“Your sins will always find you out.”

I don’t remember when my mother first said this to me, but I remember doubting whether it was true. How would anyone know what I did if no one saw it? I believed I could cover up the mistake and no one would be the wiser. It never worked! I couldn’t figure out how she always knew when I’d done something wrong! As I got older, I just gave up trying, for the most part. I remember a time (I was maybe 10 years old) when I was horsing around near the piano and broke one of her little wooden angels she had bought in Germany. There was no one around, so I put the angel back up on the piano, towards the back so it would be less noticeable and went on about my business. There was no reason to tell that I had broken something, right? It might be weeks before anyone noticed, and then how could they pin it on me? The rest of the day, the phrase echoed around in my mind: Your SINS will ALWAYS find you out! Your SINS will ALWAYS find you out! Finally, I just had to go tell her, because I knew she would find out anyway.

I appreciate the fact that there was no punishment for wrong-doing as I was growing up without the reminder that it’s always better to just be honest and straightforward when you make mistakes. This advice is as applicable in the playroom as it is in the boardroom.

1. I love sad songs and sad movies. The sadder and more pathetic, the better. Think Sophie’s Choice or Whiskey Lullaby.
2. My hair was straight as a board when I was little and the older I get, the more curly it gets – it’s crazy.
3. I have an explosive, violent temper. I can be really patient and really calm and even-tempered for a long, long time, but when something sets me off I am driven to break and throw things. For example, I threw the remote control at my husband while I was pregnant and hormonal. Not a good quality at all.
4. I can find a silver lining in almost anything. I believe that no matter how negative something seems, you can always find something good about it. (Except having a bad temper. There’s nothing good about that.)
5. My nickname in college was Pavaranda, given to me by a non-opera singing friend whose only knowledge of the opera world was the name Pavarotti.
6. I studied Italian in Rome for a month in my mid-20′s.
7. The first guy I *thought* I wanted to marry had the last name of Large. I’m thankful that didn’t work out. My parents are too.
8. I can spin a pen around my thumb. I learned to do it in a boring high school English class, and have distracted and frustrated college professors, co-workers and piano students with the trick ever since. I can even do both hands at once. I believe it to be an essential life skill.

Anyone else want to participate in this meme? Send me a link to your post and I’ll add it to this one so we can all check it out!

1. Anne of Green Gables Series, by L.M. Montgomery – great books for girls of all ages
2. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis – wonderful for all ages as well
3. Little House on the Prairie Series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder – girls of any age should enjoy these

I have others of course, but I’ll stop at three. What are your favorite books?

My worst job ever has to be the paper route I threw for a year in college. It was the Dallas Morning News and it had to be delivered in the middle of the night. I would get up about 2am, go to the place where the papers were delivered, roll them, bag them and load them up in my 1979 El Camino and take off. I had about 180 papers on the weekdays and about 250 on weekends to deliver in neighborhoods and apartments. I would finish about 4am and get home to sleep for a couple of hours before I had to get up for my 8am class. On the weekends it took longer because I couldn’t get all the papers in the pickup and had to go back for a reload. Those suckers were HEAVY on Sundays- 7-8″ thick rolled up. It was a challenge to get them from out the car window and up onto the yard, or up to the 3rd floor landing at the apartment complexes. The worst times were when it rained and I and the car would get completely soaked, and/or when it was cold (about the coldest it got in Denton, TX was in the upper 20′s). You can’t roll papers in gloves, so my hands froze. The pay was also pretty bad. Every once in a while I was able to get someone to help me out and do the driving. I would sit ensconced atop the giant pile of newspapers and yell “turn right!”, “take the next left!” etc… I’m sure it would have been an amusing sight for anyone who looked out their front window by chance at 3:30am!

I had a couple of other terrible ones in college, including teaching voice lessons to 7th grade boys who didn’t want to be there and whose voices were changing, and temping in a 2nd shift job at a place that made little rubber pieces for cars in the middle of the summer in Texas with very little air conditioning. I don’t regret having any of these jobs though. Doing things like that and sticking to it gives you a much better perspective when things don’t go quite your way in the cushy job in the cubicle farm. It could always be worse. Much worse.

Here are some others who’ve had some terrible jobs:

Katelyn at WorkinginPJs.com