Sunshine Blogger Award

Weird Weekends nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award so I’m going to take a break from the 30 Day Knitting Challenge. I have to agree with him that this isn’t exactly an award but more of a chain letter writing prompt. I had grand ideas about what my blog would be and they didn’t include silly exercises like this, but I recently started 30 days of knitting-related prompts, so what the hell – I’ll let my hair down and have some more fun: thank you for the nomination! If you don’t follow Weird Weekends yet, go check him out; he does a lot of interesting projects and blogs about them, he’s very funny, and overall entertaining to read.

So here’s the deal:

The Rules

1. Thank the person that nominated you.
2. Answer the questions from your nominator.
3. Nominate fellow bloggers you follow.
4. Give them 10 questions to answer

I was asked these questions, so here we go!

1. When was the first time you fell in love and was it “true” love?

Yes, it was true love. He moved to my area when he was in 8th grade and I was in 7th. I didn’t know it then, but our grandparents had been neighbors and good friends; his family owned and ran the local butcher shop and also employed my grandmother (that was the last place she would work; they still used her handwritten signs the last time I was in the shop – it’s comforting to see her handwriting still).

So I was smitten with him. We went on a date (I certainly thought it was that) after school one day; we hiked Mt. Tom, which is now part of a national park. As it turned out, I like liked him and he only liked me.

The next year, he like liked me and I only liked him. But then when he was a senior and I was a junior, we finally clicked and started “going out.” We dated for over a year and I still have a lot of good memories of our time together – parties in the woods, our companionship, and the week I spent with him at his summer job after he graduated, in Jackson, WY. I vividly remember the day we spent in Yellowstone with his friend who had a truck; we ate shrooms (yes, those magical shrooms) and did the park loop – it was amazing, but I’d like to go back and see it again with clear eyes.

When I broke up with him it was because I was heading to college and he was heading in the opposite direction, on probation after 30 days in jail for breaking into a store. That would have been the end of our romance, but I took a semester off of college the fall of my junior year and moved back home. I reconnected with him and we began dating again. We could have and would have gotten married if I had stuck around and/or allowed it, but I knew that I wouldn’t be happy living there and I desperately wanted to go back to school (in Pittsburgh of all places) and I knew he wouldn’t fit into my life there, though I admit part of that was because I didn’t want to make room for him. I like to think that in an alternate universe, we are married (weird, I know).

Anyway, I made this second breakup as awful as possible. Why? I don’t know. Maybe to make it stick? I was awful to him. Peter Garbiel’s Us had just come out and I still can’t listen to some of the songs on that album because they remind me of that time. The end of this relationship is one of the things I would go back in time to change, to make better somehow. I still feel ashamed.

Wow, I could do a blog post on all of these questions. I’ll try to be more brief …

2. What are you truly passionate about?

I guess I’d have to say knitting and spinning and weaving and all the yarny fiber art things because it’s what I’ve been doing with my life, aside from stay-at-home-parenting for the last 12 years. Because my family circumstances allow me to indulge in this, I’m trying to make it into a career. (Or is it already a career? Am I a fiber artist or just an aspiring one? How can it be a career if I haven’t figured out how to successfully promote my patterns & etsy shop? How can it be a career if it’s hoovering up money instead of making it? Deep questions that I’ve been trying to answer for myself.)

3. What is one of your “guilty” pleasures?

Sugar. I love Smarties (both British and American versions but at different times), though I currently don’t have any on hand. Two years ago I ordered a 10lb box of American Smarties “for Halloween” and estimated that I’d have some for Christmas as well; they were gone by Thanksgiving. I also really love dark chocolate and prefer that to other chocolate except when we’re talking about peanut butter cups (Reese’s Miniatures are the best) or Kit Kat, and don’t consider white chocolate to be chocolate – blech. I would eat maple sugar candy every day if I could. Basically, if it’s candy, I’ll eat it, with exceptions: the aforementioned white chocolate, Circus Peanuts, and black licorice.

4. What is the thing that “bugs” or “bothers”  you the most?

The sound that plastic bags make. Somehow, it inspires irrational rage in me and I have perfected The Look to get people to stop making noise with plastic bags. For example, our local theater was, for a time, handing out plastic produce bags to thrifty families who would buy a jumbo popcorn to split among 4-5 people. The sound of plastic bags rustling throughout the moving drove me insane and I vowed never to return to the theater. I have no idea what the movie was, but the sound of plastic bags rustling periodically is seared into my brain. I did relent and have been back to the theater; a friend told me she complained to management about it, along with several other people, and they stopped handing out plastic bags.

5. What was your most embarrassing moment?

There are so many to choose from; this is hard. The time during a job interview (for a tech writing position) when the interviewer pointed out a spelling mistake on my resume? I had written “asses” instead of “assess” – not a ringing self endorsement for a writer. Or the time in 9th grade when I got my period and leaked all over the back of the skirt I was wearing and a kid – the loud kid in our class – pointed it out to everyone as I walked down the hall? Or that other time in 5th grade at the class pool party at the fancy hotel in town when the rich lunch they fed us sped its way through my digestive system and I (I hate this word but it’s very apt) sharted in my swimsuit? Or the time I asked my BIL if he minded if I breast-fed my firstborn and when he said no, go ahead, I did, without a cover? (He’s 4 years younger than my husband and was in high school at the time; boobs are embarrassing apparently.)

6. Who do you admire? Why?

I really admire my cousin/sister (long story): as a child, she was put through the wringer and instead of becoming small, mean, and angry like the people who did that to her, she lifted herself up and away from them. She went from having nothing to raising 3 intelligent, considerate, and generous people and her marriage is rock-solid. I also really admire my in-laws, who left Vietnam in 1979ish on a boat in the middle of the night with 2 young children and a baby. I don’t know how they survived the war, the aftermath, or 2 years in a refugee camp, let alone how they went from literally the shirts on their backs to being homeowners and now kind, generous grandparents. They’re amazing!

7. What one thing do you want to change?

Lightbulbs? The width of my waist? The Republican nominee for president? (And I’m a democrat, BTW; I just wish they’d managed to nominate someone less … dangerous.) That’s 3 things, so I’ll pick one and say the nominee.

8. What is the strangest dream you have ever had?

This presidential election cycle? Kidding!

I’m not sure if this is the strangest, but it’s the only one I can remember at the moment. In the dream, my husband was coming home from work later and later. I was feeling very neglected and eventually, I got suspicious that he had something going on on the side. So I dropped in on him when he was working late one night to discover that there was no other woman, but that he preferred work over me and I felt just as bad and jealous as I would have if there had been another woman. In real life, he is, in fact, a workaholic and we’ve both been working on that in our relationship for basically the duration of the marriage. There’s a fine line between workaholic and the type of job and doing what he needs to do to succeed without a college degree. (Also, I’m really revealing a lot here. I was going to make this funny but things have taken a serious turn – sorry.)

9. What is your favorite season and why?

I love spring. The temperatures are warm but not too warm, everything is waking up and growing – I can see the season progress, unlike with summer & winter that seem to just drag on the same day after day. Also, there’s more sunlight every day, which makes it easier for me to leave depression behind.

10. What is your most unique quality or trait?

People have called me freaky, but freaky in a good way, I swear – like, freaky weird (weird is also good). My Dad once called me a flake, but what he really meant and should have said was “silly” (yes, I’m still recovering from that). A guy that I worked with in the late 90s likened me to Phoebe on Friends (I guess I’m okay with that). And kids in high school thought I was like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club (she’s a little darker than what I thought I was like but I’ll take it). So somewhere in all of that lies the me-ness of me: I’m quirky.

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Congratulations if you made it this far! Huzzah! I would like to nominate the following people:

elizabeth kay booth
Paula @ Spin a Yarn
Midnight Knitter
Knit Potion
Talya
mrjosiahbain
PaperPuff

Please only do this is you haven’t done it before. Actually, even if you have done it before but want to do it again, go ahead – live! Do you want to do it but I didn’t list you? Comment and I’ll rectify that (or just go ahead and do it & tag me).

To borrow from James Lipton on The Inside the Actor’s Studio, who borrowed from Bernard Pivot, who borrowed from Proust, here are my questions:

1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on?
4. What turns you off?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10.If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Have fun, friends!