Lea Wait, here, taking deep breaths after two weeks on the road … and more than two weeks of major computer problems that resulted in my not being on line and therefore not receiving (or answering) emails. (Who has telephone numbers for people? not me!) Since I missed all that sharing time on emails and social media, today I decided to come clean, and share some things most people (maybe you?) don’t know about me.

No explanations, by the way … just the facts!

1. I don’t have a cellphone. Neither does my husband.

2. I’ve never been a heavy drinker … but I do have a DWI conviction (shudder) in my distant past. My favorite cocktail is a sidecar … and I love fine champagne.

3. Sometimes I volunteer to go to the grocery just so I can buy (and devour) a chocolate bar. My husband once said he’d never seen me buy one. (Secret splurge kept secret.)

4. The house I live in was built in 1774. In 1832 it was moved from an island to the mainland. I’ve never seen a ghost there, but sometimes a television set in an empty room turns itself on. Often to a French channel.

5. I come from a female family: I’m the oldest of two sisters. Between the three of us we have seven daughters; no sons. Grandchildren? I have eight; five are girls. On the other hand, my husband is the oldest of four brothers. Together they produced four boys and one girl.

6. My youngest daughter has now been engaged for 12 years. She and her guy seem happy, although I doubt she can fit into the wedding dress I bought her in 2003.

7. First when I was in college, and  later, in New York City, I did improvisational theater.

8. When I was twenty-five I married a television comedy writer who worked for Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett, among others. He also invented Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect” line.

8. Bob, the wonderful man I’m married to today, took the pictures at that wedding.

9. I was thirty years old and single when my first daughter came home. She’d been born when I was 25.

10. The books that most influenced my life were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men. I read both books dozens of times, and, without realizing it, I patterned my family after Jo March’s.

11. I love the smells of freshly mown grass and burning leaves and mud flats.

12. I have (full) floor to ceiling bookcases (note the plural) in every room of my home (except the bathroom.) And I still have about a dozen cartons of books I have no space for. One room is just for mysteries.

13. I once smuggled drugs into India. (In case someone reading this is with the DEA … the drugs were legal in this country, but importing them to India was forbidden. They were for several orphanages.)

14. For three (long) years my business card read “Engineering Manager – AT&T.”

15. My daughters and I once appeared on Good Morning, America.

And I love Christmas and hot chocolate. What more is there to know?