Things about me

1. Tiaras make everything — from fancy parties to washing dishes — better. I have two: A bright shiny plastic one at work (we can’t have nice things there), and the much nicer silver-and-cubic-zirconia one at home.

2. I don’t know which side of the faucet is hot water and which is cold. In the house I (mostly) grew up in (we moved several times), the water lines in the kitchen and bathroom sink were backward, so the side that said hot was really cold. These things still confuse me.

3. I have one cat, Bearcat Louise. For almost as long as I can remember, every family pet has had a middle name. Bearcat was adopted by a former roommate and her boyfriend. He was the college mascot at the time — Bobby Bearcat. When they moved and couldn’t take Bear with them, they were going to return her to the shelter. That didn’t seem fair. I sent her to my mother’s to live with her Rottweiler and gave her a middle name while I lived in a no-pet apartment my last semester of school. Bear and I have been roommates since January 2000. She enjoys drinking from the sink, sleeping under the covers and sharpening her claws on my arms.

4. In 2004, my mother moved in with me. Two years later, she moved back out. That was an adventure in itself, but during the move, we found two dogs on the side of Interstate 70 in Missouri. I tried to contact area no-kill shelters, but couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone. (I have the same phone number now — still no one has returned my calls.) So the dogs moved with us. The mother, Molly Brown, and her puppy, Pica Jane, moved in with me, my mother, her dog, Valerie Ann, and my brother’s dog, Ozzie Earl. (The dog somehow belongs to my brother, although it showed up at my mother’s door step while he was in the military. And my brother hasn’t been home for more than a few days since then.) Molly Brown got her name because she’s resilient and tough and sweet and from Missouri. Pica got her name because, at about 45 pounds (she was smaller when we found her), she’s the smallest dog we’ve had for a long time, and because I’m a journalist. (A pica is one-sixth of an inch.)

5. I’m a journalist. I don’t write for a living.

6. I have lived in five states: Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Washington and Indiana.

7. I claim Will, Emmitt and Ozzie as relatives. You can see the family resemblance in the ears.

8. My lucky number is 13. I look forward to Friday the 13ths — they’re usually very good days.

9. I love trivia and bits of random knowledge, writing weirdly complicated concatenation formulas and researching historical events.