Getting a Bit Personal

After three years blogging here, I rarely post photos of me or discuss my life, because this blog really isn’t about me. But there were so many clicks on a photo of us at the Taj Mahal that I recently posted on Pinterest, I thought I’d share a bit. Plus I’ll be at Haven in a few weeks, meeting so many of the people behind the blogs I visit and I’m really looking forward to that.

So okay here goes …

Here we are at the Taj Mahal – we were lucky to visit on a voting day when there weren’t many people there:

Here’s a few facts, maybe some of them are weird:

• Oceans are pretty in pictures but ever since the big tsumani, I irrationally think laying on the beach will be safe … until the water lunges up and grabs me and drags me into the ocean. Maybe I drowned in a former life? I don’t like water, so I don’t care about beachy island vacations.
• But I love being in the air. My husband flies small airplanes and we’ve flown dogs to new adoptive homes for Pilots n’ Paws. Here are some dogs we helped:

They are so much fun to fly!

Cats can fly too. Here we took my boy Chaai to Michigan. He’s wearing “Mutt Muffs” to protect his ears from the noise. The engines of these small planes are so loud. But Chaai doesn’t really like flying like this so we won’t make him do it again:

• I’ve also jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and gone skydiving. Loved it! It’s so peaceful and quiet up there. I’d do it again. Anyone want to go?

• I have a graduate degree in public health (from University of Michigan, anyone else go there?) and that’s my real job. I work on traffic safety because I used to work in a place where a lot of people died from car crashes. Here’s my LinkedIn profile that talks about that work.
• I suffer from extreme wanderlust. The next places I want to go are Myanmar and Istanbul.
• I believe in ghosts and communication after death. Some things have happened to me, otherwise I might not believe.
• We don’t have kids. I had infertility problems. Thankfully health insurance in Illinois paid for treatments, but three rounds of IVF went so poorly, I decided that was enough. Really, by our mid to late 30s, biologically we’re designed to be grandparents by then!
• We started an international adoption home study but all the country changes going on at the time (Nepal unstable, Guatemala problems, Vietnam open then close, China changes, etc.) made more and more people apply for the India program which dramatically lengthened the India time. Really, we have many other interests to fill our lives and what was happening with adoption was not in our control, and I don’t believe in letting things I can’t control, in turn, control my life. (Except my fear of water controls vacation decisions! ha ha) So we realized instead of improving the life of one child, we can have the resources to improve the lives of many, many children someday. What we will do that truly has an impact on children, I’m still figuring out, and we’ll likely do something in India.
• I’m an E/INTJ on Meyers-Briggs scale. Exactly halfway between extrovert and introvert which is confusing sometimes – do I need to be alone? Do I need to be around lots of people? It changes all the time. Gah! But on the thinking scale, I’m around a 19 with a 1 for feeling. Totally off-balance. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings, I just don’t make decisions based on feelings. Sometimes I have to be careful to not sound like an a**hole because of that. My husband is also an ENTJ. Which is probably why what I wrote above about infertility and adoption reads the way it does – a little dispassionate. I’m totally aware of that. I tried to soften it up but I can’t – that’s really the story and how I think about it. We are just more focused on “What are we gonna do about it?” rather than “Look at what this is doing to us.”
• On a lighter note, I love celebrity gossip! I’m a fan of the “smut” at Lainey Gossip – she writes gossip for the thinking woman. You get the idea from Lainey that Britney Spears is an “owned” woman far beyond her conservatorship. She’s human but maybe moreso, she is a product for a big business. You get a peek into how much celebrities manipulate news about them. And Lainey’s recent post showing Jennifer Aniston in a mousy hair wig shows what a huge difference great hair can make. Great hair can make you look like a celebrity. In regular ol’ hair, Jennifer looks like us non-celebrities.

Hmmm … I gotta go work on improving my hair now. It’s long like Jennifer’s but looks nothing like her hair!