A Meme

Mompriest of Seeking Authentic Voice tagged me for this meme...

Rules: The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about himself or herself. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Ten years ago: Ten years ago, my husband and I went back to the place where we'd spent our honeymoon. (No special anniversary. It was our 8th.) The inn had changed owners and gone downhill, but the place (Amelia Island, FL) was still great. At work, I was an editor on a high school geography book. I was a few months away from my 40th birthday and beginning to reluctantly let it sink in that we weren't going to have children. On our vacation, I started my 2nd novel--about a textbook editor who rips apart her life out of fury that she and her husband are infertile. Hmmm. I wonder what gave me that idea. The book is still unpublished.

Five things on today's "to do" list: Garden, visit blogs, call my mother in law, walk the dog, make my special ground turkey tacos for supper. (The recipe is here if anyone is interested.)

Things I'd do if I was a billionaire: Provide the financing for my husband to make the films of his best screenplays. Self-publish my novels and hire someone to market the heck out of them. Pay off all my church's debts. Take an extended trip to Paris. Give money to UNICEF, Habitat for Humanity, Compassion International, Episcopal Relief and Development Fund, the Art Institute of Chicago, WTTW, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, and both of our colleges. Move my mother to a MUCH better nursing home. Buy vacation homes in Door County, Wisconsin and in Florida. Buy a second car.

Three bad habits:
1. Turning my recreational activities into work. For example, a couple of different years I knitted 24 Christmas gifts. (The really insane part was doing it twice.)
2. Letting my dog have his way too much. I'm not a good alpha.
3. Falling asleep on the couch at nine and then when I actually go to bed, I can't sleep.

Five places I've lived: Kankakee, IL; Wheaton, IL; Chicago, IL; Evanston, IL; Zion, IL Notice a pattern here? I'm a prairie-state girl to the core. The other odd thing is that three of those communities (Wheaton, Evanston, Zion) continued to be dry long after Prohibition ended, while Kankakee and Chicago both had associations with Al Capone. None of that has anything to do with me, except that I do usually drink a beer with dinner.

Five jobs I've had: tax preparer, 9th grade English teacher, expediter for a gasket manufacturer, personnel assistant, textbook editor, and now freelance writer. (That's six, but being a freelancer doesn't feel like a job job.)

Five People I'm Tagging:

nikkipolani

Trish

Barbara

Grandmere Mimi

Sis