Aug.15 - Blaugust Day 15 - Five Facts About Me

I am not in a great place for blogging, things are just too stressful right now. But I refuse to give up on Blaugust, not when I have this shiny new Eleventy blog built with the help of friends. I'm going to try and keep posting.

About what, though? Everything stressful going on right now is too close. I need to wait to get some perspective.

I tried looking up blog prompts, and the first few hits were just gross corporate blog prompts, like what was my most powerful leadership experience? (Being a mom.) What's my unique approach to solving industry challenges? (Avoid participating in industry.) BAH. Ugh. I miss the days when doing internet searches led to cool things.

I miss a lot of things about the days before Covid or Trump.

HEY HEY! It occured to me to look for a list of Blaugust Prompts, and they have me covered! NICE.

Okay. It's been a hard day so let's start with an easy one:

Tell us 5 facts about yourself.

1. My favorite garment of clothing is the humble hoodie. I am still searching for the perfect one, but I've got two that come pretty close. I'm not sure the perfect one exists, but I'd like to think that with all the human fashion ingenuity out there, someone will eventually make a super soft technical hoodie with an elf hood, large pockets, and thumbholes in the sleeves. One can dream.

2. I love chili crisp so much I have been known to eat a spoonful of it, right out of the jar. There's a guy in our town who sells different flavors, at the local Saturday Market (oh look, he has a website!). I can't get enough of the stuff. Calabrian is my second favorite. My first favorite was one he didn't have labels made for yet, so now I have to take this mostly empty, unwashed jar back to him and twist the lid off and hope he recognizes the smell so he sell me a second jar. It's fine, I don't have a problem. I can stop whenever I want.

3. I have an obsession with bags (cross-body, slings, small backpacks, etc.) that borders on what could probably be characterized as a clinical neurosis of some kind. I've come to grips with it and now consider it one of my finest quirks. Thankfully I did finally find the two most perfect bags a few years ago, and now I just cycle between them. So I guess the obsession is mostly calm. For now.

4. Speaking of clinical neurosis: I like puns. A lot.

5. In the mid-90's I went to Mexico. The place we were at had a huge swimming beach with this big fenced lagoon, and on certain days they'd somehow call in a bunch of dolphins that had been trained to hang out with tourists. They opened the underwater gate, the dolphins came in, they were amply fed with fresh fish (I assume this was the transaction that gave the dolphins enough patience to put up with all this), and for the next couple hours would haul tourists around, then they opened the fence and back out to the ocean they'd go. One day, after they'd opened the fence, before the tourist stuff started, I very surreptitiously swam underwater from the beach to the lagoon. I found the fenced area (just cyclone fencing under the surface), and braced my foot around one of the wooden posts. Then I rapped on it with my knuckles. Sure enough, a dolphin came over to investigate. They're SO curious! It was wonderful! It would run off, I'd go up and get another big breath of air, then sink down, brace on the post, and knock on the wood. It would zoom back out at me, knickering. We played this little game for so long the person running things up top was looking for it. When I popped my head back up, a staff person on the deck above me was asking me politely to swim back to the beach. I did. But it was totally worth it.