10 Day You Challenge: Eight Fears

1. Losing my job - Although it would be great to have a job closer to where we live (shorter commute, yes please!) I think my real fear is not having a second salary to help with the mortgage. When I think worst case scenarios where one of us loses our job, I picture our savings in terms of how many mortgage payments we could make. The weighty responsibility of being a homeowner!

2. Getting into a car accident. I've had one very minor fender bender in my past (which is about to drop off my driving record, woohoo) but I've had a series of near misses lately on 95. Close enough where the adrenaline gets pumping and I'm slightly freaked for the rest of the day. This means my driving has been very conservative in the past couple of months, for the better in some ways (enforcing a safe following distance) but slightly annoying in other ways (hitting the brakes compulsively at any hint of red).

3. Ghosts - Not going to lie, they're not something I actively think about but I have to admit a little part of me believes in haunted places. But I'm not tempted to test out this theory!

4. Aliens - Ditto on them. I know this makes me sound like a crackpot, but seriously people, our planet is a mere blip in the wide expanse of the universe and to me, it sounds arrogant to assume we're the only game in town. This doesn't necessarily mean I think they're "among us" but yes, I'll admit that I think they are somewhere out there. I think this is why I like watching alien movies of all types, because to me, they are truly scary because a part of me believes in them.

5. Cockroaches - Even their name sounds gross. I don't like how big they get, the way they move, the way they crunch when you step on them, the way they look, the way they get into everything! Knock on wood, but I haven't seen one in years. However, the couple of years we lived in Hawaii, monster-sized roaches would get into everything. Each night, if I had to get something from the kitchen, I would flip on the light and start clapping my hands to scare the suckers away. This isn't a knock on my mom's housecleaning skills, because they're in every house in Hawaii. There's also the time that I got out of the shower, grabbed my towel, and had a roach fall from it - true story and I think I'm scarred from the experience to this day.

6. Having surgery. This is another knock on wood moment, but I've never had surgery of any type (not including dental surgery). The worst injury that ever happened to me as a kid (or adult) was a sprained ankle. I can respect the field of medicine but just can't picture how I would handle lying in a hospital bed. Shudder.

7. Cooking a nutritious dinner every night for our future family. Seriously folks, it's a miracle some nights that Andrew and I eat a normal dinner that's not take-out. How is this going to work with little ones in the picture? I hope they like pizza as much as Andrew does. Or better yet, I train them young to cook and they end up making all the meals for Andrew and me. This could be turning into a "want" instead.

8. That I'm addicted to caffeine. Seriously.  I have a daily routine down on weekdays. One mug of cranberry green tea in the morning and one diet soda with lunch.  I started getting some fierce (migraine-like) headaches on the weekends that were always centered on the same part of my head. I started comparing differences between my weekdays and weekends, and realized that I don't drink caffeine some days on the weekends (especially since I'm not a coffee drinker).  So the relatively minor (in my opinion) amounts of caffeine I'm ingesting during the week are enough to cause severe withdrawal symptoms on the weekend - yikes! But I haven't been convinced to go cold turkey - yet. I need caffeine to survive mornings (and stay awake) in work!

10 Day You Challenge: Ten Secrets

I noticed this challenge popping up on some of the blogs I follow and decided it would be a good way to jump start my post writing again and for you, dear reader, to get to know me better. To tell you the truth, I have the biggest backload of post material but some days, I just give up wrangling with photos in the posts (Blogger has got to figure out a better way to make blogging easier.)

So I present to you, the:

This doesn't mean I will be blogging every day or avoiding unrelated posts in between, but I do intend on covering each of these ten challenges, in order, in the following weeks. So let's begin! In no particular order, I present my ten secrets:

1. I have never been able to do a cartwheel. Or do a proper dive for that matter.
2. My eyes are two different colors - one is more brown and one is more green. For simplicity's sake, I list hazel on most of my identification.  Most people don't notice it.
3. I think I'm in the wrong job. The older I get, the more I'm convinced that the perfect job for me is to work as a children's librarian. Despite my love of reading growing up, I still don't know why I didn't consider Library Science as a major. One, I don't think it was offered as a major at BC but two, I think I was seduced by the "glamour" of business and advertising.
4. Most of my readers know that I am a baker at heart, and only cook occasionally. After cooking a successful and delicious meal, I look at the dishes, the mess left behind and how much time I spent on the meal and I confess to thinking that it wasn't worth the effort! Which is probably why I don't cook very often. Yet, I'll spend HOURS decorating cupcakes and think it was worthwhile. Go figure.
5. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. I've never had the desire to, I think because of memories from growing up with neighborhood friends in Korea whose parents were heavy chain smokers.
6. I grind my teeth every night when I sleep. Loud enough that Andrew can hear it. It runs in my family because my mom does it too! Just like my profile says, it was part of the inspiration for my blog's name of Boston Chomper.
7. I don't eat most of what I bake - I probably taste around 20 percent of what I bake. I think it's partly because I'm baking stuff that I think others will like (which means heavy on chocolate) and partly because I get tired of something by the time I'm done making it. Also, I do make a conscious effort to not to bake things that I know I like a lot, just because I have no self control with snacking! Which is why my coworkers end up getting most of my baking leftovers.
8. I hate talking on the phone. I'll blame this on growing up on an Army base (Andrew says he hears this way too often) but I really think this is true. We lived in a very small base, so you were stuck seeing the same people every day. I'm talking more than your normal town. So I never really ended up making lots of calls as a teenager just because you knew you'd see the person the next day. To this day, I'm fine making calls at work but horrible with calling friends and family. I find phone calls to be awkward and in fact, I think I warned Andrew about this the first time we talked on the phone, yet he still asked me out on a date. :) 
9. My wedding ring is slightly too big but I refuse to get it resized, since I'm convinced that between having kids and life in general, it will eventually fit perfectly (in less delicate terms, my finger will get fatter). I don't see the point in having metal removed from it (very expensive metal) and then having to get it resized sometime in the future. This has never been a problem except for the time I washed my hands while at Amy's Halloween party last year and both of my rings flew off my wet fingers into a garbage can filled with empty syringes of jello shots. Andrew and I hauled the garbage can into the bathroom and had to dig through the whole thing to find my rings.  As a result, I've developed a habit of compulsively drying my ring finger and rings with a paper towel after I've washed my hands. Which can be pretty amusing on the rare days when I forget to wear my rings and I realize I'm drying off an empty finger. Note to self: find a store that sells some sort of rubber slip on thing to make my wedding ring fit better.
10. I'll confess that I have yet to apply for a library card in my new town, which is unheard of. I've lived here almost a year and never made it to the library.  I used to live next door to the Newton library (literally, the property I lived on touched part of the land belonging to the library) and I LOVE to read but between wedding planning and this sucky winter weather, I've relied strictly on my Kindle and Amazon e-books. This will need to be fixed soon!

Hope you've enjoyed this, I actually found it very hard to think of ten different secrets. I know these aren't exactly earth-shattering revelations but maybe you've learned something new about me today. I think the "nine loves" list is going to be much easier to develop!