Six quirks

In an attempt to fill my yearly quota of being “tagged,” and appease my guilty conscience for previously ignoring many generous tags by friends with much more interesting life details than me, I have chosen to expose myself in one fell swoop.

Six Quirks That You May Not Know About

Fingernails on the chalkboard is like music to my ears…compared to the sound of metal scraping against metal. At a family dinner last month, I was sitting at one end of a long table, where there were various conversations going on. Suddenly my teeth started to hurt. My mouth began to fill up with excess saliva. I grimaced involuntarily, and then I notice Krista at the far end of the table. She was grinning like a Cheshire cat as she scraped the prongs of her fork against her plate, and waited for my certain reaction. She was playing my pet peeve, and I literally had a physical reaction to it. The noise of silverware rattling around in the sink is something like torture to me. I hated mealtimes at my grandma’s house because we always ate out of metal bowls with metal silverware. I do not own any stainless steel bowls besides my Kitchen Aid.

When I was pregnant with Sage I heard an alarming rumor that pregnant women shouldn’t eat more than 2 hot dogs per week. I asked my midwife about it and with a look of disgust she asked, “Who would want to eat two hot dogs per week? I shrunk down in my chair, and tried not to think about the two hot dogs I’d eaten for lunch that day. The only thing better than two hot dogs for lunch is two black, burnt hot dogs for lunch (no condiments, just bun and dog). Yum.

I have a stash of left-handed dish gloves in various colors. If I had a budget, which I should and don’t, it would include a separate category for dish gloves. Washing dishes is not my favorite task, but it is absolutely my least favorite task when I don’t have dish gloves to wear. I hate getting pruney dishwater hands and soft fingernails. Somehow the right hand glove always gets a hole in it first. But just in case the hole decides to grace a left hand glove someday, I’ll be ready.

When I was in elementary school, my family got our first computer that had games. My parents made a rule that we had to log 30 minutes on the typing program before we could play games. To deter our obsession with computer games, they instituted a second rule stating that after an hour of games we had to type for another 30 minutes. This was no problem, especially since our typing program gave tests and reported the user’s words per minute at the end. Once, on a line containing only the letters a, s, d, and f, I typed 128 wpm. I’m not that fast anymore, but on a recent test, I scored 109 wpm. (How about you? Anyone else train on Mavis Beacon in their youth?)109 words

I have a deep and abiding hatred for the song “Santa Baby.” On second thought, this is not quirky. This is a normal human reaction to a ridiculous “song.” I therefore strike this item from my list of “quirks.”

I love fresh peaches, but have a hard time stomaching anything with peach flavoring. This dates back to the day in my youth when some of my family hiked Mt. Timpanogos (11,000 feet). My sister, Krista, took one of the first swigs from the newly filtered water and accidentally dropped her peach jolly rancher into the canteen. We all enjoyed exotic peach-flavored water for the next hour, and detested the peach-flavored water for the following 8 hours.

Well, there you have it. A recipe for tormenting me. I can just envision myself in a torture chamber where “Santa Baby” blasts through the speakers all day long while I’m forced to eat peach jolly ranchers and wash huge loads of stainless steel bowls and silverware without gloves. [shudder]