The Book of ME: Part 3

I'm taking  part in a meme, "The Book of Me Written by YOU," started by Julie Goucher of Anglers Rest. This week's prompt is:  Describe your physical self.

Your size – clothes size

Scars

Eye colour

Draw your hands

Finger Prints

Clothes size?  Oh, no.  Let's just skip this one, shall we?  Though I have lost about 7 pounds in the last two weeks, having cut out refined carbohydrates (mainly grains and grain products).  Next question!

Scars.  I have a scar from a tubal ligation in 1972, a scar on my right knee from when I fell off my bicycle in a gravel parking lot when I was about 10, scars from various biopsies and one large scar on the back of my right leg where a skin cancer was removed, and a mark of my generation: a smallpox vaccination scar on my left bicep.  I also have various small scars on my arms which prove that cat bathing is a martial art.  And I have a set of "railroad tracks" left on my right boob by my cat!

Eye color.  Green with brown.

Draw my hands?  Nah, I am NO artist.  However, I have large hands for a woman my size.  I also have a large frame, though I'm only 5'4" tall.  I never gave a thought to the size of my hands until my husband bought me a pair of gloves for Christmas.  I tried to put them on, and couldn't.  They were too small.  He was surprised, as he said they were standard women's gloves.  I held my hand up and told him to hold his hand against mine.  We were both rather startled to see that my hands are the same size as his!  He stands 5'9 1/2" and is not slight of build.  The best part of that came when our younger daughter wanted to buy him a pair of gloves for Christmas some years later.  She took me along as a "hand model," and the gloves she bought him fit perfectly!

Finger prints:  on file with the City of Jacksonville, Florida (I was a city employee, a librarian at the public library); the Clay County School Board (I was a substitute teacher for a brief while); the Internal Revenue Service (for which I worked for a couple of years); and the United States Coast Guard, in which I served both active duty and reserve.

Now, aren't you glad you know that?
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The Book of ME: Part 2

This is the second of the series of memes devised by Julie Goucher of Angler's Rest.  This week it's all about the natal day:

This week's prompt:
   Prompt 2: Your Birth
    Do you have any baby photos?
    Where were you born?
    Who was present at your birth?
    Dimensions?
    What day was it? Time?
    Did you have hair? Eye colours

Do I have baby photos?  You bet!  Here I am in a photo taken in Hollywood, so it's a true glamor shot!

"And I want to thank my parents, and my brother and sister, and my agent . . ."

All right.  Enough of that.

I was born at the United States Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California.  It's no longer there, at least not as a Navy hospital.  I have two birth certificates: one from the State of California and another from the Naval Hospital.  The latter one is filled out in my mother's handwriting, and has my little baby footprints on the back!

I would imagine my mother was present at my birth.  (Pardon the Packard-Reed sense of humor.)  I don't know if my father was there or not, and there's nobody around to ask who would know.  I think he probably was, though, even though by that time it was all old hat -- I was the third and last.  Also present was the doctor who delivered me.  My documents are at home, and I am not, so I cannot look up the doctor's first name, but his last name was McNulty, and he was the brother of a popular singer of the day (1947), Dennis Day (whose real name was Dennis McNulty).

I do not know how long I was, nor specifically how much I weighed, which was somewhere around 6 lbs.  The time of birth was around 6 p.m.  I am a Saturday's Child -- supposedly, I work hard for a living.

From the photo above, you can see I had a little hair.  My eyes then were probably the usual baby blue-grey, but my eye color now is green.

The Book of Me: Who Am I?

This comes from Julie Goucher's Angler's Rest blog. She is beginning a series of weekly blogging prompts. Who knows? It just might get me back up and running again (while I'm inundated with a ton of reading and several projects in grad school). (With thanks to Julie Goucher, and to Bill West of West in New England , on whose Facebook post I saw this.)

Every so often, we in genealogy need to pause in our hunt for others and take a look at ourselves.  After all, the procedure in genealogy -- what I teach to people in my presentations on beginning genealogy -- is to begin with ourselves.

"This week's prompt: 

1. Ask yourself 20 times “Who are you?”

Each time you should give yourself a different answer, and if you can easily go beyond 20 then that is fine too. . . . This is the sort of prompt that you can re do at various stages of your life, perhaps after some changes or at the start of the New Year.

This prompt is about how YOU see YOU."



Okay.  Me.

I am:

A writer.
A graduate student.
A wife.
A lover.
A mother.
A grandmother.
A person who loves cats and dogs.
A Floridian (a "Floridated" Californian).
A historian.
A research nerd.
A lover of books.
A fan of reading.
A former Coast Guard officer.
A former nurse.
A former librarian.
A person who has had to reinvent herself several times in her life.
A genealogist.
A maverick.
A funny woman.
A friend.
A person with arthritis.
A stubborn woman (I don't give up).
A supporter of the arts.

That's 23.  Let's see what next week's prompt brings.
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