Thursday Thirteen #333

Thirteen things I wish I had done differently growing up:

1. Watched my weight. Up until I married at the tender age of 20, I did not have a weight problem. It crept up on me after I took a bunch of hormones for infertility. Suddenly there was poundage.

2. Exercised. I have always been rather sedentary - give me a book over a jog any time. But I would have been much better off if I had fallen into a regular exercise routine when I was a teenager.

3. Learned to cook. I do okay - I can roast chicken, and follow most recipes, but I don't know how to make a soufflé or crème de anything. I would like to be able to fix real, wonderful, and healthy meals.

4. Learned how to eat healthily. This ties into to #1 and #3. I grew up in a household where as long as you weren't hungry, you were eating healthy. I thrived on bologna and catsup sandwiches for a time, along with gallons of southern sweet tea. To this day diet books stymy me. I can't for the life of me understand how one tiny little ounce of chocolate can turn into 13 pounds. Seemingly overnight. It's like the worst kind of magic, with Aunt Clara performing a nose twitch with a broken wand.

Me in 2012.

5. Gone to college right out of high school. I obtained my BA 12 years after I graduated from high school, and my masters only two years ago, just barely managing to finish before I turned 50. I wish I had gone on and received a Ph.d. and become a college professor sometimes. I think I probably would have been good at it.

6. Learned to be less introverted. I am very shy and quiet (though some might think otherwise) and I do make friends easily. I love a lot of people and feel warmly toward even more, but I am not a person people call with invites for luncheons or anything much else, for that matter. This is a skill I think I could have learned easier when I was younger. I might still learn more about it now, but I think it's too late for it to make a major impact.

Some of my blogging friends when we met in RL in 2009.

7. Learned more "crafty" things. I am not very good at such things as painting, sewing, or creating stuff from broken whatevers. I have done some cross-stitch in the past and it was passable but nothing to write home about. The best compliment my art professor in college could come up with generally was "that is a nice line there," when she looked at my work. One nice line out of bunches of squiggles.

8. Kept less stuff. I am not up to hoarder status, thank goodness, but I do tend to be a packrat, especially with things like books and papers. Now I need to get rid of it.

9. Kept a list of books I've read. I did not start doing this until about 2007, and I have read at least 50 books a year every year of my life. So my list should have 2000 or more books on it, instead of about 450. I can't remember every book I ever read, that's for sure.

10. Spent more time outside. I was an indoor girl, always had my nose in a book, and while I would occasionally take a walk through the fields and forests that surrounded the farm I grew up on, I did not partake of them as I should have. Nor do I do this today as frequently as I would like. Things need to become habits.

11. Spent time looking at the spiritual side of life. I was raised outside of an established religion and my spiritual examinations, which did not really occur until later in life, have been and continue to be all over the place. I wish I had started sooner. I don't have time to cover them all now, much less truly understand anything.

Trillium.

12. Learned the names of herbs, flowers, birds, and other wildlife. I have learned some of this over the years but I would love to be able to walk out in the field and say, "this is a dewdrop" or "this an anemone" or "this is bloodroot" or "this is a trillium" or "that bird is a spotted watusy doing the meringue" or whatever. Instead I have to take a field guide with me and look things up.

13. Continued to speak and study foreign languages. I had three years of Spanish and a year of Latin in high school, and while I remember a few Spanish phrases, I've forgotten most everything I learned. There is no way I could carry on a conversation in Spanish, and I regret that.



Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here. I've been playing for a while and this is my 333nd time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.