Ten Sunshine Things About Me

Here is the wind-up to the conditions outlined Paula Tohline Calhoun’s Monday Joy post in Reflections from a Cloudy Mirror…ten happy things about me that you might not have known.  This post is the sequel to Yikes, Another Award!

1.  Most people don’t know that I am the mother of two incredibly talented children, not kids anymore, although they always will be kids to me.  My daughter Laurie is working on her Master’s in biology and is already a P.Biol. with her own consulting business, servicing a lot of the oil industry (making sure they leave their oil well sites as clean and with as little impact on the ecology as possible).  In Canada, that is government-enforced.  My son Tom is an oilfield accountant.

2.  I am meeting Tom’s girlfriend for the first time in two weeks.  I am very excited, because she and I have corresponded online and I like her very much.

3.  I have been married three times and not one of them was a Canadian!  The first was a Scotsman.  Being married to him was like watching a Brit movie…I didn’t understand a word the man said for the first 10 months 😛

4.  The second husband was a sweet young New Zealander with another lovely accent.  It was more understandable though.  He couldn’t handle the age difference and my disabilities, but I didn’t blame him.  We had fun while it lasted, played like kids and relaxed.

5.  The third husband is a little closer to home, although he still has an accent.  Wertaf (his role-playing game name) is an American…naturally he insists that I’m the one who has an accent, and this even while we are living in the heartland of Canada lol  He’s a keeper.  We’ve been married almost five years now.  He is considerably younger than me but doesn’t seem it 🙂

6.  At the age of five, while my dad was away on a fishing trip with the other game wardens to get enough food for the sled dogs for the winter, my mom and I ran out of food.  We were living 52 miles from the nearest habitations and our two-way radio was broken.  I scouted out coveys of partridge sitting on tree branches, ran back to Mom to guide her to them.

7.  Mom shot a rifle that she had never shot before, and I cleaned and dressed the birds that she accidentally killed (she wasn’t a very good shot, but I was too small to hold the gun).  We feasted on roast partridge, baked partridge, fried partridge, broiled partridge, partridge stew, etc.  for a couple of weeks until our winter supply of food arrived. 

Flag of Calgary (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

8.  I was the all-night DJ on a large middle-of-the-road music station for a few years in Calgary, Alberta, Canada back in the ’70s and ’80s.  I had a party every night.  When the kids were staying with me (they were quite small then), I bedded them down on the plush carpet in the client music room.  It had a radio monitor and they could listen to me on air while they fell asleep.  They loved doing that and were quite proud of me for being a DJ.  Apparently that is quite cool.

9.  My mom managed to stay awake until midnight every night that I was on air.  I would play one of her favorite songs right after the news (she loved “Music Box Dancer” by Frank Mills, so it got more airplay than it actually should have 😛 ).  Then she would feel peaceful and drift off to sleep.

10.  I used to be an amateur long distance swimmer.  The longest distance I ever swam was five miles.  I was pretty tired at the end of that, but I loved doing it.  One of my girlhood heroes was Marilyn Bell, who was a Canadian Olympic swimmer and the first women to swim across Lake Ontario.  Imagine!  I didn’t have dreams as big as that.  I was just glad I could swim my five miles.

There ya have it, folks.  Ten little known facts outside my family and close friends.   Remember, you read it here first!

And with that, I have fulfilled all three of the Sunshine Award requirements.  Thank you all for your support and encouragement.