My sweet, tough, fellow gin-loving friend Hillary tagged me in a post, and challenged me to write five things that you may not know about me. I am a sucker for things like this, as you might have suspected. I am always bad at keeping track of what I've told to whom, though, so I have no idea if these are things you already know. At any rate, here goes.
1. I love food and cooking and all kinds of cuisines. But that wasn't always the case. Until I was about 15 (or maybe later, I'm not quite sure), I would pretty much only eat burgers in restaurants. Pasta or chicken fingers were fine, too, but I really didn't know what to do with myself if there wasn't a burger on a menu. The first time I went out for Thai food, I ordered some kind of grilled chicken and asked for it plain. I was totally missing out! Now I eat just about anything with glee.
2. I was a big athlete as a kid. I played softball and basketball for years and years, and was completely obsessed with gymnastics up until I was 12 or 13. I did handstands and round-offs wherever I went.
3. I love the first bite of anything triangular. Pie, pizza, cake: there is something beautiful and perfect about that first, perfect, triangular little bite (running out of adjectives here). My husband sometimes lets me have his, which is how you know this is true love. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that it's pie season.
4. When I was little, I was always cooking and experimenting. When I grew up I wanted to have a shop called Caitlin's Candy Corner. My mom would help me in the kitchen and my handy Dad would help me build all the shelves and display cases. It was a pretty solid business plan, if you ask me.
5. When I was around 3, I told my Mom I wanted to learn another language. She's not sure where I got that idea, but she somehow found me some French language tapes (not bad for the suburban, pre-internet 80s). I don't remember that, exactly, but I do remember wishing I could talk to anyone, no matter what language they spoke, and spending time thinking about that. I also longed for a notebook (I didn't know that was what they wwere called), to write in. I kept opening my books, hoping they would somehow suddenly contain blank paper. They didn't, so I settled for scribbling in a Strawberry Shortcake book. I can't say that my love for languages, reading, and writing has changed much, though I no longer deface reading material. I majored in Spanish, studied abroad in Spain for a year, came home and started studying German (my brain had a very hard time switching from English to German without first stopping on Spanish. I might be the only native English speaker who spoke German with a Castillian accent.), and I came very close to going to a grad program for linguistics. I got in but didn't go, for various reasons, and now I'm here. Isn't it funny how we can trace some things back?