[Kätzchen]

I've been told that I look exactly like my father's mother and in many ways, I feel that it's true: I inherited my recessive traits (blue eyes, curly hair, height, body, dental structure) from my father's side of the family.

But amazingly, I've also been told, over the years, that my voice sounds just like my mothers - and it does, to a certain degree, I think.

Primarily, I think I am probably more like my mother, in many ways. She's a thinker, she's got this unnameable intutitive and instinctual process by which she bases a good deal of her decisions on, and she gets uber quiet when she's either having troubles coming to a good decision or when she's up to something she doesn't exactly want the whole world to know about or she's about to do something totally unexpected and super sweet. She's also got this brainchild quality about her that has always set her apart from her peers/friends/coworkers. When she was earning her nursing degree, when I was a young girl (probably around the age of 7 or 8), I used to stay up late at night and help her with her math (algebra) homework. Not that I was some math genius, but because I had this way of discovering answers to complicated math problems, that even today, I don't know how I do it. I love math, by the way. My mother was the musician and vocalist, in our family. She loved the arts, music, works of literature, and anything of cultural value related to her indiginous roots. My mother had the best taste in clothes -- so much so, that even where we grew up rurally, she found ways to get what she desired: She hired my grandmother and her best friend (a seamstress) to make all our clothes and consequently, I learned quite a lot from my grandmother (my mom's mother) about fabrics and which fabric was the best to use, durability issues, fashion issues, stuff like that.

So I'd say that between the two of my parents, I probably am more like my mother, even though I don't look like her.

I also credit my work ethic to my mother's work ethic: We pretty much match each other on that front and also where it concerns learning styles, too.

I will say that is was both of my parents love of nature that inspired me to care about nature, but I care about nature differently than my parents. Both of my parents were avid hunters. I was never enchanted by hunting for game, like they were. But I loved the forest, rivers, lakes and the ocean, the wild flowers, the birds and animals, which were native to the forest where I grew up, and that's the extent of the kind of 'hunting' that I like.

If anything, I think the one skill that I definately inherited from my mother was her 'eagle eye' - how she zeros in on things that are of utmost concern to her. I think I have that same trait as my mother. She has always claimed that she inherited that trait from her mother (my grandmother) and I can't help but agree with her - even though my grandmother was terribly quiet, it seemed that nothing ever escaped her direct or indirect attention.