Monday Meme

As you know, I’m trying to blog every day this week, while I’m on vacation, to see how it feels to be more active in the blogging community again. I’m also trying to spend a bit more time reading blogs, and seeing how that feels again. Thus far, I’m enjoying it. It’s kind of like the first time you jump in a swimming pool after a long cold winter, and you think, “Oh yeah, I KNEW I liked this…I wonder why I stopped?”

This is a meme I saw over at Simon Says. Simon is another blogger that I’ve met in person…he and his lovely wife Paola and their three gorgeous kids. I kinda wanted to kidnap their children, they were so sweet. One of them asked me to join them on their trip to Yosemite, which was very touching, and I was tempted to crash the party and go along. Simon and Paola are living a very European life…he’s British, she’s Italian, they live in Brussels. The kids speak English with a British accent, Italian with an Italian accent, and I assume French with a Brussels accent. So sophisticated, to an American who sadly fits that particular stereotype, and speaks only English (though I tried French and Latin, but neither one stuck…)

Wait, where’s the meme? OK, here it is. Simon gave me 5 words, and I write something about them. Whatever I want, quippy or thoughtful. Here they are.

Fantasy

I’ll stick with the genre…When I was in High School, especially the first two years, I was a member of the Dungeons and Dragons club, which is a game of Fantasy. So you end up reading a lot of Fantasy books, with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy being the most famous. I really enjoyed them, especially The Hobbit, and then I went on to read The Silmarillion, which was more of a creation story about the world of Eä, in which the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings takes place. The genre didn’t really stick with me beyond these books, though. I guess I’m more of a novel lover.

Neighbor
We live in a townhouse in the suburbs. We own our townhouse, which usually makes you more likely to stay in place. Remember when we decided to move, back in ’07, but the housing market fell apart, and we couldn’t sell? So we still live in our same place, where we’ve been for the last 14 years. Some of the town homes are rented out, and those tend to change occupants more quickly, and sometimes you get good neighbors, while sometimes you don’t get so lucky. We’ve been lucky with our next door neighbors, who rent, though their landlord is a cheap son-of-a-gun. So cheap, he never upgrades anything, he blames the tenants when something goes wrong, wants them to tape the handle back on the broken microwave, etc. Recently he raised their rent, again, and they decided to move. I was sad to think of them leaving, because they’re nice people and they have cute kids. Turns out, they didn’t want to leave our little complex either, and another neighbor had moved away last month. So the landlord of the other unit decided it was time to fix the place up a bit…new floors, new counters, new appliances, all for less money than the first cheapo landlord wanted. I’m glad they’re staying, and I’m glad they got a better deal for a nicer unit. I hope whomever we get in the place next door is nice and relatively quiet and all of those things. And that they let us pick lemons from their lemon tree.

Costume

This is Maya and me, many years ago. She’s a kitty, and I’m Little Red Riding Hood. It’s Halloween…I’ve never really been one to play dress up for no reason.

Injury
I’ve been fortunate in this life so far, in that I’ve never broken any bones. I did crack a rib once, riding (or rather, falling off of) a horse, and that hurt like crazy for a long time. I don’t know if it would be better to have a cast on a broken bone, or just let it heal, like I did. It wasn’t fun, I’ll say that much.

Dawn

We don’t see many sunrises around here…I think you have to have a better view of the horizon for that, and get up earlier than we prefer. This picture is from a January dawn this year, when the light from the sunrise hit the winter fog just so, and made it look as though there might be a fire somewhere. It was striking, and I’m thankful to have caught it.

Thanks, Simon, for the blog fodder.  Let me know if you’d like 5 words to write about, and I’ll give them to you in comments.