Home of the Free and the Brave...

I'm strong. Not brave, but strong. If I had to choose I'd go with strong, but both would be nice too.

I'm afraid of really dumb things like guinea pigs, and lizards, and lightning if I'm outside, and getting separated from my family at the mall, and finding my way around a new city, and creatures in the dark outside my house, and walking up to big groups of people I don't know, and chickens that peck, and goats that nibble, and riding horses, and having to swim very far in the ocean if the boat I'm not on were to capsize.

I told my DIL recently, when she flew to NYC, that I could fly and not be bothered a whit, and sleep in the hotel all by myself (actually I thought that part sounded pretty fabulous) but to have to figure my way around the airport, then hail a cab and find the hotel, and then actually walk around the city, find places I wanted to see, then hail another cab to go back to the airport - all of that would terrify me just a bit.

So I'm afraid of really practical stuff like that - and potato salad I didn't make that is in the glass cases at the grocery store. And those other odd salads they offer, that have strange combinations in them, that I've never seen at a single church potluck. And water in new cities that might taste weird.

And milk that isn't milk.

Milk that is soy scared me. It was a little bit creepy for me, not having ever tasted it, but just the thought of it made me shiver a little. But our DIL was coming for a visit and I asked our son what she liked to eat on a normal day, so I went shopping for blueberries, and grapefruit in a jar (who knew they even had that? - happy news for me), and soy milk.

Oh my. I have no clue. At the store they had brands and flavors and too many choices so I phoned him and he said, just regular soy milk.

Really, she drinks that? Straight up? She pours that on cereal or berries? Eewwwww.....

But I bought it, and put it in the fridge and after she left it was still unopened, and we ran out of the normal, cow-produced milk, and I wanted my Special K with the little lumps of yogurt in it, so I decided to be really brave, and try it.

Guess what? Perfectly normal, even though it's a sort of pale tan rather than the white which I would have been a lot more comfortable with, but if you close your eyes and just put it in your mouth, it tastes completely normal.

Knock me over with a noodle. I'm amazed.

And I may just buy some of that Grandma's Potato Salad they sell, as long as it doesn't have day old crust on it, and of course we're going to Texas in a couple of weeks, and our daughter and SIL have adopted chickens and goats, so there's no limit to the stretching we're going through around here. I may just go wild, and walk up and down the aisles of Walmart, all by myself, without a cell phone in case I get separated from the rest of the crowd.

I am woman, hear me roar..... or something like that.