ACK! I've Been Tagged!

by Heather Horrocks

Sorry I missed my last day of blogging . . . I’ve been switching my email and didn’t get the reminders and, therefore, didn’t remember to blog. (Bless you for setting up the reminders!) And I hope this is my day, because I don’t remember getting a reminder about it -- but Marsha said, yes, it was my day. So if I blog onto someone else’s toes, please accept my abject apology in advance!

Marsha also told that Terry Deighton tagged me to reveal five little-known facts about myself. I would tag others; however, I’ve been out of the loop between my old unreliable networld and my new hopefully reliable msn, so I haven’t been able to read the tagging as it’s gone on each day, so I could easily duplicate. So I’ll just tag everyone else : ) . . . Okay, maybe that’s too extreme.

Hmm . . . Five little-known facts about me . . .

I think most of you probably know I was raised overseas. And my husband and I, between us, have nine kids (what?!?). But I’ll look for more obscure info. Taking a trip now, back on memory lane . . .

1. When things were heating up between Israel and the rest of the Middle Eastern world (no, I’m not talking about now, but decades ago, right before the Six-Day War), my family lived in Kuwait, long before anyone in the U.S. knew where that was. My parents had checked with the American Embassy to see if it was safe for my mother and children to travel to the U.S. and they assured us it was. So we took off in Kuwait and landed at the Egypt airport--which happened to be blacked out. (Not a good sign.) The plane took off just minutes before the airport was bombed. When we arrived at our hotel in Rome, there was an urgent telegram from my father, who wanted to make sure we had survived the bombing.

2. I’m a little shy, too, though it might not come across always, so I don’t always go introduce myself to new people at church (well, I’m too busy rushing from playing the organ in Sacrament Meeting to the Primary room to play the piano there and then, after the block, rushing to the chapel to play the piano for the choir, so I don’t get much talking to anybody time in church : ) but I like to see who needs help that I could do something for. For example, a few years ago a young woman in her 30s with three little children (and another one on the way) had her husband go for nine months of training in prosthetics in California. He was living with her parents there and she was alone here, working to pay all the bills until he could get done and support their family and she could stay home with her family. My husband and I told her that for the entire nine months (since she had no family here), she was invited to Sunday dinner every week. So we had her family over for dinner each Sunday and she became a dear friend. They’ve moved on to California now. And I feel good every time I think about what my family did for her family. And, as I am facing something now with one of my children that is quite ugly (sigh), I’ve realized it’s time to reach out to someone else and take my focus off myself for awhile.

3. I don’t like icky crawling things. My father used to have to stomp on the cockroaches when we lived in South America. We didn’t have cockroaches in the Middle East (either it was so horribly hot that it fried their little brains or else they had some top-notch exterminators), but we had them in South America, even on our nice 11th floor apartment we had. Spiders are icky, too, but I still prefer them over insects that you can crunch--and they still keep moving. ICK! ‘Nuff said. Why did I bring them up? We also had some really cool pets while we lived in South America -- monkeys, parrots, and a little deer that regularly got stolen and then, so very coincidentally, resold to my father every few weeks (I’m so glad he bought it back each time!).

4. I play the piano to relax and because I love it. I played for a cantata that I also wrote the narrative to and the lyrics to four or five of the songs (‘Joseph and Emma in Harmony’) and we performed it in the Provo Tabernacle. Not many people know that fact : ) I even got roses afterward, which was really cool. And I acted out of faith, because I was really scared that I couldn’t handle playing at that level, but yet there was a feeling of peace because I felt like I could do it (and I did, thank goodness).

5. I fried an egg on the sidewalk in Kuwait to see if that saying was true (it is, at least in Kuwait where it’s 130 or 140 in the shade : ). I was a pre-teen at the time and I didn’t eat the egg (just in case any of you are wondering : ).

So there you have it. Five until-now-unknown facts about me. Hope you’ve enjoyed them. And now I’m going to send this while it’s still my day (at least I hope it’s my day!). I will get more organized! I will, I will, I will! (That’s probably a well-known fact about me, that I need to get more organized.)

Heather