Thursday, June 26, 2014

Me, me, meme!

A bloggy thank you goes out to Robbo, for nominating me for the Liebster award - "liebster" apparently translates from the German as "sweetheart, beloved, darling". It's a way to discover new blogs and bloggers by forcing encouraging them to tell a bit about themselves and pass the love on by nominating others.

The Quasi-Official Rules of the Liebster Award
If you have been nominated for The Liebster Award AND YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT, write a blog post about the Liebster award in which you:
1. thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.
2. display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)
3. answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
4. provide 11 random facts about yourself.
5. nominate 5 – 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)
6. create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.
7. list these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!)
*****
Part One, Spelunking in My Mind:

1.  Let’s play Desert Island Disks.  Singles or albums.  Pick your five and explain. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos, double disk. Dave Brubeck Quartet, Take Five. Mozart, Eine Kliene Nachtmusik. Johnny Cash, Greatest Hits, double disk. Third Day, Move. Yes, this is a cheat, as there are seven disks. Sue me. Aside from being a favorite Third Day disk, Move has some incredibly meaningful lyrics, reminders of God's gracious gift of salvation and my coming home in heaven. Both classical and jazz music are complex, yielding something new every time you listen to it (only five disks on a desert island - the boredom would set in quickly). The Johnny Cash? No explanation needed.

2.  Who shot first?  (Understand that the wrong answer here will doom you straight to the appropriate circle of hell.) I don't care. How's that for a wrong answer? It's been decades since I've seen any of the Star Wars movies (amazed that I even understood the question without googling), and Mr. I've-already-made-millions-from-my-poorly-written-movies Lucas (or the studio) won't let the films be released via streaming, so I won't be seeing them again soon.

3.  In baseball, what is your opinion of the DH rule and the introduction this year of the replay review challenge rule?  (See above.) Everyone else both plays defense and hits. Why should the pitcher be excused? As for the replay review and challenge - grow up, boys. Life isn't perfectly fair; bad calls happen. Eliminate replays altogether, suck it up and deal with it.

4.  When the light turns green and the fellah sitting in front of you obviously fails to notice it, how do you remind him?  (Please include horn technique, appropriately-censored vocabulary and body language.) A single, light tap on the horn. If they still don't move, a light double tap. I haven't yet encountered a situation where I had to go to the third option...

5.  Are you better off than you were six years ago? Financially? Yes. Emotionally/spiritually? No. A lot of stuff has happened over the last six years; I'm still trying to find solid ground.

6.  Name a historically significant point in your life and tell us how it affected you personally. For some reason, I was home to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. It was a pointed reminder that man is not all we think we are, pushing to explore and expand our knowledge is a risky business and we should think long and hard before acting. In an odd coincidence, years later I took a decision-making class. We were given a set of facts/circumstances surrounding a cargo train trip. Given the facts from previous trips, those around the prospective trip and the possible rewards/consequences, did we go, or not? I argued long in our group that we should not, based on historical data and the current conditions. No one listened, I was overruled...and we blew up Challenger all over again. The professor had used that data, just changing it from a space shuttle to a cargo train. I'm not much of a risk taker.

7.  Brush with Greatness.  There are two ways to take this question, and how you take it says a lot about your character. One, when have you been in the presence of someone/something great? Two, when have you done something that may have seen you immortalized? Or my third option: greatness isn't found in what you've done, but in who you are when things are going against you.

8.  Cats or dogs and why?  (See Nos. 2 and 3 above re incorrect responses.) Dogs.

9.  If you had to pick an historickal epoch in Western History with which you have the most sympathy, which would you choose?  Why?  If you don’t identify with any given period, why not? While I have a thing for the art and design of the Art Deco period, I wouldn't say I've any particular sympathy or identification with any era. Modern conveniences are too, well, convenient for me to want to go back in time. Though I do rather wish our nation's faith and morality would rewind by a century or two.

10.  Charcoal or gas?   Why?  (See Nos. 2, 3 and 7 above.) Charcoal. If I want to cook over gas, I'll stay in the kitchen. Besides, the fun in using charcoal is in conquering the various methods needed to cook all sorts of yummy goodness on the grill.

11.  How has the experience of blogging influenced you over the course of your time dabbling in the innertoobs.  Best positive?  Worst negative?  How has your approach/attitude towards blogging changed as you’ve gained experience and as your personal circumstances have changed.  Tell us about the crossing of the streams between your bloggy life and your real-world existence.  (Okay, I’m cramming a bunch of questions into one, but they’re all interrelated.)
Positive - interacting with a wide-ish variety of people - many I wouldn't necessarily do so in the normal course of life.
Negative - I'm a bit more open on the blog than I am in real life (and I'm pretty emotionally shut down on the blog, so you can imagine...), and it still freaks me out a little bit when people I know casually in real life are regular readers.
Approach - Eh. The last two years or so there hasn't been much of an approach, the result of real life things more than lack of passion for blogging (see previous response about being rather emotionally reticent). Originally, this place was meant to reignite my love for writing, as well as be an outlet for faith-related discussions. While there are a few moments of brilliant writing (none in recent months), the faith component has fallen by the wayside. I still plan to get back to it, but I need to reorganize some other aspects of life first.
Crossing streams - unlike the catastrophic effect of "crossing streams" in Ghostbusters, my real life encounters with on line bloggers has been pleasant. Back in 2003, I travelled to Toronto to meet with twenty-odd other quilters for a four day informal retreat. While a few knew one another from real life, most of us only met via a quilting message board. Laughing, eating, sewing - a perfectly lovely trip. Closer to home, the lovely Sandy of Piecemeal Quilts lives just over an hour away; we met at Starbucks one Saturday to talk quilts. She invited me to a monthly quilt-in she hosts, but with the distance and the fact she has three cats (I'm deathly allergic as well as not partial to felines), I can't make it.

Eleven random oddities:
1. In third grade I wrote a series of mystery stories starring my best friend and me. The teacher let me read them to the class (to my friend's embarrassment). I still have those stories, written in loopy, big just-learned cursive in pencil on rough lined paper.

2. My third grade class included eight or so fourth graders (overflow from the other class). One of the fourth graders played violin, which is what induced me to take up the instrument the next year, when I was eligible to start in the orchestra. I played all the way through my sophomore year of college, when things just got too busy.

3. During junior high, I received a guitar as a Christmas present. Mostly self-taught, with about a year of lessons at a local music store, I played in our high school jazz band. Our choir recorded an album (this is back in the days of vinyl) every third year, including my senior year. They needed a guitarist for one number - including the sixteen bar solo opening. Yeah, that was me. I don't play much anymore, though.

4. I'm always early. For everything.

5. Watching television or a movie without doing something else - folding laundry, doing a crossword, reading a book - makes me twitch, then fall asleep.

6. No matter how many times I use a particular staircase, I still count the number of steps. OCD much?

7. Visual disorder - an inordinately messy/chaotic room - makes it difficult for me to think. In fact, it can actually make me feel so overwhelmed, I can't figure out where to start to make it better. Too much visual stimulation makes me shut down (I can only do museums in short doses); too much aural stimulation, however, makes me homicidal (not a fan of loud crowds or concerts).

8. Including college, I've lived with the same thirty mile radius my entire life. And I'm happy with that.

9. The only family vacation we ever took was to Expo '67 in Montreal. We stopped at Niagra Falls on the way.

10. On those personality/aptitude/career tests, if you tell me what result you want me to get, I can most likely do it.

11. I still wonder what I'm going to be when I grow up on a regular basis.

Wherein I may lose some friends:
A couple of friends just shut down their blogs, in fear, I think, of my tagging them for this meme. Well, ha! There are still a few left:

Mariel and/or Valerie of What's My List? (this should be right up your alley!)
Leann of Some Days There's Pie
Chad of Ruminating Out Loud

All participation voluntary; don't feel obligated.

Odd/prying/silly questions for you to answer:
1. Salty or sweet?
2. If you could only, for the rest of your life, either see the movie or read the book upon which the movie was based, which would you choose, and why?
3. How long has your longest friendship survived?
4. What part, if any, does religious faith play in your day to day life?
5. Clowns: Funny and cute, or evil Satanic spawn?
6. If the great zombie apocalypse strikes tomorrow, what skills could you bring to our hearty band of non-zombified survivors (remembering that most of our current infrastructure would collapse)?
7. What is your favorite vegetable? Method of preparation?
8. What was your first car like? What is your dream ride?
9. What is your favorite hobby? Feel free to define "hobby" as loosely as needed.
10. Star Wars or Star Trek?
11. You are a fly on the wall at a gathering of your friends, who are (for some inexplicable reason - we know they wouldn't do this in real life) discussing you. What do you hope they would say about you?

Whew. Have fun.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Ooooh fun! We will try to work this up for Thursday! I've been so busy these past two weeks that we haven't posted in a while (how Valerie puts up with me, I'll never know!) Thanks!