Oh my! Well, girls, are we the OCD club or what??
Here are my credentials as a card-carrying member:
1. I have to be the first one to open a jar of peanut butter. If anyone in my family gets to it first I'm inconsolable. For this reason, no matter what time I get home from the grocery store, no matter how un-hungry I am and no matter how fast the refrigerated groceries are getting warm, the first thing I have to do is find the peanut butter in those !&^$ bags, open it and have a teaspoonful. But only a teaspoonful.
2. I hate insects, in general, and don't believe they have any right to be alive. But I am terrified, literally, of insects that crunch when you smush them under your foot -- like cockroaches and big carpenter bees. I can't go within a six-foot radius of a roach, dead or alive. And I confess I've passed along this aversion to my two DS's. So now, if we see a roach in the house (and we get a few in this climate, including those awful flying Palmetto bug mutant roaches in the summer), my sons and I have to leave that room PERMANENTLY until my DH gets home. And if the roach is dead we drop my giant Black's Law Dictionary on it from six feet up, and leave the book there til DH gets home. Longest time Black's Law Dictionary stayed right where it was: ten days while Hubby was away on business.
3. I can't sleep with my back to the door, but I have to fall asleep on my left side. This has presented some logistical challenges when we travel. I've been known to re-make a hotel bed with the pillows at the foot of the bed so that I can face the door on my left side.
4. If I wake up in the middle of the night for any reason, I have to go to the bathroom and "try," whether or not I really need to go and no matter how cozy I'm feeling under the covers. (Freud might say this harkens back to my childhood, when we'd stop on a long road trip at a Rest Area and I NEVER needed to go and my sister ALWAYS needed to go and our mom would say to me "Well Kath honey just TRY!"
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5. I have to brush my teeth until my Braun toothbrush with the timer "jiggles" at me that two minutes are up, wash my face with good cleanser, sterilize my contacts, moisturize my face and brush my hair before I go to bed. Always. No matter what time I go to bed, no matter what state I'm in. Been this way since college. I bought good cleanser and good moisturizer when I had to eat hot dogs to do it. And I've gone through this entire ritual when I didn't remember a moment of it the next morning (but of course found my sparkling clean contacts in their case!)
6. I have to wipe down my kitchen countertops with Windex Antibacterial every evening, even when my DH has cleaned up after dinner and the kitchen "looks" clean. Not to me it doesn't, not til my trusty Windex chamois has done its thing.
7. It drives me nuts like fingernails on a blackboard when someone takes a sip from their drink with food still in their mouth. :-mad I am just repulsed! I'm not even polite to people who do this. In my swingle days I broke up with a couple of cutie pies over this "eating style," as one of them called it. One meal where this happens and they're history.
Oh enough -- I'm scarin' myself already!
http://www.clicksmilie.de/sammlung/sport/sport003.gif Kathy S.