101 Things about Me (in no particular order)
1.My parents are divorced and have been for many years. They separated when I was six.
2.I have major clinical depression. I’ve been diagnosed with it for almost 10 years now.
3.I was diagnosed with anxiety although I’m not sure how valid said diagnosis is. Once I got off the anti-anxiety meds the anxiety went away.  Completely.
4.  My paternal grandfather is still alive. He’s 94 and I hope to get out to California to see him soon, though I don’t think that’s going to happen.
5.I love chocolate. Unlike my mother, I like both dark and milk chocolates and am willing to eat chocolate by almost any manufacturer.
6.I love the tv show NCIS. It has humor, adventure, technology, great characters, and is very well written. I own the first seven seasons and will continue to purchase them as they come out.
7.Household chores are not my favorite things to do, especially cleaning; however I get in cleaning kicks when I can’t stop cleaning the loft.
8.I hate doing laundry. I love clean clothes and especially clean bed sheets, but I hate doing laundry.
9.  I’m fairly convinced that I will always be alone, especially once my parents are gone.  I will have nowhere to go with anyone at that point.
10.I love thunderstorms and miss the days of having a covered sun porch with windows on three sides when I could watch them. The beauty of lightening always wows me.
11.I love to read and I am not a book snob. I will read almost anything as long as it looks interesting. My favorites are sci fi and fantasy along with romance.
12.I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I started when Blogger first came out and then switched to LiveJournal. Now I have (as you can see) my own WordPress blog hosted on a site by my lovely sister Techievampire.
13.I love to take photos and display them on my blog. I am part of many photo memes (Weekly Winners, Wordless Wednesday, PhotoStory Friday, and PhotoHunt) and randomly throw up photos. I adore the advent of digital cameras and memory cards and love the fact that I can have all my photos and not worry about having space to store my prints.
14.I have a cat name Kit. He’s a big kitty and a wonderful companion. He loves to give kisses and be scratched. You’ll see photos of him on my blog. I promise.
15.My sister is a pilot who flies jets. She married another pilot who flies jets last August. Flying was a dream of hers that she made come true. I’m jealous.
16.I want to write. I have a book started and have several people with copies of what I have written so far. Several love it and are bugging me to write more of it.
17.I am extremely intelligent. I was sixth in my class and could have been higher had I worked harder. I’ve always been an honor student and was used to getting many A’s.
18.I dropped out of college during my final semester due to my depression.
19.I love Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation.
20.I just recently learned to knit. I know two cast on’s, the knit and purl stitches, garter stitch, stockinette stitch, and binding off. My dream is to make socks. I regularly drool at yarn and other knitting supplies online. I have a whole wish list on Amazon that is nothing but knitting stuff.
21.I love to sing and during all of my public school years sang in choruses and choirs. I was in musicals and even did some solos. I miss singing more than I miss anything about school and would go back just to do that again.
22.I work for a mail order pharmacy doing data entry and I love it. I’ve always loved doing data entry though I sometimes think that it is a waste of my education. I’m also very good at it – accurate and fast.
23.I have recently discovered a love for audio books. When I work I can listen to my iPod (yes, I can finally justify buying the iPod!) and I love listening to audio books. If they weren’t so darn expensive I would have more of them. FYI – iTunes tends to be cheaper than Audible.com.
24.
25.My favorite color is purple. It has been for years. I try to get as many purple things as I can. They make me happy.
26.I used to have a purple car. It was a 1999 Saturn SL-1. I now have a 2005 Hyundai Elantra. It’s blue.
27.My favorite movies include Twister, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, The LOTR Trilogy, Legally Blond, Legally Blond 2, White Christmas, Star Wars, The Princess Bridge, and Air Force One.
28.I collect Enesco Calico Kittens and have for years. I just need to find them all, get them out, and display them. They have been discontinued, but I sometimes search ebay for them.
29.I love steak and when I can afford it I make it. As much as I can. Delmonico is my favorite and I usually get a four pack of thin sliced ones. I eat two at a time. I broil them in the toaster oven and then salt them. Yum!
30.I had my gall bladder out a few summers back. It was my first surgery and I’m hoping it will be my last. Although many people have told me that I would be fine after a few weeks but to this day I still have trouble with greasy (aka good) foods.
31.I am on Plurk, Twitter, FaceBook, and MySpace. I use Ping.fm or Pixelpipe to update them all. I read them all (except MySpace) several times a day and try to respond to people. I love keeping up with my friends.
32.I don’t have kids and I don’t plan on having kids. I don’t have the patience or the stomach for it. Sometimes I feel abnormal or guilty for not wanting kids.
33.I’m about 5’0′ tall. My license says I’m either 5’1” or 5’2” or something like that, but I think I’m shorter. I’ve always been short.
34.I’ve gained about 80 lbs since I started my depression medications.  Since discontinuing the medications I’ve lost over 40 lbs of that weight. I’m planning on losing more and have cut back on some of the things I used to eat along with buying Walk Away the Pounds. Now I just have to use them. Motivation is hard for me, though I hate being so out of shape.
35.I love widgets and plug ins and have been filling up my sidebars with them. I need to rearrange them and work on some other ones. I love having neat stuff on my blog.
36.My friend Sarah of There’s More to the Story and Snap2Scrap has been a big help when it comes to my blog. She designed my current layout and has been the inspiration for most of my plug ins and widgets. She regularly helps me find things and figure things out. I don’t think my blog would be so good without her help.
37.I am a major Pittsburgh Steelers fan and love to watch the games on my big screen tv in hd. I started getting into football in college and have loved it ever since.
38.I am a major Pittsburgh Pirates fan and love to go to baseball games. I’ve been going for many, many years and will continue to go as long as I can afford to. I keep hoping they’ll have another exciting year (like the Cinderella year) but it hasn’t happened recently. I did get to go to on of the National League play off games during the three peat years.
39.I want to digiscrap, but I’m not sure I have the patience. I started my first layout and I’m already taking a break from it. Hopefully, I’ll get more into it when I have more patience an stamina.
40.I was engaged to a real bastard (excuse the French) who was the main cause of the run up in debt, depression, and all sorts of nasty things. He had an anger problem and I think, had we stayed together, he would have ended up abusing me. And I probably would have taken it.
41.I often wish my life had turned out differently even though I know I wouldn’t be where I am today had I not gone through what I have gone through. I guess I just wish I was different.
42.I am very jealous of my sister. She is well-liked, very charismatic, usually gets what she wants, and gets tons of attention. She’s funny, happy (for the most part), and did I mention well-liked? She’s living her dreams, isn’t in debt, and has a wonderful man.
43.I often feel lonely. I’m a homebody and don’t get out much. I’m not really a person people like to talk to or spend time with. It contributes to my depression and I don’t know how to change it.
44.It takes a lot of courage for me to talk to people and when they don’t respond well I tend to give up. I rarely call, text, or im due to this reason. I always feel like I’m bothering or pestering people. Always.
45.I did a stupid thing and dropped all of my meds on my own. It’s not turned out too badly and I’ve lost a lot of weight.
46.All but one of my paying jobs have been office jobs and the one that was not lasted exactly three months. Yeah, I never made it off probation – they wanted people old enough to work the fryers and though they had three people lined up to be hired who were old enough so let me go at the end of my probationary period. They didn’t.
47.I have had the following sentence pounded into my head until I believe it more than anything else: “Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone.”
48.I want to complete Blog 365 and keep having to restart it. Blogging every day is a challenge for me. I get tired and frustrated and don’t feel like blogging on days that I have to work.
49.I have a whole collection of VHS tapes that I’d like to transfer to dvds. I even have equipment to do so. I just need to gather the time and the motivation.
50.I love to collect images, especially icons. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them, though I certainly use a lot of them on this blog.
51.I love my Jawbone bluetooth and am on my second one.
52.I am very generous when it comes to family and friends and am much more willing to spend money on others and dream about spending money on myself. This has been my downfall, or at least was when it came to Terry and Tom.
53.I like to dye my hair different shades of brown and have even tried blond. I have never bleached my hair, though I have bought solution to do it with. Currently my hair is un-dyed and very dark. I’m liking it and plan on keeping it.
54.  I don’t think anyone will love me for me.
55.I prefer silver and white gold (and of course platinum) over gold. It wasn’t always this way, but has been for the past several years. I have a lot of silver jewelry.
56.I think my work schedule is awesome. I only 4 days a week and I work 2 pm to 12:30 am.
57.I don’t want to own a house. I don’t want to pay property taxes, take care of a yard, or be responsible for all of the maintenance. I also don’t want to have to pay hoa fees either. I know – I’m weird.
58.I love God and Jesus, though I don’t attend church. I’m a conservative Anglican and hope to get into a church which supports the beliefs I have, but most churches meet in the morning and that’s a problem.
59.The main reason I don’t go to church is that I’m afraid to. There are so many people and I always feel like such an outsider. It’s very intimidating for me and the last time I went to church I spent the whole time shaking. Now that I know Terry isn’t regularly attending Seeds of Hope I may go back there. It is a long ways away.
60.There are a lot of times when I just want to crawl into bed and hide but I’m getting better at staying out there. I feel safer all bundled up in bed under the covers.
61.I am a self injurer and have been for years. I know the pain and tension that leads to self injury as well as the thoughts of needing to be punished to make things right with the world. I’ve never cut, but I have scratched, pounded, banged, slapped, and punched. I know the shame involved, the utter sense of despair that leads to and from it, and the sense that people won’t understand and will only feel contempt for me for doing it. (Update: I have self injured in years – could be a consequence of going of all the medication.)
62.I have had many people tell me that if I was a better Christian I wouldn’t have depression. I have people act like I am a freak for having depression. I have had people (in my own family nonetheless) tell me that I’m not really sick, just lazy and using excuses to get out of life. It still hurts.
63.I feel that while depression is more widely known, it is poorly diagnosed and understood. People assume its nothing more than a simple feeling of unhappiness (which is the case in regular depression feelings but not the illness) and that its something that someone should be able to snap out of. They assume that all it takes is will power and that people with depression are faking it or are weak/lazy.
64.I hate bugs and at time this hatred evolves into a phobia. This, too, is related to my depression as I never had a huge problem with insects before college.
65.I love traveling, though I don’t like going on my own. I have been to many states with my families and have been lucky enough to go through a lot of experiences.
66.While I was in high school and college I was very active in clubs and leadership learning. I was on student council until my junior year of college and regularly went to church and leadership camps. The strange thing is that all that training has gone to waste as I am not in any groups or organizations, unless you count the union.
67.  I have a lot of problems with pain in my fingers, wrists, arms, and elbows.  I don’t know why and I don’t have a diagnosis.
68.Daisy has been my nickname since I was a little kid, though no one in my family uses it anymore. I use it a lot online, especially in places where I don’t feel comfortable having my true identity known.
69.I have a lot of movies which I want to see and own, but do not watch.
70.I don’t believe in homosexuality and don’t support gay marriage. I do not, however, think all people practicing homosexuality are evil and deserve to die like many I know do. They have been misguided by the devil and need lots of love and prayer. Often, it is loving relationships which are distorted by the evil one. I have known many homosexual people in my life and think that they are wonderful people. I don’t go for hatred of anyone or anything.
71.People hear that I am conservative and assume that I am filled with hate. That I do hate, because I do believe in tolerance and love for everyone, including those who do things that I definitely disagree with. Sometimes I think those people who are “tolerant” are more hate filled than anyone.
72.I love to laugh and some of my favorite sites are humor sites such as Cake Wrecks, What Not to Crochet, Pioneer Woman, Yarn Harlot, and LOL Cats.
73.I put my contacts in backwards from standard teaching – I put my left one in first, though I do take my right one out first.
74.I used to wear contacts all the time though I got away from it while I was in college. I’m trying to get back into the contacts all the time era. (Update: I am back to wearing them every day when I have them.)
75.I love country music. I also love show tunes and musicals.
76.I love going to see musicals. I have seen 42nd Street, Evita, 1776, Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Godspell, A Musical Christmas Carol, Wicked, Peter Pan, and several others which I cannot remember. I have been in Godspell and Anything Goes.
77.I love living in Pittsburgh with one exception. I have been spoiled with culture, sports teams, educational experiences, and a theme park. It’s been a wonderful place to grow up.
78.The one exception would be the snow and cold. I would love to move in order to get away from those things. I think about Arizona and Florida.
79.1979 is the year I was born in. That year the Pirates won the World Series and the Steelers won the Super Bowl. It was a very good year for the Steel City.
80.I don’t know anything about the courtship of my parents. I know next to nothing about their wedding and little more about their marriage. Asking about it was not encouraged. It scares me as I have no good role models for relationships or marriage.
81.1981 is the year my sister was born in. She was born on square root day.
82.I hate horror movies. I had these friends in high school who had me watch some with them. I hated it and once I hid behind the Christmas tree. These friends know who they are.
83.I was in Godspell in high school and I will always remember one quote that was said as we were trying to get somewhere to eat after a show and ENP didn’t have room. “Jesus makes reservations.” Anyone else remember?
84.I love Christian bookstores. They are full of not only neat books, but awesome treasures. I always want to buy tons of things. Usually, I restrain myself.
85.Another store I always buy lots of items in is the Half-Price Bookstore. Luckily things are half price so it’s not as expensive as it could be.
86.I love spicy candle scents – Bath and Body Works scents in particular – Cinnamon Stick, Spice, Spiced Cider – all very yummy. I can’t wait for the Christmas season when Spice will come back out.
87.I wear Bath and Body Works Sweet Pea perfume. I like it a lot. I also hope someday to get Moonlight Path. I have Moonlight Path bubble bath, but am almost out. Romantic scents are cool, too.
88.I love getting acrylic nails. I especially love purple nail polish. Bright colors, glitter, color changing – any nail polish with any of these attributes are likely to end up on my nails. But only when I have acrylic nails.
89.Things I always carry in my purse –  my cell phone, my digital camera, a pen, my wallet (with my health insurance card, my AAA card, my driver’s license, etc.), a pad of paper, and much more.
90.My father is a published author. He has co-written four books with his fiancé which have several editions. This is one thing in his life that I hope to take after, though I would like to have my work of fiction published one day.
91.I get really depressed when I don’t get enough sleep. I also get very hungry, headachey, easily irritated, and thirsty.
92.I hate dealing with bills. I hate dealing with money. The fact that the two go together can really throw me for a loop. I just hate it.
93. I have very sensitive skin. I easily get sunburned. I also sunburn badly. I get red marks on my skin all the time and the slightest scratched turn an angry red almost immediately. This was of great use when I was younger when I could easily prove to my mother than yes, my sister had hit me. Hand marks showed easily.
94.I collect change to use for vacations when I go on them. I have a pretzel bottle that I got from a former boss and I throw all of my change in it.
95.  I often wish I was close to someone. Anyone.  No one really knows me.  I’m not sure if anyone ever did.
96.I love the look of snow, but that’s about it. I love the way it blankets the ground, falls from the sky and I love to sit inside on a snowy day watching it fall from the sky by a crackling fire. Hot chocolate helps, too.
97.I love s’mores, mountain pies, and hot dogs roasted over a campfire. I love campfires and singing around them with friends.
98.I love the sights, sounds, and smells of Autumn as well – apple cider, campfires, hay rides, pumpkin pie, etc.
99. My love language is Word of Affirmation. Words matter.
100.  I’m embarrassed to be myself around the people I know.
101.I have been called a great blessing and a source of understanding and wisdom. I have been told that my greatest gift is that of love and understanding and that I’ve helped people through some rough times.