Monday Madness

August 14

1. How many "people" pictures do you have displayed in your house?

Not too many. I'm an anomaly in my family; there's a rogue's gallery in everyone else's house somewhere. I find it rather repellent. In the living room here, there is one silhouette of Sparky as a toddler, and one photo of my in-laws (woops, nope, it's gone...hmmm...replaced by a watercolor done by a friend), and a couple of pictures of The Boys upstairs in my bedroom. That's it. I'm weird; there's just no getting around it.

2. How many times a month/year do you rearrange your furniture?

I'm the daughter of a compulsive mover-arounder. I like rearranging furniture, but I'm lazy, so it doesn't happen that often. Mom always just shoved it around till it fit. I tend to (hello, compulsiveness), make scale drawings and cut out little paper scaled-down furniture and play "paper dolls" with it all.

In fact, I was just thinking about doing this upstairs in our room. I have this idea about moving the dressers over there and the bed over here and uh...Beast! A little help here!!?

Someone I once worked with told me her mom rearranged the furniture so often that they never knew, when the arrived home from school, what they'd find where, and who they'd be sharing a bedroom with! That's just crazy (and so was this coworker).

3. Do you check your email every day? If so, how many times a day?

I check my gmail constantly, although I have a little popup at work to tell me if something comes in. My Outlook is usually open at work too. Our home email I don't check that often, because we don't get much fun stuff there. The others, maybe once a week takes care of them. It's mostly spam anyway.

4. How often do you generally look at a clock/watch on any given day?

Constantly. Really, probably 6-8 times an hour. I'm overly time-conscious, and rarely do I not know exactly what time it is.

Also, my watch has a date in it, so I refer to it for that too.

A former pastor--who was OCD like me about time--said that on vacations his wife made him take his watch off for the duration. Aaaarghhhhh!!! NO!

5. How do you handle telemarketer phone calls?

We have caller ID, so we don't answer if we don't recognize the number (or if it's blocked). Most of our friends know this, so they just leave a message. The phone I'm NOT compulsive about; I have no problem ignoring the ring. On the rare occasions when I do take the call, I just hang up as soon as I hear that tell-tale pause before they speak. It makes me happy to be able to do that.

We had a rash of calls from an 800 number last month; I finally answered, let the chick get through her spiel and just said, politely, "Put us on Do Not Call" and hung up. They haven't called back. Yay.