Anna Campbell over at Romance Bandits tagged me for the 8 meme (list 8 random facts about yourself). I was VERY glad she did, since I had no idea what to blog about this week! (It was a hectic week, my Pug got an ear infection, I didn’t finish the WIP like I wanted, and Dancing With the Stars had its finale…)
So, here ’tis! Way more than you ever wanted to know about me, Amanda.
1) This is no surprise to anyone here at RR, though it might surprise people at the day job, who think I’m a serious, fairly normal, grown-up person. In reality, I am a crazed fan-girl. I have Steady Boyfriend Orlando (Pirates of the Caribbean opens today!!), New-ish Boyfriend Matthew Macfadyen, and Totally New Boyfriend Apolo Anton Ohno. If only I could put up their pics in my cubicle…
2) Another factoid not unknown to the Riskies (and related to #1)–I do love cheesy things (as well as actual cheese, come to think of it. Especially Gouda). I love Hello Kitty, garden gnomes, travel souvenirs like teapots shaped like the Tower of London, DWTS, and Disney movies. Also 1930s musicals with huge production numbers, where Fred and Ginger (in dresses made of feathers!) dance in a fake Venice or rain-swept gazebo.
3) I love music like Turandot, Mozart, Ravel, and Miles Davis. But I also like Abba. Especially Dancing Queen. And that Waterloo song.
4) I’ve worked in bookstores and libraries, in the office of a company that sets up estate sales, a classical music radio station, the marketing office of the symphony, and now back to a library. Where will I end up next??
5) In grad school, I specialized in Elizabethan poetry, just to be sure I’m totally unfit for any “real world” job. Therefore, I’m hopeless at sales calls and Excel spreadsheets, but if you ever need the symbolism analyzed in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, I’m your girl.
6) I’m the oldest child in my family, I have one brother who is several years younger. He’s a snowboarder and mountain biker, and doesn’t much like to read. Sometimes I wonder how we ended up in the same family, but I love him dearly.
7) I love raspberries and chocolate, cherry gelato (also saying the word “gelato”), samosas, and pad thai with shrimp. I hate brussels sprouts, lima beans, liver, and bananas (okay, I don’t ‘hate’ bananas, but I don’t much like them).
8) If I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Maui. Or the English countryside. I can’t quite decide. A bungalow near the beach or a cozy Tudor cottage?
I’m supposed to now tag 8 people, but instead I’m going to tag all of you! List your 8 in our comments–let us get to know you. Enjoy the holiday weekend, and be sure and sign up for our Riskies newsletter at riskies@yahoo.com. Please don’t make us list 8 reasons why you should…
Huh. . . 8. . . well. . . let’s see what happens. LOL
1 – Star Trek fan, big time.
2 – Star Wars fan, big time.
3 – Have a kitty, named, well, Kitty 🙂
4 – Live on my computer
5 – I’m simply surrounded by books. And it looks rather nice this way, actually. 🙂
6 – Collect teddy bears, rubber duckies, Ernies.
7- did I mention I was 30? ONly 5 months older than Star Wars? 🙂
8 – Love space shuttles, want to be an astronaut, go and live on Mars when Earth goes kaput and Sally Ride and Albert Einstein are related heroes on that. 🙂
Lois
Amanda, thanks a bunch for playing! This eight random facts tag has been huge fun and I’ve discovered so many interesting (and often funny!) things about people I thought I knew. Your facts were great! Actually, one of the best ones was Nicola Cornick’s – she did hers on my bandita post if anyone wants to see.
I too am a crazy fan girl. It’s pathetic at my age! But my latest crush is Richard Armitage from the BBC North and South. Has anyone seen that? It’s absolutely wonderful and he’s just magnetic. Sigh.
LOL, Lois! My parents once had a cat named “Miss Kitty”
Anna, I agree that Richard Armitage is quite yummy! Do you have his pic up by your desk? 🙂
OK, I’ll play…
1. I go to a lot of baseball games. My husband, daughter, and I have a 16-game plan with the Mariners. Though the team has been depressing for several years, we always have fun at the ballpark.
2. On a related note, Ichiro Suzuki is my secret baseball boyfriend.
3. My favorite cuisine is Italian.
4. I’m not much of a collector. My most prized possession is probably the Peninsular War campaign coin/token my husband gave me for 35th birthday a little over a year ago. I keep it at my writing desk as inspiration.
5. I grew up in Alabama, and I still say “y’all” and “fixing to.”
6. I lived in England in 1997-98.
7. My writing mantra for when I’m stuck is “What would Joss Whedon do?”
8. I still hold a grudge against FOX for canceling Firefly, and Nathan Fillion is one of my secret actor boyfriends.
1. I once had a cat who would bark and fetch mints. And who was deathly afraid of bananas. (He has since gone to cat heaven, where there are tons of mice and no bananas.)
2. I love shopping in thrift stores.
3. I love sunshine, but I don’t like being in direct sun. (And I hate sun in my eyes.)
4. I was living in London in 1996 when the IRA resumed its bombing, and I actually heard/felt the Docklands bomb. At first I thought it was an earthquake, then I thought “this isn’t California!”
Then I vaguely wondered if it could have been a sonic boom. (When I was growing up there seemed to be sonic booms all the time, probably due to local experimental jet testing or something.) My best analogy was it sounded/felt like someone had taken a huge piece of wood and whacked the side of my flat.
5. I loathe cilantro.
6. And three of my favorite cuisines are Indian, Thai, & Mexican, all of which use lots of cilantro.
7. Some of my favorite singers/bands: Thomas Dolby, David Bowie, Genesis (especially older stuff), Thompson Twins, Peter Gabriel, Liza Minnelli.
8. When I was fourteen, my five favorite musicals in the world were The Man of La Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof, Oliver, The Music Man, and Annie. Or maybe Evita. 🙂
Cara
I love this eight tag! Really interesting, Susan and Cara and Lois. Cara, we clearly must share record collections one day (I was such a DB tragic). Susan, love the sound of the Peninsula War coin.
Amanda, perhaps I can find a picture of RA to inspire me (if it survives being drooled upon regularly) while I’m in England in a few weeks. Whoo-hoo! Stately homes, here I come, doo-da, doo-da…
Okay, really should be writing but this is too much fun.
1. Used to have a black cat named Scooter who was nuts for cantalope. Hope there IS cantalope in cat heaven.
2. Equine fanatic.
3. Had a mis-spent youth as a seriously nasty little punk rocker. Am all better now.
4. Peter Gabriel is God. Jane Austen is Goddess.
5. Longtime and forever fangirl crush is Alan Rickman (goes double for the Snape fetish) current fangirl beau is Aidan Gillen.
6. Favorite things to grow are sweet peas, roses, and pumpkins.
7. I’m an initiated and practicing Wiccan.
8. Have just started reading Claiming the Courtesan. Ooh boy, Kylemore is intense!
So who’s next?
My turn!
1. We once had a cat named Kitty Kitty
2. The irises of my eyes are bigger than normal.
3. I collect Ackermann prints.
4. My very first car was a 1964 Plymouth Valiant (it was very used)
5. I never took my kids to Disneyworld.
6. I hate sushi
7. I love peanut butter and jelly sandwichs
8. I met my husband in a mental hospital……
(okay, I have to explain that one. We both worked there as psychiatric aides. My husband gave up psychology, but I stuck it out for my whole “other” career)
Wow Diane, The Waifs, an Australian band, have a song in which a 1964 Valiant with a ruby red interior is mentioned! Beats the heck out of my POS 4-door Maverick. That thing was like driving a davenport down the road. (“Davenport” = mid-west USA word for very old overstuffed sofa.)
Your eyes must look like a kitty’s.
Now my responses to y’all (I lived in Alabama for 4 years, but I’ve blogged about that). Do you say “Y’all come and see us, y’hear,” Susan?
I love Star Trek, too, Lois!! A young William Shatner! sigh. I can sometimes tell within 30 seconds what episode it is.
Janegeorge–Wiccan??? fascinating!
Hey, Janegeorge, reading my book? Kewl. We had a dog named Astro who loved avocado (we lived on an avocado farm so he was in dog heaven). Good choice with Alan Rickman! Even the voice is enough for me! Shivers down the spine, good ones. We had a cat called Blackie – as good as Kitty and Kitty Kitty. And yes, he was BLACK! I visited Atlanta for the first time last year and I’ve got to say those Southern accents, yum! Diane and Susan, y’all keeping talkin’ like that, y’hear?
OK, I’ll give it a shot:
1. When I was a kid, we had a cat named Lucky Gray. She was–get this–gray.
2. At the moment I am typing this, I am in Beijing, China. But usually I’m not.
3. I love books. Fiction, nonfiction, genre, literature, what have you. I am usually reading several books at any given time, and I carry a stack of books with me from room to room so I’ll always have a choice of what to read wherever I am.
4. As a kid, I was Marvel, not DC. But DC’s OK.
5. Did I mention that I love books? I did mention that, right?
6. A theoretical physicist is not the same as a physical therapist. Indeed, the two rarely go together.
7. In spite of my technical education, my favorite hobby is theater. Especially Shakespeare.
8. My mother and father are both Protestant ministers. My sister and brother-in-law are both ministers. Both my grandfathers, and one of my great-grandfathers, were ministers. I am very not a minister.
Todd-who-hopes-he-didn’t-forget-to-mention-that-he-likes-books
Hello, Todd in China! Thanks for clearing up the “physicist/therapist” thing. 🙂
Diane, next time I see you don’t be surprised if I stare intently at your eyes trying to figure out the large irises thing!
And I once had a cat named Diana (because she was blonde, blue-eyed, and a spoiled princess/diva) who adored tomatoes, but they had to be fresh from the garden. Never from the store. She always knew the difference. She also liked salmon, but never if there was any dill sauce that had so much as touched it. I really miss her and her fussy ways. 🙂
Isn’t Todd cute? You see why I snatched him up!
BTW, as long as we’re sharing silly cat names, my barking cat was named Mousie, because when he was a kitten I thought he looked like a mouse. 🙂
Okay, I actually thought he looked kind of like a drowned rat (he was very very young), but “ratty” is too cruel for even me to name a cat. So he became Mousie.
And — why was he so young, you ask? He and his brothers were abandoned in our backyard during a storm when they were only something like 2 1/2 weeks old. So for quite a while, actually, their names were “the fluffy one,” “the white one,” and “the other one.” (Mousie was “the white one.”)
More than you ever wanted to know, of course!
Cara