Introvert vs Extrovert - do extroverts feel the same pressure that introverts feel?

This question came up over this past month in our house. So, I thought I might take advantage of this space to try to explore it knowing fully that this exploration will likely not bring me any solutions to the question. As an introvert I am not likely to go around asking extroverts the question.

Both my husband and I are on the introverted end of the spectrum. He is more fully on the spectrum than I am, but I have similar tendencies. We both prefer to be alone the majority of the time, or with those that we are exceptionally close to us. However, we feel pressure to be social and maintain some balance.

My choice to be social is to be a part of small groups. I like to find a group that I'm comfortable with and build my social community in that manner. I curl on a team, I am part of a group of stitchers, I go to writing sessions with other writers and I'm often the planner of large family gatherings.

Hubby's manner of being out in the world is to attend large sporting events as a spectator, participate in huge runs, and he enjoys Vegas!  For him, I think this is akin to being a part of the action, but not the focus of the attention. He can blend in to the crowd and feel their energy.

This past weekend we were on our way to my curling teams annual Christmas party. It's not huge, only eight of us with spouses. I wasn't feeling particularly like going - almost approaching too big, but hubby was looking forward to it. He knows my team mates, but only peripherally. Therefore, true to form he could get away with pulling back into himself and allowing me to be the outgoing one of the couple. I think that is what led to my reluctance to go.

Upon discussing our thoughts on this we decided that hubby and I do these things in order to maintain a certain perspective on life and to feel like we're part of society. This revelation got me to wondering if extroverts feel any kind of pressure to be solitary and explore their own imaginations free from the stimulation from others.

Family Fun

I began doing some family research in anticipation of my mother's 80th birthday about seven years ago. At the time I didn't find much on her family, but found a great deal of eyebrow-raising information about my father's side of the tree.

What a twisted and gnarled tree it has turned out to be - on both sides. My generation has always joked that we are pretty twisted, but we have nothing on the previous generations! I guess we come by it honestly.

I have tried to share a lot of my discoveries with the brothers, but they are fairly flippant about it, but as I learn more some of the patterns are repetitious and others I am glad to say that I believe we've broken them. I suppose that most families have their cuckoo nests when you dig a little and it is likely a numbers game. We're a pretty fertile bunch, so the odds are in our favour that we would have more than those who chose to have smaller families.

What really interests me is how I could possibly weave this into a story and show the connections from generation to generation. Additionally, how much is simple genetics and how much is learned behavior?

This is what keeps me thinking the last little while as I have acquainted myself with some relatives that I have just introduced myself to.

A plan baby

It's time for a new plan and I think hubby and I have just given birth to one.  It's a five year plan that we are both going to have to set our minds and hearts on to see it grow up to what we know it can be.

This plan has a number of components: financial, emotional, spiritual and professional. The end result should be one that brings us both peace and adventure and how each of us will handle those two components together should be interesting for our relationship.

I think that is all I wish to share of this mission for a bit. I tend to wish to protect ideas in their infancy until I am completely comfortable with the shape, size and feel of them.

Yummy!

I am not a baker, so this is my fiasco for the season.

I am taking part in the cookie exchange with a group of ladies that I used to work with. Third year running.

Here's hoping that the continue to allow me and my limited baking skills to continue to participate. I've combined a basic sugar recipe with another idea that I saw somewhere along the way. The test run for hubby and the kids (25 & 26) for Grey Cup last weekend worked out well, so here we go again.

Chocolate Surprise Sugar Cookies

Preheat Oven to 350 and line cookie sheets with parchment

2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour 1 tea

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

1 cup butter, softened

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

30-35 mini chocolate bars/macaroons

Cream together butter and sugar.

In separate bowl sift together flour, baking soda and baking poweder.

Beat egg and vanilla in with butter and sugar.

Mix in flour mixture and combine to create dough.

Form small ball of dough, hollow out centre with a thumb-press. Insert

mini-chocolate bar. Roll dough around the chocolate.

Place cookies on cookie sheet with plenty of room around.

Bake in oven for 9-11 minutes at 350.

Enjoy!!

Words - time to get creative

I sometimes need to give my creative brain a nudge and this is one of those times. I've been doing a great deal of writing lately. Business writing - in hopes of landing a paying gig, personal writing - in hopes of getting to the deep dark recesses of my soul and list writing - in hopes of getting things organized and able to check them off. I haven't done much creative writing and won't make it out to the writers group that meets this morning, so I thought I would dazzle the page with the following.

I'm using a little help prompt help to get me started.

“Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.” ~ Jeannette Winterson

The revelation came in a manila envelope with the symbol of the Manitoba Provincial Archives in the return address folder. I ripped it open hoping not to rip any of the pages inside, but too impatient to find the letter opener that was likely tucked under something on the side of the counter. 

The gasp of the archivist heard from the other end of the phone had been true to it's sound.  This was shocking and stunning and caused the ground to shift a little beneath my feet. The bastard hadn't been divorced when he married Mom. That meant that their marriage was not real and instead of him being a bastard there were seven of us. 

We all suspected for decades that Edward was either born out of wedlock or at least conceived there, but it turns out after a check with the church that they shared their nuptials in that had been a truth. One of very few that made up the foundation of the marriage. 

I had started this journey in order to give my mom something special for her 80th birthday. A little link to her past and some information about where her parents had come from.  She had rarely spoken much about her growing up years. The stories few and far between never went any further back then her childhood on the prairies during the depression and drought of the thrirties. Any stories were fraught with the prairie version of Dickensian depressiveness and with sorrow and economic hard times.  Occasionally she alluded to fun games of kick the can or taking the gopher tails to town to sell for candy money. Gophers were a big problem on the farms - they ruined the fields and that's the last thing they needed during the midst of the drought.

What I came away with though, aside from one picture of her parents sitting on kitchen chairs in their Sunday best in the middle of a snow bank, was more information on her husband, my father.

My father was out of my life, thankfully, at the age of 12. He was a large, imposing man who abused his wife and children and made our lives hell. We didn't need the priests to tell us about hell on Sunday mornings - we lived it.  Sure, there were good times. Times when we laughed ourselves silly, played pranks, or just amused ourselves with whatever we could get up to, but most of the time we were all just hiding from the horrors that we knew would come with the next bottle of rum, rye, moonshine, or just because someone had said something his warped sense of decorum didn't agree with.

I guess, in retrospect, I was lucky. I was one the last child and learned quite a bit from example. I watched what others did to bring on a rage and I avoided it as best I could. I hid in my room a great deal. I hid in my head much more than that. I knew that things could get very bad and I prayed that I could stay out of the way long enough to keep it at bay.

Jack had been married before.  Apparently in 1947 in his hometown of Winnipeg. The wedding took place in the family church in which he and his siblings had been baptized.  I imagined that they had all had their first confessions, first communions and confirmations to the Catholic church in that building surrounded by a tight-knit congregation.

His first had filed for divorce in February of 1953 stating infidelity as the cause. In those days, the divorce law was a national law and you had to petition the federal government after having published your intention along with the reason in the newspaper. This small one-liner is where I had seen the first clue to the original marriage. After that I had contacted the church that had been named in my aunt's wedding announcement to find a record of my father's birth. Turns out he had lied by a year about the year of his birth. On the baptism certificate I found a one-liner at the  bottom noting the date of the original nuptials and the year of the wedding.

Eventually, I tracked down the archivist in Manitoba who was more than happy to supply me with a photocopy of the divorce paperwork. Included in the package was the original petition. That petition not only stated the reason as fidelity, but also named the party with whom my father had been accused of cheating on his wife with. The woman shared the same name as his first wife. Given the surname and address of the co-accused I knew it had to be a relation.  Unfortunately, by looking at the original marriage license application I determined that Jack had been stepping out on his wife with his wife's mother.

The subpoena for divorce was served upon Jack as he was at work on a military base in northern Manitoba - working as an airplane mechanic. The paymaster confirmed that the paperwork had been served in March.  I have not yet received a copy of the military records, but I am certain that any stories told about his service overseas during the Korean war will prove to be untrue. How he managed to leave his post shortly thereafter and make his way to Banff in time for a summer romance with my mother is still unknown.

He did make his way to Banff though. Why Banff? It wasn't a destination of note for most in those days. Certainly not for prairie people from Winnipeg. They were more apt to go east to Toronto to make their fortune in the big city. The answer to that might be in the fact that the divorce decree was actually granted in Vancouver, BC - the new home of his first wife and the child of the original marriage.

My suspicion is that Jack either ran out of money, or train tickets on his way to Vancouver and wound up stopping over in Banff to try to make enough to get him the rest of the way to the coast and his lost family. However, during his stopover he met my mother. A prairie girl who had no doubt not had the best upbringing in life on the farm and had left it at 15 with her younger sister in tow.

The romance must have blossomed or my mother held fast to her Catholicism and wouldn't allow him to go past a certain point without a ring on her finger. The part that had always confused us, though, was the fact that both had grown up Catholic, but chose to marry in a Lutheran church. This was another reason that we were suspicious about the timing of Patrick's conception. Their anniversary was September 14 and Edward was born September 17, 1954.

I was desperate to share my findings with someone, but who? If I shared them with mother it would send her into a spiral of depression that she may not be able to climb out of at this stage of the game. Edward didn't like to hear of anything unseemly unless it was political in nature and worldly in interest. It would cause Michael to go into a drinking binge and that would spiral much like mother. I didn't know where the other boys sat on this, so for now I would keep it to myself lest my precarious position in the family tree change.

Ho Ho Holy Crap!

True to my word I sent out the note to the next generation last night to get a butt count for Christmas dinner. The easiest way I have found is to use Messenger to create a group. My note went out at about 8:15pm last night and the smart @ss remarks back and forth amongst the cousins was still going on at 8 am this morning. Oi! I love that the cousins are mostly close, but they sometimes try my patience.

I'm housing it this year. I hesitate to say 'Host' because it really is a committee that puts this on each year. My brother brings the turkey and ham that he has roasted at home and toted piping hot to my house. My other brother's wife brings the cutlery and plates. Folding tables and chairs come from a variety of sources. This year, as of now, there could be 26. In most years this is a fluid number, so I will try to make sure that I have seats enough for 30 just in case.

Thirty might seem like a great deal to a lot of people, but it's a partial family gathering. My mom had seven children and six of us remain, with five of the six having children of our own. So, mom has wound up with 14 grandchildren and six of them, soon to be seven, have their own children. We have remained relatively geographically close, so this year we'll have three of six siblings together and a smattering of our children and some grandchildren.

When you add that ridiculous tale of numbers falling off the family tree to the fact that as a close-knit family we often feel the need to feed some extra folks who for one reason or another might not be participating in a dinner shindig - the table fills up quickly.

My next task is to define the menu and send notes to everyone asking them what to bring. This has become more of a struggle in recent years as the 'kids' age. I believe in equality, but it's so much easier for the single young men to get a pass on bringing a dish then the young mothers and fathers since the parents are 1) used to cooking by now, and 2) bringing more mouths to the table. That seems wrong though, most parents with small children at home will be busy enough that morning without having to stress over making and bringing something, while the single ones will likely be enjoying a sleep in day. Hmmm....well, I have a couple weeks to wrestle with that dilemma.

Since there are so many of us we long ago gave up exchanging gifts amongst us. Now we do a gift exchange. Each adult brings along a gift for under the tree that cost them less than $20. Numbers are drawn, wrapping is destroyed and theft and mayhem ensue. It's a blast! There is always at least one gift that is stolen more often than others and there is usually a couple more that cause us to wonder about the gift givers thought process, but it's always in good fun.

As the big day approaches and my to do list gets shorter, hopefully because things are done and not because I've just decided to downsize I'll keep you posted on what's going down in Shanny-town!

31 Days of Blogging

The last few weeks, months have been a challenge for me to get out of the habit of staying in my happy place with my words confined to my various notebooks or as files on my computer and put them out into the world. As karma would have it over the course of the last 3 days of this week many people in my life have been telling me to start blogging to get over my fear of putting my words out there.

Today the 31 Days of Blogging Challenge came into my Facebook feed and I knew I could not ignore the signs anymore.  So, thank you Cheryl, for the virtual kick in the keyboard. 

As many of you can tell I am new to the blogosphere, so I hope that you'll be kind and if you see me make an error - I'd love to hear about it.  That's how I'm going to learn.

So, just a tidbit about my first day of December.  I woke up inspired by fresh snowfall and hoping that I would get inspired to kick it into gear with getting the Christmas projects on the go.

Well, that went a little sideways....good intentions and all. I managed to finish the afghan for my sister-in-law that should have been done weeks ago and then decided that I must get the Charlie Brown/Ugly Brown Snowsuit quilt out of the way before I got going on the first of the projects. Instead of simply moving it to the binding chair in the living room and leaving it there for tv watching after dinner, I moved it, took a seat and started up a podcast in order to finish my 2nd coffee.

Well, then the boys needed to go out around the block to get their daily dose of exercise, so off we went. Upon our return I needed, of course, to eat.  This led me to sitting at the table and getting annoyed by the fact that for the last few days my Office program hasn't been letting me save. So, after trying to be my own IT department I broke down and went to their support website. It helped. Not the first time, or the second, but by the 3rd phone call and 4.5 hours later I was uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled the wrong version, reinstalled.....until Yippee!!!  it worked.

Needless to say, it's time to put the dinner in the oven.  (I had even planned to be so busy with sewing Christmas things that I had taken some previously made and frozen shepherds pies out.)  At 4:30 pm I didn't want to start anything as I'll be busy this evening assisting hubby with prepping for snack day at work tomorrow - it's his turn to bake/take.

Therefore, I sat down to cruise Facebook while the oven preheated and saw Cheryl's challenge and here I am.  On that note.....I'm anxious to finish the first of the blogs for the month and wander through the other ones.

Good to see you all here and good luck with your own challenges this month!!