101 Things – Jen

1. I love to read fiction. I love the idea of reading non-fiction, but it takes me a long time to get through those books.
2. When I can’t sleep I’ll pick up a kids book from my childhood and start reading. I’ve been known to get through one of those books quickly on a sleepless night.
3. Roald Dahl is one of the first children’s authors that I turn to – I’ve loved him since I was a child.
4. I LOVE chocolate. Milk chocolate is my favourite. Dark chocolate is okay. I don’t like white chocolate.
5. I get ancy from staying in one place for a long time. I think it comes from the need for me to experience change.
6. I like change. I like the adventure that it can bring.
7. Sometimes change is scary.
8. I believe you need to do one thing every day that scares you.
9. I’m scared of a lot of things – but I suck it up and keep going.
10. I love to knit.
11. I don’t like to knit sweaters – they take too long.
12. I don’t like to knit scarves – I find them to be boring.
13. I enjoy knitting mittens and hats, and socks.
14. I’m cheap.
15. No, really, I’m really cheap.
16. I wish I wasn’t so cheap so I could spend copious amounts of money on beautiful yarn.
17. So is Jeff.
18. I love to sing.
19. My dream is to sing on Broadway – I’ll never make it there, but maybe one day I’ll try out for community theatre.
20. Auditioning scares me.
21. I love musicals. I can sing songs from almost any musical.
22. I wish that people in real life would break out into song and dance on the street – wow… life would be great if that happened.
23. My favourite musical is Camelot.
24. I love the story of Camelot and King Arthur.
25. I took a class about Camelot in university – it was terrible. I swear the clock stopped at 1:30 in that class for at least 2 hours!
26. My favourite place to belt out a musical song is in the car.
27. I don’t drive in Korea – I haven’t belted out a song in a LONG time.
28. Okay, I’ve belted out songs in Noraebangs – Karaoke rooms.
29. I love Karaoke rooms – your own personal room where you can sing without having to wait in line.
30. I don’t need to be drunk do sing Karaoke.
31. I led an awesome Karaoke session in Costa Rica one night – I rocked the mike between (and during) songs, it was awesome.
32. I love pets. I find that a house is missing something if it doesn’t have a pet (or, something else that’s living and breathing).
33. My current pet is a plant named Norman. He’ll have to do until we can “settle down” a bit more.
34. I’m going to miss Norman when we leave for Mongolia.
35. I’m looking forward to adopting more plants in Mongolia.
36. We have killed 5 plants since arriving in Korea because our apartment gets no sun.
37. I need sun to be happy.
38. I am a very tactile person. I love to touch things when I go shopping. My friend Richard gets annoyed that I can’t stop touching things. I think that’s why I love to knit.
39. I worked in a refugee settlement in Uganda for a year.
40. I worked for an organized that implements sport and play programs in refugee settlements all over Africa and in Asia too.
41. I am a terrible athlete – but I try really hard.
42. I love to play – especially with kids, they have great imaginations.
43. I miss beans and rice and matokee like crazy. My mouth waters thinking about the stuff.
44. I LOVE Uganda and can’t wait to go back.
45. Going back kind of scares me because things will be different.
46. I often think about the people I left behind there… and about how lucky I am to have been able to have the experiences that I have had thus far.
47. I bought a LOT of ugly fabric in Uganda, but in my mind it’s all beautiful.
48. I can’t bear to cut it up because I know that I can’t easily replace it so it’s sitting in my parents basement.
49. I started wearing makeup in 2005.
50. I started wearing high heels (occasionally and never without complaining) this year (2008).
51. I started drinking coffee when I was 23 years old.
52. I don’t like breakfast, but I need to eat it or I will not survive.
53. I don’t like cereal, but I can handle granola or muesli especially with yoghurt.
54. I got married in August of 2007 in Costa Rica.
55. Two weeks after we got married we moved to South Korea.
56. Four weeks before I got married I broke a bone for the first time in my life.
57. My relationship with my husband hasn’t changed (well, nothing drastic) since we got married.
58. The Korean women in my office never refer to their husbands by their names, it is always “My husband…” I’ve come to find this normal.
59. I was worried I’d have a hard time calling Jeff my husband.
60. I don’t understand why so many girls think that things will change when they get married.
61. I kept my last name.
62. I want to combine our two names into one last name eventually… (Dawseng…)
63. Eventually I’d like to come back to Canada and settle down.
64. I’m worried that settling down will bore me.
65. I don’t want to be a boring mom who only talks about her kids.
66. I think I will be that kind of mom – I’ll have to work really hard to not be that person.
67. I think that kids ruin your life (my mom says that’s not true). But not really…
68. You have to be responsible for more than just yourself when you have kids – it’s a very
69. I want to have kids.
70. I love kids.
71. I love teaching kids, but more importantly I love creating relationships with kids and helping them to grow as human beings.
72. I have a passion for helping people.
73. When I was a child I asked for Santa to help people instead of giving me gifts. I got a $50 gift certificate to a local grocery store to buy food for the food bank, and a letter from the humane society saying that 2 dogs had been adopted.
74. I love quotes.
75. I write inspirational quotes that I find in books I read in notebooks.
76. Sometimes I write down beautiful sentences I come across.
77. I came across a lot of beautiful sentences in “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy.
78. I love reading books set in India.
79. I would love to travel to India some day.
80. The place scares me.
81. I LOVE LOVE LOVE Indian food.
82. I also love Thai food.
83. I don’t like to go to restaurants that serve food I could make myself at home.
84. I hate paying $15 for pasta – it’s never any better than what I make at home.
85. I’m a vegetarian and have been since 2002.
86. Being a vegetarian is hard in Korea.
87. I’ve cracked a few times. Korean BBQed Galbi is delicious.
88. My stomach can’t handle a full serving of meat anymore.
89. I could never be a vegan. I love chocolate and cookies and cake too much.
90. I love to bake.
91. I hate cleaning baking dishes.
92. I get bored of making cookies after the 4th dozen.
93. I loved dissection lessons in high school science.
94. I would love to dissect a human body.
95. I don’t think I could handle dissecting a human body.
96. I love using the subway in Seoul.
97. I don’t mind using public transportation as long as it’s reliable.
98. My hometown public transportation is not reliable.
99. I love riding my bike.
100. I don’t like the cold (makes sense that I’m moving to the capital city with the lowest average temperatures eh…)
101. I don’t like riding my bike in the cold.