Blast to the past

Deb and Patti have both tagged me so I suppose I can no longer avoid this.....7 things that people don't know about me......how about some childhood stories?

1. I was a Junior Olympic archery winner when I was a kid. Yep, it's true. The chunky little girl with coke bottle glasses, the one who couldn't do anything athletic to save her soul. The one for whom the "mandatory 2 innings of play" rule (in softball) was surely invented.
My dad set us up with this, cannot imagine where he got the idea, but he took me and my brother to this archery place every Saturday morning. We had to get up really early to drive there. Dad was serious about it too, even bought bales of hay for our basement and set up a small range - we had a ranch house so our basement was pretty long and we could practice down there. It absolutely defied logic that I was good at this, truly I was such a clumsy backwards child. But my hand/eye coordination is still good as evidenced by my "shooting" on my nephew's Nintendo Wii. I stunned (and scared!) my husband a couple weeks ago when we were in Memphis. Ha!
2. I learned to play the cello between my sophomore and junior years in high school. I had always wanted to play a string instrument ever since the 4th grade when we were tested for musical aptitude. I apparently flunked the test and the school administrators told my parents it wasn't worth their money to provide any musical lessons for me. Can you imagine!?!? Lucky for me my parents didn't take kindly to hearing this and told me I could start with the piano since we already owned a really old one that had been given to us. So, in the first of my many defy the odds stubborn acts, I taught myself to play the piano using a key chart and a piano primer that I found in the bench. That led my parents to sign me up for private piano lessons. And then in high school the string instrument bug came back; I wanted to play the viola. I met with the orchestra director who told me he could really use another a cello player. I took a crash course with lessons all summer long so I was up to speed by the time the school year started. To this day cello music makes me swoon.
3. I raised a baby sparrow when I was 12. He fell out of the nest and was abandoned. I fed him by hand then released him to the yard when he was old enough, tried to train him to find food, etc. He eventually left our house but would visit and I could still get him to eat from my hand.
4. I had strange premonitions when I was young. One day I was walking home from the school bus and told my best friend I had a feeling something horrible had happened to someone in my family. When I got home my mother told me that my uncle (healthy, in his 30's) had a heart attack and died. I also have this really weird ability to find lost items. When I was in my teens I made a little leather bracelet for myself, just a strap of leather with one painted bead on it. I wore it to a concert in a park near our home. There were thousands of people there. Naturally I lost it and was simply demolished because I loved that bracelet so much. The next morning I told my mom I was going to go find it. She laughed about it, said I could make another one, etc. Basically told me to knock myself out but doubted I would find it. I walked the approximately one mile route to the park in an attempt to retrace my steps and easily found the bracelet nestled in the grass.
5. In the 8th grade I had the art teacher from Hell, Miss Siemer. She was a young teacher and very mean. Clearly she preferred the boys in our classroom. I was accustomed to getting high grades in all my classes, but especially art. She was horrid to me, told me I was no good, had no talent and should simply abandon any ideas of any artistic future. I was in a vulnerable awkward state that year and unfortunately I believed her. It destroyed my artistic notions for years and years and sent me in the direction of writing and music. But.....my last effort in her class was a pop art piece, a huge replica of a Kool-aid packet. My parents still have it, hung in their rec room basement along with some of my other early artistic endeavors such a painted plaque next to their pool table with some pithy "rules for play" and this fun "rubbing" piece I made in black and white. I love that Kool-aid packet and am so happy my Mom is a pack rat and keeps all this stuff.
6. Hunting for morel mushrooms was a family activity we did every year on Mother's day. My Grandpa Schaich had a secret spot, out in Indiana near a Dairy Queen because we got ice cream afterwards. Grandpa would walk with slow deliberate steps and would, without fail, find the first mushroom. He would leave it in it's place and call us all around so we could see what to look for. Once we saw that, it was easier to spot them and we would find lots of these decadent delicacies.
7. I hate raw onions. I mean I really hate raw onions. Like I will gag if one gets in my mouth. This stems from a Home Eck incident in high school. One where we were supposed to make potato soup yet we were not given enough time. It was a partner project and I cannot recall what went wrong. All I know for sure is the soup was not even remotely cooked and had way too many onions in it. Out teacher forced us to eat our own soup and I thought I was going to be sick there were so many raw onions in it.

Ok, that's it for me, probably more than anyone wanted to know, ha, ha.