JUST SEVEN

I've enjoyed reading everyone's seven things, so here are my seven:
1) I was a horrible tomboy when I was a kid. All the boys in my neighborhood had a "club" and built a treehouse a few blocks away from our home, in the "woods", and they let me help build it. My parents bought my sister and I a bike, but I secretly coveted my little brothers red bike. I rode it everywhere - mostly by myself. I couldn't wait to come home and get his bike and go riding. Another thing I loved doing was riding a "skateboard". I had to put that in quotation marks, because it was really a "skate" - "board". I got a board, tore a pair of my roller skates apart, and nailed them to the board - Voila! We had a choice of riding our skateboard on the street - which had lots of gravel on it from when they would sand down the snow in the summer, or on the sidewalk, which had bumps and places where the sidewalk had either risen or fallen. I remember challenging one of the older boys to a "Skateboard Race" to see who could make it all the way to the bottom of the street 1) first, 2) without falling off your skateboard. I won!! It actually even amazed me. I used to argue with the lady next door. She wasn't really great at arguing and my friends and I always thought I won the arguments. She was always yelling at us kids for being mean to her daughter. Her daughter was spoiled, bratty, a cry-baby and a whiner, so we never really felt that bad about being mean to her. Another one of my favorite things to do was climb trees. We had one Maple tree that had a little spot in it we called "Scamper's Perch" because it was where our cat always climbed up to and sat. I always loved to climb that tree and just sit in Scamper's Perch. I can even remember when Scamper was alive, he climbed up there and got on a limb by me and looked at me like, "Hey! You're in my seat!" I also used to climb the tree - in my Sunday dress - behind our old church on Fontnelle (sp?) street - waiting for my mom and dad to get finished doing their "church stuff". I think I still have tomboy tendencies, because a t-shirt or sweatshirt and jeans is my absolute favorite thing to wear. I don't wear those shirts that much, because they are really not very flattering (maybe I've gotten a little more girly), but I do wear jeans almost every single day.

2) I HATE liars. I hate people who do not tell the truth. I hate people who only tell half-truths or twist the truth to their advantage, or conviently leave something out so you don't get the whole story. I'm not quite sure where I got this, but twice when I was a teen-ager I lied to my parents. The first time was because a boyfriend had asked me out to a drive-in movie and my parents didn't want me to go to drive-in movies. He told me to lie to my parents and tell them we were going to go to a walk-in movie, and then we'd just go to a drive-in. We did this, I know at least twice, maybe three times. He would always tell my parents we were going to go to a movie that he had seen, so he could tell me about it enough to tell my parents, when they asked me the next day about the movie. This worked pretty good, until one day I guess he either ran out of movies, or didn't tell me enough about it. He told my parents we were going to see "Bullet" with Steve McQueen. If you have never seen this movie, it has one of the greatest car chase scenes ever made in it. The next day, sure enough, my dad asked me about "Bullet". My dad was a great movie buff and saw lots of movies. He had seen "Bullet". I guess I wasn't "gaga" enough over the chase scene, or else he got suspicious and threw something in that really wasn't in the movie. I never knew. Anyway, the jig was up. They made me break-up with him. The other time I lied, I plead the 5th. :0)

3) Another thing about me, which is evident above, I NEVER tell ALL my secrets, and never will.

4) I dated my cousin. I know, this probably grosses some of you out. I never looked at it that way. He was my second cousin - maybe second cousin, once removed, I don't know. I dated him for two summers. He also dated my sister, Inside Stories, so there is another secret about her. :0)

5) I am an absolutely obsessive Harry Potter freak! I have all 7 books and I also have all 7 books on cd. I have listened to the cd's probably 5 or 6 times each, maybe more. I love Harry Potter, because to me it is a great Good vs. Evil story. I love those kind of stories, because I think that is what the world is going to come to. Those of us for good will band together, regardless of religion or race, and fight against those who are evil.

6) When I was a kid I thought I was horibbly ugly. I was too tall, too skinny, had naturally curly hair in a straight hair world, and had horribly bucked teeth, so bad I couldn't even close my lips around them. I used to drink this stuff called "Neutrament" (was that what it was called?) that was supposed to help you gain weight. It didn't work. I used to iron my hair, and especially my bangs, with the iron. One time I burned my forehead on the iron. I used to put hair straighteners on my hair and roll my hair on huge rollers. I wore braces for 4 years and retainers after that. One time when I was a younger teenager, an teenage boy investigator came to our church. Everyone at church came up to me and told me he and I looked exactly alike - so alike we could be twins. I think they were going up to him and telling him the same thing, because he kept looking over at me. This turned out to be one of the more traumatic events of my young teenage life. I started crying and ran out of the church and started walking home. My parents picked me up on their way home, but I continued to cry ALL night. My dad came in to try to console me and told me if I wanted to, I could go to a beauty shop and get my hair cut and styled. I cried harder because to me, my dad was saying that yes, I was ugly and hideous. That night really changed me and finally I dried my tears and picked up a huge chip and put it on my shoulder and got an attitude that dared people to knock it off. I think that also started my rebellious streak. I decided I wouldn't let people hurt me anymore because I wouldn't care anymore what people thought.

7) When I was a teen-ager I played the guitar. I used to take that guitar everywhere I went when I was hanging out with my friends. I had a group of friends who loved to sing. Nece, Danny, Billy, and Randy were the main ones. We weren't boyfriend and girlfriend with any of them, just friends. If you saw these guys, you wouldn't think they were singers, but they did. Some of them would have parties at their house and I'd take my guitar and we'd sing half the night. We used to love to go out to Buffalo Lake. There were small caves out there that we could get in and build a fire and sit and talk and sing. I can remember other people who came to our parties, but they would often not stay long. I remember one guy said, "Geez, all you guys do it sing - this party's no fun!" One of our favorite songs was one my friend, Danny taught us - "Flowers for Mamma". It was a tear-jerker country western song. Danny first started singing it, but then after my friend Nece and I learned it, he used to love it when she and I would sing it and would always want us to sing it. She and I even sang it one time at our church talent show that my mom entered us in. I can remember how shocked the members of the ward were that I had actually come to a ward social. I think they thought I had seen the errors of my ways, but I hadn't. Not yet anyway.

Well, that's it - or at least that's "seven". The hard part was not coming up with seven things, but just trying to find seven things I was willing to tell. :0)