64 posts tagged “qotd”
Tell us two truths and a lie about yourself.
OK, you tell me which is the lie.
- When I was in 5th grade, I was kicked out of my church's children's choir program for pointing out that rams and ewes are different.
- I could never be a vegetarian. I'd miss steak way too much, and I don't even like that many vegetables.
- At one point in my life, I wanted 26 children so that I could name each one with a different letter of the alphabet from Andrew/Abigail to Zachary/Zoe.
Which band or artist which is no longer performing or alive would you have loved to have seen?
Submitted by Rev Stan.
Anyone who knows me well already knows the answer to this one. It would definitely have to be Elvis. No contest on that one. I'd pick either very early Elvis around 1956 when he had his first single ("Heartbreak Hotel") for RCA or the 1968 Elvis in the black leather for his comeback special on NBC. Of course, any Elvis would be better than no Elvis, and I still enjoy watching my DVD of Aloha from Hawaii from 1973 too.
What's one family recipe that you wish you knew how to cook?
I started out answering today's Vox Hunt and then realized I was probably writing a better QotD response even though I'm not really talking about a specific recipe I want to cook. Food prompts inspire me, I guess.
I have a weakness for cookbooks, and I own several that I have never used for cooking. I read them and talk about them and think about them, but there's a relatively small subset of my cookbooks that I use regularly.
It's a bit of an obsession that really started the summer I was 8 years old. My mom had a nice collection of cookbooks, and I got it in my head that I needed to write down all the recipes I liked and get her and my grandmother to share the recipes that were just in their heads because I'd need those recipes when I got married. (Yeah, I'm not sure where that came from either.) I spent the summer collecting recipes, writing them on index cards, and carefully sorting them in my recipe card box.
The seriousness of it all makes me giggle a little now, but it was one of the best things I ever did as a kid. I heard so many great family stories talking about food with my mom, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. That was the last summer my great-grandmother was alive, which makes those recipes and memories even more special.
I still have my recipe box, and thanks to it, those family recipes are always close at hand when I want them. Even with the proper ingredients and preparation, they never taste quite as good when I make them, but I figure that just gives me an excuse to bug my grandmother to make her fabulous cornbread dressing or to convince my dad to make chili when I visit or to hang out with my mom while she makes deviled eggs.
What's your musical horoscope? (Put your player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)
Inspired by Stephanie.
If you really want to know what I'm listening to, then you can also check out my Last.fm profile. Probably 90% of my music is randomly selected. I just pick the playlist that fits whatever I want to hear and let it play while I work. For this, I actually used my entire mp3 collection, but I didn't get anything weird in this group unless you count Miss Piggy and Ozzy.
What's one of your favorite quotes?
Submitted by Georgie-boy.
We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so is everything.
- Charles de Lint, Memory & Dream
I'm sure I've said this before, but it's the stories that keep me interested in blogs and online journals. I'm one of those people who enjoys reading about what you had for lunch or that funny thing your kid just did or the millionth photo of your cat, and I continue to feel privileged when people share these bits and pieces of their lives with me.
What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
In the late 90s, I was part of a listserv called ScribeTribe. I was more observer than participant, and Fran, Emilio, Ellen, Elaine, Kathleen, Lisa, Amy, and others whose names aren't coming to me at the moment meant a lot to me. I'm sure none of them remembers that quiet girl from Alaska, but I definitely remember them, and I still love and quote many of the things they shared with the rest of us.
All of that is to introduce the poem "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver that I fell in love with first on ScribeTribe. For me, this sums up so much of why I've been writing online for the last 10 years. I want to have a record of my story, and I feel honored whenever someone lets me read part of their story. Together, we find our place.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
What are five books that changed your life?
Inspired by Ms. Genevieve.
First is the Bible as I've already mentioned, and I specifically chose the NIV Thompson chain-reference because that's the Bible my dad has. It was the one that grabbed my attention as a child with all those notes connecting different topics, and I loved having family devotions where we'd just pick a topic or word and follow it through the Bible. When Matt and I married, my dad give me my own Thompson Bible with my married name embossed on the cover, and it's the Bible I use daily.
With Daring Faith is a children's book about the missionary Amy Carmichael who served in India in the early 1900s. As a little girl, I read many missionary biographies, and this one sticks with me in part because of a single story. Amy prayed for blue eyes as a child, and she wrote that her mom used that as a lesson that God often answers prayer with a "No" or in other ways that we don't want to hear. As an adult, brown-eyed Amy was able to disguise herself as an Indian to get into places she wouldn't have been allowed otherwise. She used that story to illustrate God's bigger plan for us, and I carried the memory of that with me growing up. It gave me a lot of peace during some body image issues in my teens.
The Giver is just a beautiful book that makes me think about what it means to be human and to have community.
Tisha is the story of a teacher in rural Chicken, Alaska during the 1920s. This was recommended to me by a teacher who saw my love of Laura Ingalls Wilder and other stories about young women teaching in rural areas. This book is what first made me curious about Alaska, and it made a certain pen-pal stand out from other possible pen-pals. That pen-pal is now my husband, and that's certainly life-changing. :)
Mere Christianity is a reminder that we have more in common than we sometimes we realize. The quote "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." comes from this book and is the source of this blog's name.
Sure, most sequels stink, but what movie really needs a sequel?
There was a time a few years ago that I really wanted to see a sequel to The Goonies, but now I think I'm better off with the memories of how much I loved that movie as a kid. Now, my top movie for a sequel would have be Big Trouble in Little China. If you remember the ending of that one, it left a nice little hook for a sequel, and people need more Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) in their lives!
I found another resolution generator via AmyH. This is the first one that popped up for me, and it made me giggle, which was definitely needed. :)
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Where do you do your online shopping?
Lots of places! Probably 95% of my shopping other than groceries is done online, and for special grocery needs like yummy cheeses that I have a hard time finding here at reasonable prices, I shop online at places like igourmet.
For other online shopping, there's Amazon of course, which was where I made my first online purchase ever in December 1996 because the book selection was not so great in Fairbanks at the time. I'm also using Barnes & Noble a lot because I'm always getting coupons for them and because we have a membership card there.
I'm a frequent shopper at Lush and The Body Shop because I love taking baths and having a nice variety of lotions. I do all my clothes shopping online, so there's too many stores to even mention when it comes to clothes. For geeky items and cool T-shirts, there's ThinkGeek, J!NX, and OffWorld Designs. Levenger, K. Schweizer, and FLAX art & design are places where I do more "window shopping" than real shopping because they can be a little outside my budget, but I still love them.
Speaking of budgets, some of my favorite shopping sites are ones that help me save money like FatWallet Forums, The Bargainist, and Current Codes.
