five things

Bloom

It required several hours of persuasion, but I finally managed to wrestle this one to the floor. It's a biggie: 36" x 36".

I have given up on memes -- mostly because I promise to do them and never follow through. But when I was tagged by Leonie to do the 'five things you may not know about me' meme, I decided to do it anyway. I've already given up almost all the obscure things worth sharing (or not) in previous meme posts but managed to come up with a few more.

1. When I was 16 or 17 I won second prize in the Dental Health Month logo contest put on by the Canadian Dental Association. My logo had a beaver in it: Canada + teeth = beaver.

2. We received an embossed letter from the bank today because we have almost paid off the debt we accrued 10 years ago when we took out a huge RRSP loan so we could get enough of a tax return to finally pay off the house downpayment money we'd borrowed a couple of years earlier (anyone familiar with Canada's tax laws actually understands this). This is what the letter said (loosely translated): Congratulations. You have just funnelled so many thousands of dollars into our coffers over the past decade that we can hardly wait to see if you're suckers enough to do it again. Still, it feels good: like the day I made the final payment on my student loan. I was 35.

3. I discovered I was nearsighted at a Harlem Globetrotters game when I was 14; I couldn't read the score. (Have I shared this one already?)

4. As a child I had two major fears. It wasn't injections, jumping off the rocks into the ocean on Eagle Island* or snarling Rottweilers. Those were a walk in the park compared to dolls. I think it was their dead, staring eyes. The other was also dead-person-related: skeletons. There was a Time-Life book on the shelves of the school library called Early Man with a human skull on the front. I avoided that section of the library like the plague. And the Sinbad movies with the sword-fighting skeletons on Saturday afternoon B-movie TV my brothers loved? Never.

5. Today's my birthday.

*Too weird. I just googled Eagle Island to see if I could find anything about this little island where my best friend lived when I was growing up, and where I spent so many days and nights. What did I find? The very house I spent all that time in, not to mention the rocks I so cavalierly leaped off, now madly renovated from the cottage it was, for sale. Check it out here.