Idiosyncrasies

As a nod to one of my favorite websites, I now offer 5 of my idiosyncrasies.

1. I can be very superstitious and I still follow chain letters, but I do find this quirk comes and goes. I may go for weeks without doing any chain e-mails, then I’ll read one that really affects me and then I’ll send it out. My apologies if you have been a recipient when I am in such moods.
2. I always put the toilet lid down. It is a habit I picked up after reading a feng shui book once, that open toilets will allow your good fortune or good qi to drain away. I know it annoys the Husband, but I do it all the time.
3. I am a hard-core recycler and I will spend a lot of time tearing away those bits of paper in plastic packaging, just so that I can separate it in my recycling bins (since my community still requires that to some extent). I save Styrofoam containers from takeout lunches, or the plastic yogurt cups or anything else remotely recycleable and will wash them in my dishwasher because I know I can recycle them.
4. I am constantly making faces. I have an expressive face, which can be a good thing, but more often than not, I make odd, ugly faces like scrunching my forehead and nose when I react negatively to something. The bad thing is that my son has now picked up this habit. The good thing is that I can never play poker and therefore I will never gamble away my savings on a bad hand.
5. I can be an extreme packrat when it comes to things that I want to read. In college, I was constantly saving New York Times issues that I had no time to read. I still do that now with that paper, with my own paper (when I’m on vacation), and with about a half dozen magazines. It takes something like an allergic reaction to the incredible amount of dust that all these papers accumulate before I can bear to recycle them.