Right off the bat, most folks associate the number 13 with bad luck but for me, it’s always been my lucky number. I was born on the 13th and the number 13 has always made me happy. It’s not even really a numbers thing, I have always been a much bigger fan of the number 3, 6 and 9. So 13 is sort of like the odd man out lol – go figure!
- I am a musician. Since 4th grade I have played saxophone and its really my first love creatively. I primarily play bari sax and jazz and big band are my preference. I went to college on a full ride and while only lacking 63 hours to my music education degree, I probably will never finish it. I feel like its time to pick my horn back up, finally. I have had some things holding me back from doing that but I’ve been able to work through most of them. Music showed me that I have a performer’s heart and I always strived to better my craft, which I feel taught me valuable lessons about never giving up and always having goals. Interestingly enough, I have a baby grand piano in my home, yet can’t play piano to save my life. I know the keys and I can read music, but having my hands play two different lines of notes makes my head hurt lol. Instruments I can play somewhat are flute, clarinet, and tuba. Instruments I still want to learn some day are accordion, ukulele, banjo, fiddle and hurdy-gurdy!
- I dislike the texture of wooden spoons. Smooth wood has always been beautiful to me and I grew up building houses during the summers with my Dad who was a general contractor and cabinet maker, so I learned to appreciate the beauty of wood but wooden spoons freak me out. I don’t like rough, dry wood under my fingers and I cannot stand to watch someone eat with wooden utensils or lick a popsicle stick. As a kid, I would throw the ice cream away before I would eat it off the stick, and while corndog sticks are similar, once they are deep-fried, they don’t have the same feel. I also cannot abide suckers with the paper or wood sticks. I have, on many occasions, wrapped the lollipop stick in tape before eating it lol. It’s all tactile issues for me, and as a grown-ass woman who has had a 3-year-old chase her through her house with a wooden spoon, terrified, I wish I could change it, but I can’t. I also dislike the cardboard egg cartons, construction paper and cheaply made paper bags.
- Conversely, I love all things stationery! Including handmade papers, card stock, notebooks and anything having to do with the planner world. Like most folks in the planner community, I love Tomoe River Paper, its beauty personified, but I also love paper that ink just absorbs into, spreading with that faint feathering of the perfect stroke. I also love parchment paper. One of the first things I couldn’t get enough of when I was a kid was my first copy of the Constitution of the United States. I loved folding and unfolding that document because of how the paper crinkled and sounded, much like TRP does after you’ve used watercolor on it or written on it with a finer nib pen. Again, it falls back to the tactile feel of paper and the white of an empty page. I love pure white paper with a soft gray dot grid, then reticle grid, and last but not least, ruled. I do not like blank notebooks at all. I need lines to write! As for notebooks, I love my Field Notes, Log and Jotters and other pocket-sized notebooks. But if they have crappy paper in them, they won’t even get a second glance. Planners are a whole different animal for me and most of you know I am a Hobonichi fanatic, but after having reviewed quite a few things on my YouTube channel, my first loves still hold sway over me.
- I can clean everyone’s house but my own. I don’t know what it is, I have always been damn good at cleaning houses, and even put myself through college cleaning my professors’ homes. The one thing my mother taught her children well was how to clean house! But now, unless I am under the gun for company coming over, things get done when they get done. I am not saying I am a bad housekeeper, but I feel like there are other things in life that come first and I only have so much time in a day to enjoy it, so yeah, the laundry might pile up and I can tell you I have honestly never cleaned the windows in my house for the 10 years we have lived here, yet I will be on my knees with a toothbrush cleaning the corner nooks and crannies of someone’s house if they needed my help or wanted to pay me lol.
- I am a huge HUGE sci-fi geek. Nerd. Whatever you wanna call it, I live it. Yet…I have never seen the point of Dr. Who. (There, I said it!). I can quote you lines from every Star Trek movie or series, I can almost word for word give you FireFly quotes, yet I cannot for the life of me see what Whovians enjoy about the Whoniverse. Maybe it stems from not being a British TV fan, or maybe I don’t get British humor, but I swear y’all I have tried. Multiple times, with multiple doctors and its literally painful for me to sit through it. I just…no. Not even a little bit.
- I embrace exploring and adventuring on my own. I never thought I would be that kind of person, but after traveling to Spain for the first time in 2014 when I was 46 years old all by myself, my wild soul was set free and I crave travel and adventure! That thrill of finding your own way, figuring things out on the fly and hoping like hell the local authorities don’t arrest you for carrying weapons across the border woke something up inside me that will always be there. Needless to say, I don’t mind traveling with other folks, especially my adorable husband! But there are times when I need to go out and do something on my own, just for me and I love that about myself.
- For the first 40 years of my life, this was in reference to my body size. I took up a lot of space in a room. Nowadays, I still take up a lot of space when I walk into a room but its more about an attitude than it is about stature. I don’t think it’s a negative or a positive, it just simply is. When I was 450 pounds I tried to hide my body, my personality, my everything, to make sure I didn’t take up more room than I should and would literally try to fold into myself so people couldn’t tell me I was taking up too much of their space. Now, I am simply Amy. Or Rogue. Or The Badass Valkyrie. Whatever name you know me by, its who I am and trying to put myself in a tiny little box is never going to happen ever again. I am who I am and I love the person I have become, and I love the people who have helped me discover her. Just like ‘nobody puts Baby in a corner’ Amy doesn’t fit into any fucking little box. Bigness. I have it. I embrace it. I love it.
- I am an athlete. I am a runner. I am a triathlete. I am a yogi. I am someone who enjoys physical exercise and extreme sports. The only limits I have are those given to me by my body, otherwise, I would be climbing mountains, backpacking across Europe and finding every niche sport I could possibly get into. I love competition. I love the thrill of winning and in a very strange way the crushing blows of defeat, as its all adrenaline to me and that’s exactly what I thrive on. But, deep down, in my heart of hearts, in that little jewelry box on the shelf inside my soul, the real reason I am an athlete, a competitor and am so completely driven to do what I can to get better is…the secret, illogical fear that I will be wake up one day and be 450 pounds again. I can’t explain it, nor do I feel like I need to. It’s what drives me, plain and simple.
- My secret power. When I walk into a room, I instantly assess who’s a threat, who I can take in a fight and know as many exits as possible. There are also a few other things I assess pretty instantaneously as well but those are going to stay my little secret lol. I also never sit with my back to an exit if I can help it. As a child who grew up in an abusive home, it’s something that gets instilled in you early on – how to navigate the land mines and mitigate threat. I wish I could tell you this skill was born from my sword fighting, but honestly, that just honed it. No, this was a skill I learned at a very early age and quite frankly I am thankful for it. Everything I have gone through in my life has led me to where I am today and while I rarely talk about it, it is always a part of who I am. Would I change it if I could? Honestly No. It has forged me into a stronger, more capable human being and made me realize who I didn’t want to become as I grew up. Plus, it’s a damn cool superpower that has served me well more than a few times!
- I am a Zombie Apocalypse kind of prepper. As a couple, my husband and I have more legitimate plans in relation to a zombie apocalypse or alien invasion than we do for fires, floods or storm damage. I’d like to say its only because we LOVE Apocalypse type movies but truly, we have more weapons in our home that were bought on the pretense of zombie horde slaying than for someone breaking into our house. I will say if someone breaks into our house, it will NOT go well for them as honestly, they’re not gonna be able to walk out again. End of story. Some say never bring a knife to a gunfight. Trust me, a knife fight is all I will ever need.
- I am a list maker. I love to write things down. If I want to remember it, I write it down with an actual pen, on actual paper. I have come to realize I love to make plans, I love to make lists, I love starting projects, but at times, my follow thru is lacking and I am working on that. But making a list, checking it twice? Santa ain’t got nuthin’ on this bitch!
- I am an extreme extrovert who has bouts of shyness. I am gregarious, I am loud, I literally feed off the energy of a crowd. I love public speaking, I can get up in front of a room and do my thing with no hesitation whatsoever. But put me in a room with one or two people, and I would much rather fade into the background. My husband likes to tease me because I find karaoke (his hobby) a fate worse than death. Because there’s usually 4-5 people in the bar, the energy is very laid back and there’s no one to dance with (or as I like to call it, no one to dance for). I can’t always put my finger on why I get shy, because if you know me, you know that is NOT me, but on occasion it hits me, and I don’t know why. Someone once suggested it was because I sensed a stronger Alpha in the room, which I just laughed at. If it’s an Alpha male, all that does is make me bolder, and if it’s a stronger Alpha female, it just makes me territorial, so that is definitely not the case. But I have yet to figure this one out…and maybe I never will. Just like introverts can have bursts of extrovert-edness, maybe we can have the same thing in reverse!
- I love to learn but I hated school. Growing up I was an average learner. I got good grades, did what I was supposed to and was actually a pretty decent kid, but I hated the structure of school and going to class. As I became an adult, every time I enrolled in a class I regretted it and just thought maybe I wasn’t a good student or you can’t teach me. But I have come to realize I crave learning things and figuring out things I don’t know much about, I love doing research on things that interest me and I can’t get enough of reading! I know now that I will never stop learning, never stop reading and never stop becoming better at life. I look at all the research I have done over the past few years on my body, how it works, what it takes to compete and how to negate the negative aspects of aging, versus becoming better at training and sports. I honestly think had I found this in college I would have become a researcher or social scientist but I only just found it and found my love for learning. I am happy there are more adaptive ways for kids to learn now, and they aren’t forced to sit in tiny little desks and learn shit they will never use again in their lives…like calculous! I learn my way, in my own time, and that suits me perfectly!
Well this turned out a little more weird, cool and creatively different than I expected but then again, most of my blogs go their own way and I often don’t get the full thought process behind it until days later, I just go with my instincts and my heart and see what happens. This was an idea that came to me listening to Chase Jarvis and Brene’ Brown during a podcast and it kept tugging at my brain until I finally had to get it down on paper.
If you made it all the way through this, thank you! I appreciate the fact that someone reads this, even though truth be told I would write it even if no one ever saw it, just because I love it.
That’s the best weird, cool and creatively different thing you can do…find something you love that you would do no matter what, and just do it!
Peace!
The Badass Valkyrie 
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