Kelly is a mother, runner, writer, designer and serial entrepreneur. She is also a reformed over-committer and believes that a busy life need not be a stressful life. She blogs about all this and more at A Life Less Frantic.
Everybody has a THING. What is yours?
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I blame my Grandmother. I lived with Granny for six years and that meant living with someone who needed to have the TV volume set at a billion decibels in order to hear it. This was sort of fine during waking hours, but at night while I was trying to get to sleep … not so much.
So I started sleeping with a fan on every night. No gentle whirring for me either. The only way to drown out the TV was to have that fan set to warp speed. And it worked a treat.
The only problem was that I became addicted to it. As a super light sleeper, the tiniest noise will wake me in the night and being in possession of the world’s tiniest bladder means that if I wake in the night I then have to go to the toilet. As you can imagine this is highly annoying. So now everywhere I go, my fan goes with me much to amusement of everyone who knows me. Thankfully my husband is also now an addict too but as you can imagine, the line to share a room with me when I go away with my girlfriends is pretty short.
As if that little idiosyncrasy is not enough, I also cannot sleep if my quilt is upside down. It must be the right way up. (Sadly my three year old is also infected with this and tells me off if I dare put his Thomas the Tank Engine pillow down on his bed with the wrong side showing OR if the right side is showing, but Thomas is upside down). I also cannot sleep if the cupboard door in our bedroom is not fully shut. I have no explanation for that one!
Sadly my weird little ‘things’ are not restricted to sleeping and the bedroom either.
When I finish a run I never kick my shoes off while still full tied. The laces have to be loosened in quite a precise manner before I can take them off.
I also have to stop my watch on an exact time. Accidentally stopping the clock at 30:01 means that I now have run for another 4 minutes and 59 seconds. Because I certainly can’t stop the clock on something so random as 31:00. Of course this also extends to microwaves. What kind of person leaves 23 seconds showing on a microwave when they are finished with it? You need to ZERO that thing please, people!
When I take clothes off the line I always clip the pegs back on the line so that they are on their loosest hole and hang in such a way that I can easily push them to one side or another of the line. For this reason it drives me nuts when my husband takes clothes off the line because he just puts the pegs back on in any old fashion. (Think I’m weird? I know people who will only hang up white clothes with white pegs!)
And finally, I have an absolute loathing of scrunched up tin foil. Flat tin foil straight out of the packet – no dramas. Tin foil scrunched up into a little ball? That stuff makes my skin crawl and I cannot pick it up with my bare hands. I have to get a tissue to act as a barrier before I can throw it in the bin. For this reason Easter is my mortal enemy.
So there you have it – a few little oddities that cause much amusement for my friends and family. The thing is, we ALL have these idiosyncrasies so now that I have shown you mine, it’s time to show me yours.
Let’s all have a good laugh at each other in the comments below...
