch they call it a “kroonjaar” (crown year) when you have a birthday ending in 0.
96. I told someone I was having one (a chance to practice my Dutch )and he said, “Oh, turning 20?”
97. My first reaction was, “Yuck, why would I want to?”
And my second was, “If I were 20, I couldn’t even races Masters!” (27 or older, for rowers)
98. It’s not that hard to come up with 100 things if you babble a lot – it’s if you try to put in actual information that it gets difficult.
99. Fortunately I can babble with the best of ’em. (Or worst!)
100. Een kopje koffie and appelflappen (a cup of coffee and apple turnovers) for anyone who’s gotten through this whole list.