Eight Things Meme (Again)

Ana tagged me for the Eight Things Meme.

Rules: "For this meme, each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog."

Even though I have done this one before, I thought of a theme for this one and I do tend to enjoy memes of this sort. You may have also noticed that I tend to enjoy getting tagged (though not too often!), but I've sort of given up on tagging other people as I suffer from meme paralysis. I do have a personality quirk that tends to make me paranoid about imposing on other people in any way.

Anyway, I thought I'd do something similar to Ana's "eight things" and focus on my childhood and the family I grew up in.

1. I'm the 5th of seven children. We're pretty scattered about the country now (my spiritual director recently joked about "the Lawless diaspora"). My parents and two older brothers (and their families, including 15 of my nieces and nephews) live in the neighborhood of the Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma. Say hi for me if you happen by for a visit! (While you're there you can pick up some farm fresh chicken from the Vita Bella Ranch). I have three siblings left in California (where we all grew up) and a sister in Minnesota.

2. I grew up in California's "Silicon Valley" (is it any surprise that my dad, most of my brothers, my husband and my father-in-law are all engineers?). When I was in high school we belonged to the homeschool group and attended Fatima pilgrimages here. For quite awhile I attended classes once a week here (and graduated from High School with their day school students - it was two hour drive - each way - by the way!). Also during that time, my sister lived in the flat above here. One of the big plusses of homeschooling for me was hanging out with my older siblings for weeks at a time - and what a rich environment that was!

3. My mom was very active in the pro-life movement when I was quite young. She ran a crisis pregancy center sometime in the 70s (when I was a tot) and we went on many pro-life prayer walks when I was a child. According to her, we met many important family mentors on these walks - like Fr. Fessio and Fran Crotty.

4. My ancestors came to the U.S. from the Portuguese Azores, Ireland (via Canada), Luxembourg and Germany. I'm sure there are others mixed in along the way, but those are the main ones I'm aware of. Most arrived in the U.S. right around the turn of the 20th Century.

5. Being involved in Catholic Information Network (started by my sister and brother-in-law and two others back in 1987) my senior year of high school was quite an experience. My mom and I ran one of the nodes of the CIN BBS that year. I remember being quite excited when Karl Keating logged onto our computer!

6. Growing up, I don't remember meeting anyone else who had read The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings or The Phantom Tollbooth. It was really fun going off to college and meeting so many people who had!

7. When I was a child, my dad worked in the cassette tape industry - both audio tapes (he worked for a company that helped put together the Library of Congress' audio tapes for the blind program) and computer programs back when they were on cassette tapes.

8. The parish and school I belonged to growing up were rather unique for our area. The founding pastor (the parish only dates to the 50s) was there until he retired around 1990. The diocese sent many very interesting and faithful priests there over the years. We were one of only a few parishes that used a communion rail in those days (70s and 80s). And we had a particularly good music director (he sang opera on the side). I sang in two choirs and did tons of cantoring when I was in high school. There were IHM nuns from Philadelphia teaching in the school from its founding in the late 50s until about 5 years ago.

As always, consider yourself tagged if you're interested.