My friend Lisa is someone who comes up in this blog occasionally and in my thoughts a lot. This is for good reason. She is my oldest friend and was as much an integral part of my childhood as my own brothers. I knew her before I even knew my brothers and considering our mother’s became friends when they were pregnant with us, one could argue that Lisa and I knew each other before we were born.

My earliest childhood memory of Lisa goes back to when we were 2, maybe 3, years old and her toy stove. Lisa’s dad built the stove out of a big wooden box painted white and big enough to fit a couple of kids inside. Flat coiled coat hanger wires were fastened to the top to make burners along with a few discarded dials, either from a real stove or maybe a TV. Best of all, the stove had small wheels attached to the bottom and a small door on the front side of the box which was supposed to be the oven. But Lisa and I did very little pretend baking or cooking. Instead we would climb into the box via the oven door and scurry across the kitchen floor, pretending we were in a car. Once we got to our destination we’d close the oven door so it was pitch dark and pretend we were at the movies.

A few years later when Lisa’s family moved to another house the stove was given to my brothers and me. It lived in the playhouse we had in our backyard and it became the main prop in a game we called Witchy-Witch. I believe that Witchy-Witch was the invention of one of the neighbor kids, but I’m pretty sure Lisa and her sister Lynda played the game with us many times as well. Witchy-Witch was our version of Hansel and Gretel. One kid played the witch and chased the other kids around the yard trying to catch them. If you got caught you got stuffed in the stove.

Lisa always tells me that I remember everything from the past and it’s true. My head is filled with great childhood memories and she happens to be in the majority of them.

Guess what I saw the other day when I stopped over at, Practical Paralegalism? I saw that my favorite paralegal, Lynne DeVenny won an Awesome Blogger Award! It was no surprise to me of course, since anyone who reads her blog already knows that Lynne is a pretty awesome blogger as well as a snappy dresser.

In order to qualify for the award Lynne had to share 7 random things about herself and then, (surprise! surprise!) at the end of her post she nominated 7 more people to do the same, including me!!!

I am not only honored but am extremely grateful for the prompt because in case you haven’t noticed I’ve been pretty slow with the posting lately due to a severe case of blog block. Luckily the idea of share seven random facts about myself got my creative juices flowing. I enjoyed listening to that tap-tapping sound while I came up with this list:

1.  I repeated 4th grade.  Yep, they still did that back in the 70s.  Actually one of the reasons why I was held back is because I was extremely shy and a year younger than most of the other kids in my class.  By the time I hit 4th grade I was a complete loser with no friends and I couldn’t learn my times tables.  I gotta say, 4th grade was a lot easier the second time around. 

2. The school I went to was an experimental “open walled environment.” Each grade was in a single giant classroom, with three teachers and 90 kids. There was never a quiet moment during school hours. Hm…that might explain part of item number one.

3. I am a native Californian and have never lived outside of the state. In fact, I have never even lived outside of Alameda County. (Other than a brief sojourn in Santa Clara County my husband can make the same claim.)

4. I am a terrible driver and always have been. In fact, the legendary Jim Willis declared me the worst driver’s ed student in the history of Granada high.

5. I am not a fan of fruit. To all those people who say, “Gee, I love fruit! It’s so sweet and delicious” I say “Have fun and eat your fruit. Just please leave me out of it.” That said, I do my best to still eat some fruit every day because it’s supposed to be good for you but I don’t do it willingly. Bleh!

6. I went to school with Jill Whelan. You know, the girl who played Captain Stubing’s daughter on The Love Boat? She also played the sick girl in Airplane and had a short run TV series called Friends. (A different Friends…it was 1979.) Jill was in my junior high French class. I never spoke to her. She was always surrounded by a posse of admiring girls.

7. My grandfather was a chemist at Lederle Labs in the 1940s and worked on the team that helped develop penicillin.

OK, that last one is not really about me, but hey close enough right?

Thanks Lynne for the shout out and most of all the prompt!

In preparation for our latest adventure, code name Jessopland 2.0, I am training Mrs. B to use a leash.  There’s a lot of articles and YouTube videos about leash training a cat and they are all very clear about one important thing: you need a lot of time and patience.  They aren’t kidding. 

Mrs. B is actually pretty tolerant of her harness and leash but so far the majority of our time together when doing this activity consists of this: 

Clearly Mrs. B is planning to kill me but I’m still not sure if it’s because of the leash or my annoying voice.