25 Random Things About Me Mememememe

Yoga Korunta tagged me for this memememe on Facebook, so I'll just publish it here too, OK?

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25* people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

1. I prefer black tea, English style with milk and sugar, to coffee in the morning.

2. I love to get places under my own propulsion -- walking, biking ...

3. I love to play guitar and sing; I think I sing well and I'd be a better guitar player had I started at 16.

4. I have been folk dancing for 34 years, off and on

5. I also play recorder; I have since I was 8 and got my first instrument for my birthday while traveling in Germany.

6. Marzipan is my favorite confection.

7. My 3 kids were all delivered by a midwife, 2 of them at home.

8. I met my husband when I was 15, he was 14.

9. I hitch-hiked through Europe alone when I was 17. My parents didn't know. (In other words, I was stupid.)

10. My favorite literary genres are: memoir, coming-of-age stories, and historical fiction.

11. When all else fails me, I read Terry Pratchett.

12. I wish I knew how to write songs.

13. I love Corgis (the stocky, foxy-looking little dogs favored by Queen Elizabeth) and have had 2 of them, although right now we have a Dalmation mix whom I adore.

14. I knit like crazy and have no idea how to crochet.

15. When I go outside at night I always look for the moon, the Big Dipper, Cassiopia, the Pleiades, and Orion (in season.)

16. I've only seen Aurora Borealis a couple of times, and I wish to see it again. Soon.

17. I want to try snow shoeing.

18. I loved changing diapers when my kids were small. We used cloth diapers and washed them ourselves, and I liked that too. And no, I don't have some sort of fetish.

19. I would choose a good grapefruit over any other kind of fruit. Especially now, in January.

20. One of the best vacations we ever took was to the Bay of Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, Canada. (I imagine that my children would beg to differ, but tough. I'll tag them and they can put in their own 2¢ worth.)

21. On our honeymoon in Paris, we went to see Jim Morrison's grave. Why? We were staying right down the street from the cemetery, it was there ...

22. I hiked up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. It was fun, and I'd do it again.

23. My car is a 1990 Volvo station wagon. (Anyone surprised?)

24. I used to have my fingers sing operas while I washed dishes -- but you'll just have to take my word for it. No repeat performances ever again. (Not even my husband has seen it.)

25. I'm scared of earthworms.

*Consider yourself tagged, if you want to be.

Tagged!

Ho hum. Life is so ... meaningless. That's why I have jumped at the chance to do the meaningless meme, just as DCup knew I would.

1. Five names you go by:
a) Mom (Mommy, Mama ... depending on what they want from me)
b) Ms. Grindrod (my schoolmarm persona)
c) Snoozin' (or sometimes Snoozin' Suzan or Snoozer)
d) Suzy
e) Hey you! Feed me!! (spoken in cat, dog, and guinea pig)

2. Three things you are wearing right now:
a) my favorite Irish cardigan
b) felted green wool slippers (I made them myself)
c) my nuddies (under my clothes)

3. Two things you want very badly at the moment:
a) another 2 days off
b) a good book and bed

4. Three people who will probably fill this out:
a) Enriched Geranium
b) Poodle Doc
c) (insert your name here)

5. Two things you did last night:
a) Went to hear my sweetie's band (Reptile Palace Orchestra) at the beautiful and amazing Mabel Tainter Theater in Menomonie, WI -- about 3 1/2 hours north of here
b) soaked in the bacteria & chemical stew, er, hot tub at the Menomonie Country Inn & Suites

6. Two things you ate today:
a) eggs benedict at the Norske Nook in Osseo, WI
b) roasted, salted cashews from the Menomonie Food Co-op

7. Two people you last talked to on the phone:
a) my older daughter Cinderbelle (true story: She called shortly after we arrived home, while I was trying to put things away. I was talking and walking when -- eeeuwww -- I stepped right in a pile of dog doo outside of our bedroom. I guess Molly didn't get out right away when she needed to.)
b) Sparkly Seacow's friend Violet's stepdad Todd

8. Two things you are going to do tomorrow:
a) go to work
b) meet a friend in the sauna at the Y to conduct some Quaker Meeting business. (Hey, it was her idea!)

9. Two longest car rides:
a) Madison, WI to Keene, NH in my 1967 VW beetle with my dog, my mama cat and her 4 newborn kittens
b) Madison, WI to Salt Lake City with an 8 year old and a toddler

10. Two of your favorite beverages:
a) Yorkshire Gold black tea, brewed strong, with milk and sugar the British way. I drink a cup every morning and afternoon.
b) Mocha Millie, a coffee drink at a neighborhood coffee shop, made with chocolate and malt powder. "Whipped cream on top?" "Yes, please."

And finally, a clip from a favorite movie: Etre et avoir (To Be and To Have). If you have not seen this wonderful French documentary about a teacher in a country school, do yourself a favor and rent it.

Tagged! From 20 Feet Away

My esteemed husband has tagged me for this old saw of a meme, and because he is a Promise Keeper and I am a submissive wife, I have no choice but to respond. Ha! As if ...

Rules:

• The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
• Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
• At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.
• Yadayadayada

Ten years ago:

I was teaching first grade at Hawthorne Elementary School, struggling through the fog of both grieving my daughter's death and taking care of my other two young daughters. Motherhood is not for the fainthearted!

Five things on today's "to do" list:

• Prune the dead branches from the cherry and redbud trees
• Weed the flower garden around the redbud tree
• Go to Meeting
• Walk in the arboretum for mothers' day, remember to take the binoculars!
• Dinner at Atlantis Taverna with my mother-in-law

Things I'd do if I was a billionaire:

• Get out of debt
• Pay for my kids' college
• Buy myself a new guitar (I'm fixated on the Gibson CJ-165, because it is an overall smaller-bodied acoustic guitar that supposedly has a big guitar sound; I have very small hands and sometimes the stretch is a struggle.)
• Send a great big donation, TOMORROW, to Shirley Golub in her bid to replace Nancy "I'm rich and impeachment is off the table" Pelosi
• Donate the several millions of dollars needed to restore the theater at Madison East High School (and I'd be in good company because actor Bradley Whitford has donated money to the same cause. It's his alma mater.)
• Remodel the library at my school, and while I'm at it replace all of the toilets. Really. They are ridiculous.
  
• Set up an endowment for the American Friends Service Committee
• Buy the Camp Woodbrooke land outright (that's the Quaker summer camp on whose board of directors I sit)
• Buy my husband an upright acoustic bass

Three Bad Habits:

• Procrastination
• Being something of a loose cannon
• Spending too much time on the computer

Five Places I've Lived:

• Terre Haute, Indiana (birthplace of me and Eugene Debs) -- 3 years
• westside of Madison, Wisconsin -- 16+ years
• Fannrem, Sør Trøndelag and Rauland, Telemark, Norway -- 1 year
• Spofford, New Hampshire -- 1 year, when I went to Keene State College. Why? I don't know!
• eastside of Madison, Wisconsin -- 25+ years

(The eastside and westside of dinky little Madison might seem like one and the same place, but to a local they are worlds apart. When I first moved over here, it was skid row and blue collar land. Gentrification is making too many inroads, sadly, but the realtors still steer newcomers to the westside and seriously, there are long-time residents who are afraid to come to my side of town! And if you listened to some people, you would never know that we also have a north and a south side!)

Five (or so) Jobs I've Had:

• Detassling corn
• A&W counter-help
• Laborer in a nursery (plants, not kids) in Norway
• Teaching in many child care centers
• Assistant/docent in fledgling Madison Children's Museum
• not to mention being a nursing assistant at a nursing home and at a "Happy Home for Handicapped Children"

Five People I'm Tagging (Please don't hold it against me and feel free to decline ...)

• Poodle Doc
• Sacred Suzie
• Yearning For God
• Sorghum Crow
• Sminthia

For Pete's Sake, Don't You Know Enough About Me Already?

Jan tagged me for a meme, 10 Random Things About Me.

1) My grandfather invented an early process for putting whipped cream in an aerosol can (There! I didn't forget this time!)
2) I only like pajama bottoms, not the tops. I make my own bottoms and I wear old t-shirts for tops.
3) I love hedgehogs.
4) I am afraid of flying.
5) I've tried whale meat. (It was served for dinner at my boarding school in Norway. It was like stringy beef.)
6) I do not care for organized sports.
7) Like Jan, I make food from scratch and do not use mixes.
8) My favorite holidays are Groundhog Day and May Day.
9) I worry a lot.
10) I like board games and word games, but not card games.

And I tag ... PoodleDoc, PoodleDoc Jr., Sminthia, Enriched Geranium, Sparkly Sea Cow and Quaker Fruit Salad.

Addendum ...

... to yesterday's meme. HOW could I have forgotten the most significant random fact about myself? I must be slipping.

My grandfather invented one of the early processes used in putting whipped cream into a can!

How cool is that?

Oh My God, Another Meme!

And aren't they all about me-me? This one is from the good doctor, Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein. But I googled it to find out what the actual directions were, and found out that this one has been tumbling around for a l-o-n-g time, years, in fact. It's the "Seven Things Meme", so I'm going to tell you 7 random facts about myself.

1. I don't reveal this too often, but I am a Hoosier by birth, born in Terre Haute, IN (which is also the birthplace of Eugene Debs.)
2. In second grade I got in trouble for writing profanities all over the playground when I was supposed to be going home for lunch.
3. I learned to read from Alice & Jerry (not Dick & Jane or Tom & Betty or Jimmy & Sue.)
4. My favorite place in North America is the Bay of Fundy, which extends from Maine to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and has the highest tides in the world.
5. I love gardening, but earthworms have always freaked me out.
6. I do not like spicy hot foods. My favorite cuisine is Middle Eastern, and my current favorite restaurant is Peruvian (but they do not serve guinea pigs, so don't even ask.)
7. I tend to find dimes laying on the sidewalk.

Now, here's my thing about memes: I really don't like tagging people, so I'll just open it up. If you want to tell 7 things about yourself, either in my comments or on your blog, go right ahead. If you post them on your blog, please let me know and I'll swing by and read them.

Book Meme

Jan tagged me for this meme. I actually like memes, especially ones where I get to talk about books. I love books. Maybe I should become a librarian. And I tag anyone else who wants to answer, either on your own blog or in my comments, because I am also interested in what others are reading. Maybe I should become a librarian. Oh, yeah, I already said that.
Here goes:

Total number of books? Gosh, I haven’t counted. Ever. I actually seldom buy books these days, unless it’s something I know I will read again and again, or something with limited availability. I have a large collection of children’s books, many of them out of print favorites. So I probably have between 1000 and 2000.

Last book read? Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things (A mystery for middle school aged students that I read and reviewed as part of my student teaching for library certification) and At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman.

Last book bought? For myself, Two Sweaters For My Father by Perry Klass

Five meaningful books?

The Impossible Will Take A Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear by Paul Loeb

Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition by Catherine Whitmire

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope by Jonathan Kozol

Push by Sapphire

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

How about favorite children's books? I LOVE children’s books, always have. I’ll name a few from my childhood:

Twig by Elizabeth Orton Jones
Dr. Goat by Georgiana (I want this book! If you have a copy you’d like to sell, let me know.)
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Dubose Heyward
Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present by Charlotte Zolotow
Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett
The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes
Pink Maple House by Christine Noble Govan (I’m looking for this one too.)
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit

Most Used Cookbooks:

Whole Foods for the Whole Family, La Leche League (Jan's favorite too!)
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home, The Moosewood Collective
Extending the Table ... A World Community Cookbook, Joetta Handrich Schlabach
From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Farm Fresh Seasonal Produce, Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition
The Joy of Cooking, Rombauer & Becker

Tag, I'm "It"!

So here's a question: If Dick Cheney plays tag, does he tag himself?

I did a Dick Cheney and tagged myself for the meme at Blue Gal's site. Why? Because I wanted to, that's why. And you're either for me or you're for the terrorists.

OK, so I'm naming three favorite books that others may not have heard of:

1) Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry; this book spoke to me. Wendell Berry has written numerous works of fiction about Port Williams, Kentucky. This one chronicles the life of Hannah Coulter, from when she is a pregnant young bride during WW2 to when she is an elderly woman. There are passages in this book that sing.

2) The Wizard of Loneliness by John Nichols (but not the journalist John Nichols that writes for The Progressive, etc. This John Nichols also wrote The Milagro Beanfield War.) This is a beautiful and funny coming-of-age story about a rather neglected, motherless boy who goes to live with relatives in Vermont when his father enlists and is shipped overseas during WW2. It was made into a dreadful movie about 15 years ago, so even if you saw the movie and hated it, please give the book a try.

3) The Summer Book by Tove Jansson; this author from Finland is best known for the children's "Moomintroll" series, which is delightful in its own right. The Summer Book is a novel about the relationship between a little girl and her grandmother one summer that they spend together in a cottage on an island in the gulf of Finland.

As always, if you order any of these books from Amazon I will never speak to you again.

Tag, everyone is "it"! What are your favorite books?

Tagged!

I was touched to be mentioned among Quaker Dave's current favorite blogs on Thursday. It was sweet. All I do is sit for way too many hours and pour out my heart onto the computer keys (when I should be practicing my guitar, feeding my children, brushing the dog ... you know, life.) But I love to write, and it pleases me to know that a few people like to read it.

So, I guess I am supposed to list 5 favorite blogs of my own ... which of course is not easy to do, because I read a lot more than 5 on a regular basis. And I read them because I like them. But here goes:

Potato Prints: written by a dear friend of mine who exists outside of the luminiferous ether of Blogland. I even know what she looks like! She posts her lovely artwork along with wry commentary. She will be on hiatus for a while, but you can go back and look at the archives. She was one of my inspirations to begin a blog.

Poodle Doc: another dear (F)friend, who I also have face to face communication with. He doesn't post really often ( eg. not 4 in one day like some people I know) but I really enjoy reading the things he composes, as well as his gleanings from elsewhere. Besides, he used to be my vet and even made a house call when my daughter's pet rat was dying.

Thailand Gal: this one's new to me, but Chani almost always seems to nail something that's been a part of my recent musing.

Well, with Quaker Agitator, it's definitely a mutual admiration society and check out Daily Darfur too. (I wrote that all in one sentence, so it only counts as one. That's creative accounting. It's left over from the brief period last fall when I decided to try being a Republican and effect change from the inside.)

OK, 2 blogs that I don't just like because the authors share my name. They're both done by really creative women, illustrated with beautiful photographs of locales that look exotic to my Wisconsin eyes, and they resonate in me in a different way than the lefty political blogs where I spend so much of my time. Suzie's Sacred Space (from BC, Canada) and Arty Fartying Around (from South Africa.)

What am I up to now? 4? Great ... I can include this one more: Goldendaze. Ginnie is a really good writer and she has led/leads a most interesting life.

And so many more. I love that in the blogging world there is myriad somethings for everyone, and because I have this split personality between Emma Goldman and a Norwegian housewife, my cyber travels take me to blogs about knitting, progressive politics, education, Quakerism, and making the most adorable Japanese stuffed animals ("stuffies") you've ever seen.

Tag, you're all "it". This time it's bad sixties TV sitcom theme song tag, so if you don't want to do it, you have to sit down really fast and say, "Greenacresistheplacetobe!"

The Meme

Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies: The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. An amazing book that documents not so much a culture clash between Hmong refugees and American doctors, but shows two enormous cultural ships that totally pass each other in the night with disastrous consequences for one little girl and her family. This book is profoundly beautiful and moving. Fadiman is an excellent writer.

Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music: This is a hard one. I love music, but -- changing the way I listen to music? That's awfully intellectual and heady. Um, let's see, what has given me goosebumps? Maybe that's how to approach it. Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill and Here Comes the Flood. Johnny Clegg & Savuka's album Shadowman. The Pachelbel Canon (though the effect was somewhat spoiled by my time working in a fern and croissant restaurant in the eighties where it was WAY overplayed -- the very first time I heard it, it blew me away.) Marta Sebestien's voice. Bulgarian women's ensembles. The early days of the Irish folk music revival (the band Planxty, in particular) Phil Ochs' I Ain't A-Marching Anymore

Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue: The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, Truly Madly Deeply, Babe, Little Women, Dr. Zhivago (the Omar Shariff one, of course), Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, Harvey, The War at Home (a documentary about the Vietnam War protests in Madison, Wisconsin)

Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief: Ugh. All I can think of is modern ones, and we are so steeped in every aspect of their lives by things like Peephole Magazine, that it is hard to suspend disbelief for any of them even if they are good actors. How about, Meryl Streep (I know, I know -- what a cliché.)

Name a work of art you'd like to live with: My tastes are simple: The Trevi Fountain in Rome, Van Gogh's Starry Night, a rose window from any one of those medieval cathedrals in Europe, Persian miniatures, mosaics from Pompeii

Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life: For a long time it was Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Aleksandrovich, Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. Really recently, Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Always, To Kill A Mockingbird.

Name a punch line that always makes you laugh: "Got any grapes?" (As told repeatedly by my 4 year old daughter a few years ago.)

Tagging: PoodleDoc, Ed, Potato Prints, Ginnie, Suzi-k or any of my siblings because I know you're all reading this religiously ... You can answer in the comments section or on your own blog.