Honest Scrap Award

Thanks to my dear friend, L, at Meinsideout for nominating me for this award. Sadly both L and I are recurrent miscarriers, but happily we are now both expecting twins! This award gives me a chance to share with the blogosphere ten things that you don't know about me. Although I find these things somewhat narcisstic, I also enjoy reading them about others. So, here goes with 10 things about me ...

1. I have a Master's degree in Wildlife Biology from UGA and did my research on small mammals (e.g., rats and mice)--this is what funded my graduate studies and paid my bills. Although I am a self-proclaimed girly girl, I can get my hands quite dirty. I'm not afraid of mice, rats, snakes, worms, spiders, bats, or anything else creepy crawly (well except fish I have an aversion to touching fish--it's weird I know).

2. I once woke up to a mouse in my bed. In my groggy state of being half-asleep I heard our cat, Elvis, growling, which he only does when he has a mouse and doesn't want Asha (the other cat) to take it from him. Despite not being afraid of mice (see #1) I didn't like the thought of a live mouse crawling under the covers on my legs, so I bolted out of bed, ran out of the room, slammed the door, and left J in the bed with the cats and mouse. Mind you J is scared to death of mice and wasn't pleased with me in the slightest bit!

3. I once got stopped by a police officer when I was picking up a dead coyote on the side of the road in Georgia. I was with three girlfriends and all three of us were done up in full makeup as we'd just come from a Mary Kay party. At the time I was a grad student in wildlife biology and was required to make study skins (think taxidermy) and was desperate for specimens that I didn't have to kill myself. I mainly "stuffed" mice because they were readily available (refer to #1) and easier to catch. I didn't end up using the coyote as it was a lot more work than the mice, but one of the other girls "stuffed" it. Seriously, can you imagine what this officer said to his colleagues when he went back to the station?! LMAO!

4. After graduate school I worked in wildlife epidemiology studying West Nile virus. My job was to travel around Southeastern US trapping/netting birds to collect blood samples to establish the spread of West Nile virus.

5. I'm a total science nerd! I LOVE to read research and I love to critique it! It's quite normal to hear me speak of replicated studies, small sample sizes, uncontrolled experiments, biased data, etc...

6. I am ridiculously attracted to bad boy, Collin Farrell--yum! I think he's a terrible actor, but I find him to be extremely sexy. It's funny because I would never, ever want to date someone with a bad boy personality like his, but I still like to fantasize about him. (And yes I did see his sex tape--J actually downloaded it for me one Valentine's day. I was simultaneously aroused and turned off by it. If you watch it, turn off the volume and you'll enjoy it more! The eye candy is nice (and big), but he says some ridiculous things!)

7. I'm obsessed with plucking my eyebrows. I like shapely eyebrows that aren't too thin and aren't too bushy, but just right. I can't stand to see the little black hairs poking out of the skin, which makes waxing impossible, so I have to pluck my eyebrows at least every other day.

8. I'm a detail-oriented perfectionist to a falt. I waste countless hours of time fixing seemingly insignificant things. For example, I'll spend hours on a Power.Point presentation just fixing the font, bullets, spacing, etc, so it's all the same/uniform. My good friend and colleague, E.L., calls this "Nikifying" things. I call it wasting time, yet I can't seem to let it go. J always tells me I "focus on the trees and miss the forest", but in my opinion what he doesn't realize is that without the individual trees there wouldn't be a forest!

9. I am super self-conscious about my body. I've struggled with body image issues my whole life and always see myself as "fat" no matter what size I am, including when I'm a size 1/2 (I'm now a size 5/6, but determined to get back to a size 3/4). It's something I've been working on improving my whole adult life. I do NOT want to my children to grow up disliking their bodies because they hear me saying negative things about myself, which is why I'm working hard to change this.

10. Although I'm embarrassed to admit this, I'm annoyed with people who speak poorly and have terrible grammar. I find myself judging them as ignorant, unintelligent, and uneducated. This is definitely one of my weaknesses. I dislike judgemental people and yet here I do it myself, so I'm working on this.

I would like to nominate K for this award and hope that next week she'll post 10 things about herself for us to read. I also nominate the following bloggers for this award:

Kris at Looking for Another Angel
Meg at No Oven for the Bun
B at No Regrets
Jaymee at Our Surrogacy Adventure
Infertile in the City
Kate at From Infertility to Baby
Becca at Into the Light Again