Fertilehealthy

The truth revealed

We have a winner!  Lidian guessed correctly!  I most certainly did not have a pet snake in high school.  I have an extreme and irrational fear of snakes.  In fact, if I turn a page and see a snake picture, I will hurl the book across the room and not touch it again. I always joke that a snake won’t even have to bite me to kill me!

This means that the rest are true!

1. My mother tongue is Afrikaans, a local language that evolved from Dutch, although it is said to closely resemble Flemish. It is one of our 11 official languages. The others are English, Ndebele, Xhosa, Zulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Tswana, Swati, Venda and Tsonga (I had to look it up)! My husband is English speaking, and we converse in both English and Afrikaans at home. I don’t speak any of the native languages, but used to be fluent in French and could get by in German. I still read French, but would speak it quite badly now - another case of use it or lose it!

2. Shudder!

3.  What can I say, we moved a lot when I was a kid.  Then I went to university and dropped out after two years (doing two different courses).  When I got divorced I started yet another course, completed one year and stopped.  Then I did a year of Bible College.  And stopped.  So after 4 years of tertiary study, I actually have no qualifications!  And I really don’t mind.

4.  He invited me on a dinner date two days after making contact online.  I said “yes”, and I haven’t said ”no” since!  He is the best thing that’s ever happened to me (with some stiff competition from my best friends, Lizana and Charlotte!) and I love him dearly.  He really is my second chance.

5. So six of you doubted my ostrich riding skills!  If I didn’t currently weigh over 300 pounds, I’d be most offended!  This is in fact true.  When you don’t have any qualifications (see #3), you get to do a lot of menial jobs.  After my au pair stint in France,  I got a job on an ostrich show farm.  The job entailed taking groups of tourists on a tour of the farm and educating them about ostriches.  The last bit was a physical “show and tell” with a tame ostrich.  We’d pull the neck around, open the beak, lift the wing, etc.  Then we’d demonstrate that it one can in fact ride an ostrich, if you weren’t too attached to going in a specific direction.  One stops by pulling the neck back, like a hand brake.  We would demonstrate this and then we would let the tourists try.  I attribute my still youthful appearance to all the laughing I did in those six months!  If you had a particularly obnoxious, loud mouthed yob on your tour, you’d make sure that he got one of the more unruly birds.  And you’d send him off to the dirtiest (read shittiest) part of the enclosure!  By the way, the photo at the top is me (looking great, if I may say so myself), loading a German onto the ostrich.  The one below is also me, showing off the “fan”.

6.  Yes, I am a natural blonde, although I have strayed to red in the past.  These days my hair is mousy, so I have to help it along a bit with Clairol Nice ‘n Easy.  But here’s the proof! (And Dee, I’m not offended!)

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