lists of 5: 5 things all about mememe

So there's these things that us bloggers (gnh gnh) do, they're called 'meme's' - and up 'til this very moment I thought they were just a blogger thing where you write about yourself and so it's called a 'me me' (get it?) and then I looked them up on Wikipedia and discovered they're actually all deep and meaningful - who knew?

Anyhoo, I've decided to do one here, (and besides, aren't all blogging things really about me me me anyway?) and in a minute you'll see why.

5 things meme:

1. What was I doing 5 years ago today?

Getting married! (See now why I chose this one?). Yup, 5 years ago today I married my high-school sweetheart... happy sigh... We'd been together for 12 years (yes, you read 12) and living together for 5 (yup, 5, seems a topical number) and decided, for no particular reason, to do this:

 

I'm so glad we did!

2. 5 things few people know about me:

• I have, very seriously, a phobia of toads. Yup, toads. In my case, it's probably the world's most easily explained phobia, which I'll leave for another posting, but it's a real problem and I don't take kindly to people laughing at it thank you very much.
• I have a completion problem. I have a string of incomplete courses behind me (Xhosa, Spanish, Sociology, Karate), I have a growing pile of incomplete projects, I often don't complete sentences. I once even admitted to this when asked the dreaded: 'What's your greatest weakness?' in a job interview - not a wise move!
• I have the bizarre gift of remembering extremely arb facts about arb people. This has occasionally served me very well, but most times just makes my husband roll his eyes when I say something like, 'that guy who parks his green van in the parking lot at the end of our road is the same guy who, with his wife, camped next to us at that isolated camping site that New Year's eve when I was pregnant and had a meltdown about how much our lives were about to change. You remember them, they also had that extremely annoying sausage dog and the matching his & hers hideous red Crocs, they were driving that van then. And it seems they actually live diagonally behind us and that's the same annoying dog which has been irritating us for years with it's unseen yapping behind the wall, how weird is that, and you know that baby we keep hearing who we think must only be a bit younger than ours? It's theirs! So they were probably also pregnant in that campsite on that NYE!'. By now husband is reeling at the arbness of it all and my ability to notice, and store, such arbness, but the scariest thing: the above really happened. I can't help it see.
• I'm very lazy. I am perfectly happy spending a whole day being bone idle in my pajamas reading a novel and eating toast. Perfectly and deliciously happy. Or I was last time I had the time to be lazy...
• I re-read beloved childhood books when I'm feeling sad or sick or just a little fragile. I've read the Little House series, Little Women and the Anne of Green Gables series more times than I can count. I love those girls so much that my Mum signed my 18th birthday card 'from Mum & Dad, Laura, Jo and Anne and all the other people who've watched you grow up'.

3. 5 things I would do if I became a billionaire:

• buy a massive piece of untamed wilderness in Africa, build my dream house and a number of other houses scattered about the property for my parents and visiting friends
• take all the trips I've ever dreamed of - motorbiking through Italy, 4x4-ing through South America, slow train across Asia
• finance and produce a bunch of gorgeous, gorgeous films
• become a benefactress and fund innovative and effective relief operations all over Africa
• find a cure for AIDS

4. 5 jobs I've had:

• waffle & sundae maker the summer after I completed high school, my then little brother would run to bury his face in my t-shirt every evening when I got home and declare that I smelt delicious
• wardrobe assistant in commercials assisting in dressing, amongst other characters, Tibetan monks, African dancers, people with giant bunny heads & hosts of Chinese school children
• conference coordinator on a conference during which - the hotel had a fire and all my delegates were evacuated, a delegate came down with meningitis and another miscarried, I lost, and found, 150 items of luggage within an hour, I exposed a meal ticket scam and persuaded the hotel to change a sit-down dinner for 600 to packed dinners for 600 to be ready in an hour (god I want to cry and then go to bed for a week just remembering this one)
• coordinating a promotional dinner where all the attendees got so coked up they left before dessert and myself and a colleague ate about 20 creme brulee each and nearly puked
• co-ordinating an international meeting on health where the host hotel was so ineffectual that I ended up throwing a box of garbage over the front reception desk in a fit of rage and, unbeknownst to me, in front of the attending World Health Organisation delegate. He applauded.

5. 5 of my favourite words:

• yummy
• ass
• zerbet
• lurid
• onomatopoeia