Tag Results: Pickles, Life Coaches, Mah Jong, Swimming, 1984

Thanks, Sarah, for tagging me.

Five things about me you (perhaps) don’t already know:

1. I loved them before I was pregnant, but damn, I crave half-sour pickles like nobody’s business. I buy them six- or eight-at-a-time at a local grocery store that’s a bit pricier than the nearby Stop-and-Shop, but no one else seems to carry these beauties. I’m talking about the fat green pickles sold at the deli counter, not the jarred pickles sold in the refrigerated section.

2. I’ve talked to two life coaches in the past year to try to figure out why I’m not moving forward on different writing projects. Both told me they thought I was motivated and had done a lot of groundwork on both of them, but that I just needed to make finishing them a priority. Sort of like scheduling a date night with your husband so that you can actually have fun, pleasurable sex, I need to set deadlines so I can move these projects ahead. On one hand, I think the concept of having a life coach is sort of cool, just like an athletic coach inspires athletes to do their best. On the other hand, I wonder why I can’t just get motivated enough to finish these damn things on my own. Insight, anyone?

3. I play Mah Jong, an Asian game played with these cool ivory tiles, in a weekly game with a bunch of friends. At first, I wondered if I was turning into my mother, who always played Mah Jong, or like others who have a weekly Bridge or Poker or Canasta game. But since I’ve learned the ropes, I’m hooked. It’s actually fun even though we never play for money. I’m told it’s a lot like playing Gin with cards, though I’ve never played Gin.

4. I swam on my high school (and earlier, my town) swim teams for a few years. This was in the mid-1980s, pre-pump, and I rarely tested my blood sugars. I don't really remember having insulin reactions, but remember eating big snacks before I went to afternoon practices. It’s odd, that I don’t remember having major insulin reactions, but again, this was in the days of long-action (NPH and regular) insulin and my average blood sugars were probably pretty high those days. At the same time, I wasn’t particularly fast or much of a finessed swimmer, so I wonder if my performance was because I wasn’t built to swim for speed, or if my blood sugar control just wasn’t that tight. Probably a combination of both.

5. I won a town-wide eighth-grade speech contest back in 1984. I competed in the “original oratory” category, and wrote an original speech about how the (then) present-day 1984 was similar to the book 1984. I won a plaque and a blue ribbon and performed the speech in front of a big audience (about 40 other eighth graders competed that day). I never did anything quite like that again (no high school debate team for me), but today, I don’t have any trouble speaking before a crowd.

A lot of the d-bloggers I read have already been tagged, so I'll stretch out to some of the Cyclesistas I now read. Tags mean you write a post about five things about yourself. Tags out to:

Violet at Pumplandia
Serenity at Serenity Now!
Gary at My Diabetes CGMS
Heather at Big P and Me
Watson at My Dear Watson