Thanks. I think I needed that.
Ms. Whatsit was kind enough to rattle my cage a little by tagging me with the eight-random-things-about-me meme, and now that we're settled in and the phone lines are working again, I've caught up with my blog-reading, and it's time to procrastinate while I try to decide what to do next, I'll try to tackle it.
The Rules
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves which others do not know about them.
2: People who are tagged need to write in their own blog and post these rules.
3: At the end of your 8 random facts post, you must select 8 more people and leave a message at their site that they have been tagged….
1. I think eight-random-things-about-me has come to mean instead eight-things-about-me-that-I-bet-most-folks-don’t-know-but-I-think-might-be-interesting: it’s lost the quality of pure randomness that the term implies, because we don’t dare write down every little thing about ourselves on uniformly tiny slips of paper and then just draw blindfolded and share the first eight of them out of the hat.
2. I love the way that people from different parts of this country use our mostly-common tongue differently. I admire that Mark Twain spoke and wrote fourteen distinct dialects of English, and that he did it to such marvelous effect. Jeff Foxworthy has an appreciation for the way language serves us, and I appreciate that flexibility. When I was younger, I could fall into approximations of the way people talked fairly easily. I lament the increasing difficulty I have doing that as I grow older. I am glad that I was immersed in French at an early-enough moment that I was able to acquire the language with some depth and fluency without a ton of effort.
3. I’d rather think or talk about projects than actually sweat over them to complete them. Maybe that’s why I don’t post so very often.
4. I grew up with close family ties to rural Minnesota; in my extended family my father was the only one who didn’t make his living on a farm. Consequently, I have kind of a I-can-do-it-myself attitude about projects of all sorts; I truly can’t fathom why anyone would call a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter when it would be cheaper to just buy the tools you need to perform common-sense tasks yourself. Of course, that means that I sometimes realize two years later that I should have put a trap in the drain from the washing machine, so that the guest shack doesn’t stink like unvented sewage so bad when the wind blows out of the north.
5. Common sense isn’t. I totally understand that a predicate nominative requires a nominative pronoun. It’s common sense. So’s the fact that an adverb can serve equally effectively after the verb as before. It just has to be close, and most of the time, the closer the better. Common sense. And I understand that water flows downhill unless it’s under pressure, and that makes plumbing entirely accessible. Again, common sense. (Except the part about the traps and the vents: I have to go back and retrofit a trap.) And electricity is just as simple. Common sense. I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as common sense: there is a community of knowledge. And I am blessed to be still enthusiastic about acquiring more parts of it. I am even more blessed to have had that enthusiasm encouraged.
6. I make a truly melt-in-your-mouth-delicious chocolate truffle pie, but I haven’t shared the recipe with anyone because if you seek it on Epicurious dot com, you shall find it. The only part I don’t like is trying to find the chocolate wafers – I generally end up scraping the white out of Oreos and using the black cardboard parts for the crust. I have shared the results with friends, and they like it, I like the fact that it only takes an hour or so (not counting unstuffing the Oreos).
7. I like hyphens, colons, semi-colons, and the word “anyway.”
8.I despise Microsoft Word’s writing tools. They’ve flagged two words in this post as misspelled and only two of my sentence fragments.
I have every intention of ignoring the last rule. The dogs I would tag have demonstrated an aversion to playing these games. They'd rather chase squirrels and rabbits and the neighbors' cat.
The Rules
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves which others do not know about them.
2: People who are tagged need to write in their own blog and post these rules.
3: At the end of your 8 random facts post, you must select 8 more people and leave a message at their site that they have been tagged….
1. I think eight-random-things-about-me has come to mean instead eight-things-about-me-that-I-bet-most-folks-don’t-know-but-I-think-might-be-interesting: it’s lost the quality of pure randomness that the term implies, because we don’t dare write down every little thing about ourselves on uniformly tiny slips of paper and then just draw blindfolded and share the first eight of them out of the hat.
2. I love the way that people from different parts of this country use our mostly-common tongue differently. I admire that Mark Twain spoke and wrote fourteen distinct dialects of English, and that he did it to such marvelous effect. Jeff Foxworthy has an appreciation for the way language serves us, and I appreciate that flexibility. When I was younger, I could fall into approximations of the way people talked fairly easily. I lament the increasing difficulty I have doing that as I grow older. I am glad that I was immersed in French at an early-enough moment that I was able to acquire the language with some depth and fluency without a ton of effort.
3. I’d rather think or talk about projects than actually sweat over them to complete them. Maybe that’s why I don’t post so very often.
4. I grew up with close family ties to rural Minnesota; in my extended family my father was the only one who didn’t make his living on a farm. Consequently, I have kind of a I-can-do-it-myself attitude about projects of all sorts; I truly can’t fathom why anyone would call a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter when it would be cheaper to just buy the tools you need to perform common-sense tasks yourself. Of course, that means that I sometimes realize two years later that I should have put a trap in the drain from the washing machine, so that the guest shack doesn’t stink like unvented sewage so bad when the wind blows out of the north.
5. Common sense isn’t. I totally understand that a predicate nominative requires a nominative pronoun. It’s common sense. So’s the fact that an adverb can serve equally effectively after the verb as before. It just has to be close, and most of the time, the closer the better. Common sense. And I understand that water flows downhill unless it’s under pressure, and that makes plumbing entirely accessible. Again, common sense. (Except the part about the traps and the vents: I have to go back and retrofit a trap.) And electricity is just as simple. Common sense. I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as common sense: there is a community of knowledge. And I am blessed to be still enthusiastic about acquiring more parts of it. I am even more blessed to have had that enthusiasm encouraged.
6. I make a truly melt-in-your-mouth-delicious chocolate truffle pie, but I haven’t shared the recipe with anyone because if you seek it on Epicurious dot com, you shall find it. The only part I don’t like is trying to find the chocolate wafers – I generally end up scraping the white out of Oreos and using the black cardboard parts for the crust. I have shared the results with friends, and they like it, I like the fact that it only takes an hour or so (not counting unstuffing the Oreos).
7. I like hyphens, colons, semi-colons, and the word “anyway.”
8.I despise Microsoft Word’s writing tools. They’ve flagged two words in this post as misspelled and only two of my sentence fragments.
I have every intention of ignoring the last rule. The dogs I would tag have demonstrated an aversion to playing these games. They'd rather chase squirrels and rabbits and the neighbors' cat.
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posted by Amerloc at 11:49 AM
1 Comments:
So you were moving then, not bailing out on the blog? I was worried.
I must say that yours is by far the most thought-provoking and truly random eight-things meme response I've read thus far.
What about the ellipsis? I tend to use them quite a bit these days, probably for lack of something smart to say . . .
You realize that I'm likely to link you again now that you've mentioned your pie, recipe or no recipe :-D. I wonder if chocolate graham crackers would substitute okay for the wafers. Have you ever tried them?
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