I got the "eight random things about yourself" tag from T-Hype, which made me remember that almost two years ago I filled out a tag of sets of seven examples of various things about myself, and a few of these will come from there until I get rolling.

1. I'd really like to be in an all-girls Beatles cover band - not professionally or anything, just for fun - preferably with Rosalie, but the later in life it gets, the less picky I will be about bandmates.
2. I can name the Canadian provinces and territories and their capitals.
3. Instruments I have started to learn how to play and then relatively quickly abandoned: oboe, cello, harmonica, and guitar. My ten years of piano lessons should count for something, though.
4. Speaking of which, whenever I visit my friend Wendy, we delight in hauling out her books of piano duet sheet music and ripping through them at breakneck speed with devil-may-care inaccuracy. It is so fun.
5. The last book I finished was the latest in the fabbity-fab Georgia Nicolson YA series. On our recent trip to England, Melina went looking for foods mentioned in the books, Jammy Dodgers and Midget Gems (not "Jims," as many a shop employee thought she was saying), which is a step beyond our usual habit of just taking on the books' infectious slang. Some examples include "astonishingly dim ____ [insert name]," "dither-spaz" (noun), and "then we laughed like two loons on loon tablets."
6. David Bowie's "Modern Love" makes me laugh like a loon on loon tablets. The reasons for this do not need to be gone over here, because 1) the story is very long and 2) apparently I don't tell it very well - no matter how hard I try to explain to other people why the song makes me laugh hysterically, they just look at me blankly and say "okaaaay...."
7. One of my favorite childhood memories is going to a kindergarten classmate's family farm and holding a piglet. Despite growing up in rural west-central Illinois, I have visited maybe three or four actual working farms (not just houses out in the country) in my life.
8. In 1997 while in graduate school and living at a fancy-pants college (think Oxbridge), I accidentally ate breakfast with Pierre Trudeau. "Accidentally" in that I sat down at his table but didn't recognize him. We ended talking about Canadian history. How's that for pressure?

Bringing me hour after hour of giggles and/or fascination! Not to mention ridiculous new celebrity crushes: David Walliams (Little Britain)

and Nigel Havers from The Charmer (and A Passage to India and Chariots of Fire).

A few years ago I saw this little cookbook from some other dimension named Pies Men Like. Except it wasn’t from another dimension. It was written by the folks at GM in the 1950s for the GM wives so they could make, well, pies their men liked. Delightfully retro in that gee-I'm-glad-the-50s -are-over sort of way. But also scary.

Be happy this is not our reality (at least, mostly it isn't, overtly it isn't). Rejoice in the people and experiences and things that make your pie yours. Pies I like! But I prefer cake.

Who am I?

contact me

I love Bollywood so much that I made a separate blog for it.

remember when I went to Australia?

when you take grad school too much to heart re: literature

when you take grad school too much to heart re: travels

The Trophy Wife

rock and roll lifestyle

Why God Why

Technically not a friend, as not a human, but still a place I love very much, so it counts: Massey College

Blog design is based largely on Not That Ugly with some ideas from Firdamatic with some additional tweaking

Flickr rocks! Really.

Hurrah for Blogger

And for folks trying to library-ize blogs: Blogwise and Blogarama

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