Fifty Things

I got this meme from Heidi at Health Nut Wannabee Mom. I did it on Facebook a couple of days ago, but I'm posting it here with more info and a couple of updates I just made to it. Life is ever changing :) I thought this was a great opportunity to let you all know more about me. I don't know how interesting I am, but I hope you enjoy reading my list :) Please take this meme if you like...it's fun.

And hey, have a great weekend! :-)

1. What time did you get up this morning?
At 8:30 am... although I usually get up at 6:30am with Brit Boy, but he's on vacation this week, so I've been sleeping a bit longer.

2. How do you like your steak?
medium well done

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
The Taking of Pelham 123, starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta

4. What is your favorite TV show?
Currently - Private Practice; all time favorite - original series Bionic Woman

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
New York City

6. What did you have for breakfast?
Cup of herbal tea and cheese toast(have to get my cheese in for the day :))

7. What is your favorite cuisine?
Italian food

8. What foods do you dislike?
Green peas, soft-boiled or hard-boiled eggs, jello, liver

9. Favorite Place to Eat?
Somewhere with a great view

10. Favorite dressing?
Ranch dressing

11.What kind of vehicle do you drive?
Rover 45

12. What are your favorite clothes?
jeans, t-shirts, dangling earrings, sandals, shoes that I can just slip on easily and go, my swanky black trenchcoat/raincoat(very good in England ;-), dresses sometimes too

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
Italy, France(been there, but would love to go again), Monte Carlo, Lapland, Switzerland, Japan, South Africa ...the list goes on and on :-)

14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full
I shoot for half full, but it just depends on the day

15. Where would you want to retire?
Somewhere living next to the beach

16. Favorite time of day?
In the daytime it's 11am and at night 11pm....there must be some pattern here ;-)

17. Where were you born?
Georgia, USA

18. What is your favorite sport to watch?
Tennis

19. Who do you think will not try this meme?
Don't know, but it's cool either way :)

20. Person you expect will try this meme first?
Don't know again :)

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
Everybody

22. Are you a bird watcher?
Yes sometimes

23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
I said more of a night person before, but then I had more of a think on it. I'm a bit of both I guess, but then this goes back to the 11 o'clock thing. I get really energetic around 11am and I'm good for quite a while. Then I get really energetic around 11pm for a couple of hours. LOL.It's like clockwork and it never fails. There must be some numerology going on here. So from eleven til twelve I'm wide awake...so call on me then and you'll get 100% of my attention. LOL.

24. Do you have any pets?
Only a mechanical dog for now; we'll add on in the future

25. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share?
Nothing comes to mind, but you never know what's coming :)

26. What did you want to be when you were little?
Everything...the Bionic Woman, an actress, a musician, anything where I could have fun

27. What is your best childhood memory?
Helping my dad plant the vegetable garden in the spring

28. Are you a cat or dog person?
Not sure ????? We had cats and dogs when I was growing up, so I guess I like both.

29. Are you married?
Yep...to Brit Boy :)

30. Always wear your seat belt?
Every time!

31. Been in a car accident?
Yes and I got hurt...a van hit the passenger side and I got bumped into hard and had trouble walking for a while. I'm fine now.

32. Any pet peeves?
People talking loudly in public on cell phones, people making out in line/queues and they're really going at it (get a room) :)

33. Favorite pizza topping?
mushrooms

34. Favorite Flower?
Any blue flower or a calla lily

35. Favorite ice cream?
chocolate

36. Favorite fast food restaurant?
KFC or Pizza Hut

37. How many times did you fail your driver's test?
Zero

38. From whom did you get your last email?
Colette

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card?
Harrod's...that store truly has everything :)

40. Do anything spontaneous lately?
Said hello to a grumpy neighbor...they didn't answer back...oh well.... ;-)

41. Like your job?
It's a work in progress...trying to reinvent myself with a new career

42. Do you like broccoli?
Yeah, I like it okay...especially when I can put a bit of cheese on it ;-)

43. What was your favorite vacation?
Paris, France for our first wedding anniversary a couple of years ago

44. Last person you went out to dinner with?
My husband

45. What are you listening to right now?
The theme song to the tv show Monk...I love that show

46. What is your favorite color?
blue

47. How many tattoos do you have?
0

48. How many are you tagging for this meme?
I'm leaving it open for anyone who wants to try it

49. What time did you finish this meme?
11:44 am

50. Are you a coffee drinker?
On occassion, but not often...the caffeine makes me too hyper. I'll run around like a cartoon if I have too much coffee, but it sure tastes good...LOL

Seven Things About Me

I’m trying to finally get caught up on a few awards and memes that I’ve received over the past while. I figure better late than never (smile). Anyway, this meme was passed along to me from Golden Prague – Expat Life. It’s one that asks me to tell seven things that you all may or may not know about me. I tell you, it’s hard to think up a list like this sometimes because you always wonder, ‘am I boring people with this?’… LOL. Here’s my list anyway.

#1 – My favorite color is blue.

#2 – The best steak that I ever had was in Paris, France. It was a bit rare and I usually run the other way from rare meat, but this was WONDERFUL!! It didn’t taste bloody at all. Maybe it was good because Brit Boy and I had just come in from dodging fierce bolts of lightning and I was so grateful. LOL. Nah, it was just delicious!

#3 – When I was about twenty years old, I stood in a boutique window and was a live mannequin for an hour. Hey, it was the late 80s and it was a good job for a student. LOL. I remember having on very bright clothes. My neck still gets stiff thinking about it. (smile)

#4 – I want to learn to play the piano. I figure that I’ve conquered playing the flute years ago and I’m quickly becoming a recorder playing superstar (wink) (laugh), so this is a good addition. Actually, I’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano, even before my flute playing days. Brit Boy shares this wish with me…he’d love to play too.

#5 – My toenails are painted red right now. I love summer! (smile)

#6 – I’m currently studying a freelance and feature writing course and it’s going along fine. I’ve always loved writing and I just want to get better.

#7 – I love researching things. The journey to find out about something always just gives me a thrill.

Well, those are my seven things. I hope that I haven’t repeated anything from the past. Please take this meme if you feel like it. I like this exercise because I can share more random things that I wouldn’t necessarily think to blog about. It was a good workout for my brain…I needed that. (smile) Have a great weekend everyone!

I've Been Tagged!!!

I’ve been tagged by Lisa at Serah’s Soap Blog. She makes various soaps and her creations are fabulous. Her cupcake soaps look so good sometimes that I just want to eat them (smile) Please stop by her site and check out all of her wonderful items. Lisa did a very creative seven things list using cartoon characters…she is creative all over the place (smile)




This is my second time being tagged so I had to dig a bit more in the drawer of my life to come up with seven more things. Here I go once more with my seven random things about myself.

#1 – Whenever I get a drink at a fast food place, I get the heebie jeebies if I don’t wrap a napkin around the cup. I can’t STAND the feeling of the wet cup on my hand. If I don’t have a napkin or paper towel to wrap around it, I will use my sleeve if I have on long sleeves. I don’t know what it is, it just drives me crazy :)

#2 – Back in March, I had a chance to talk to a researcher from the Oprah Winfrey Show about a feature that they were doing with some of us who were reading “A New Earth” along with the webcasts. The researcher asked me questions about my experience in reading the book. Then she told me that they would get back to me if they wanted to use me. Well, they never called back, but my “almost but not quite cheerleader” within me was thrilled. LOL. I was just grateful to be considered.

#3 – I’ve met a few celebrities in my life. In the mid 80s, I met Dionne Warwick and got her autograph. She had a perfume out at the time and she was at a department store signing autographs. It was my mom’s birthday, so I thought this would be a good gift for her. So I spoke to Ms. Warwick and then she signed the box of perfume for my mom. Also, I have met two members of the group Hootie & the Blowfish back in 2000. I met the lead singer Darius and the guitarist Mark. They were cool. I met them after a concert that I attended with two of my nieces. I have nieces and nephews who are not that much younger than me, so we would hang out occasionally. And going a bit further back to 1995, I actually spoke to Darius on the phone when he was at a radio station in Atlanta. So it was a full circle moment when I finally got a chance to meet him face to face (smile) I was a big fan back in those good old days.

#4 – I honeymooned on the island of Lanzarote, which is a part of the Canary Islands, with Brit Boy. The landscape is really unusual and scenes from “The Planet of the Apes” were filmed there. When I found this out I was excited. I loved all of those movies and the tv show. Here’s a photo of some of the landscape.




#5 – While we were in Lanzarote, I took a ride in a submarine….well a mini one and Brit Boy was there too. (smile) It was a weird sensation.

#6 – Also when we were in Lanzarote, we took a camel ride. I couldn’t believe how far it was to the ground. LOL. Brit Boy and I shared a ride. We traveled in a group and there was a camel attached to ours from the front and there was one attached to us from the back. We were riding along and all of a sudden I felt something rub my arm. I looked back and it was the camel behind us. They had a covering over his mouth so he couldn’t bite me, but he was intrigued by my arm and just kept rubbing his mouth and face on me the whole time. I guess he liked my scent. LOL. He was a cutie.

#7 – I used to be something of a spelling bee champ when I was a kid in the 70s. I even have a second place ribbon squirreled away in my keepsakes. I have second place because I guess I had an aversion to being number 1 back then. LOL. I used to act as if I were a boxer and I would “take a dive” and mess up on purpose. It was a kid thing. LOL. Sometimes I would win and sometimes I would let myself lose. It was just a game I played. Here’s the thing though, now it seems sometimes that my spelling is slipping a bit and I have to double-check myself. I usually just laugh and say to myself, “well ain’t karma a b*tch”…LOL.

Now I will tag seven others. To my picks, I hope that you will participate, but I fully understand if you can't. No pressure at all :) My tags are:

The Many Ramblings of Me
Crayon Writer
The Peacock’s Nesting Place
Just Me
Sassy Black Friend
Stay at Home Mom
Bella Casa - Beautiful Home

Thanks Lisa! :)

A New Earth Revisited

Several days ago, I was tagged by Bas at Istanbul Expat. This tagging has to do with books, which I LOVE!!! (smile) Love my books! Anyway, when he tagged me, I wasn’t reading anything which is kinda rare for me. I usually am reading something. Of course with me that can mean something that I have been reading for months because I have this habit of reading more than one book at a time and the reading gets strung out. I will have about two or three books going at once and then I’ll hop from one to the other and then revisit the previous one and I’m still able to pick up where I left off. I’ve always done this even when I was a kid. It may sound like my mind would be frazzled by this, but it works for me. Can’t explain it, but to each his own, right? It’s sort of one of those march to your own tune things and my tune comes in stereo. (smile) I have heard of other people doing this, so after that I was like, okay, so I’m not alone. LOL. Gotta love it! Do any of you do this?

Anyway, he tagged me during a rare dry spot. I was taking a breather. The rules state that you pick up the nearest book for this tag, but for once there wasn’t a pile near my bed, because I had cleared the decks. So I put this tag on the back burner for a while. Well, in the last few days I have started to re-read a favorite book of mine, “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle because the time felt right. And I decided to take a chill pill and read just one book...a novelty ain't it? (wink) Then this morning, I looked at a note I had placed on the side table, right here next to the couch, it said, “Don’t forget the tag from Bas!” I said to myself, “Oh yeah, can’t forget,” and then I put the note back down. I turned to walk into the kitchen and kicked over a pile of books I had sitting on the floor next to the couch…my new “to read” pile. “A New Earth” singled itself out, so I took it as a sign.

The rules of this tag are:

1) Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2) Open the book to page 123
3) Find the fifth complete sentence on the page
4) Post the next three sentences
5) Post a comment and tag five more people

So here it goes.

From “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle

‘The ego doesn’t know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe---in the form of people and circumstances---gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole. The ego’s unconscious core feeling of “not enough” causes it to react to someone else’s success as if that success had taken something away from “me”.’

I read this book earlier this year, and it, along with other things helped me out of a dark spot I was going through. I read it along with the Oprah book club webcast seminars and it was great to have the author on the webcast there every week to help me go through it. I won’t lie, it was a tough read for me when I started it initially, because so much was crowding my mind at that time and I couldn’t comprehend no matter how hard I tried. And also it is just a lot to take in. The book’s words were fighting for space within my head and they were up against some pretty stubborn sad thoughts in there. But once I participated in the first webcast and had Mr. Tolle to lay the groundwork, the trickle out of the old stagnant thoughts started. Maybe just a drip in the beginning, but anything was a help at that point. And by synchronicity, the next day, or later that morning for me in the UK, I started my blog. It was my first “step out” since I came here to England. This was a baby step that started me in forward motion again. (smile)

As for the quote, I haven’t come to this point during my re-read yet, but I remember it standing out to me before. It reminded me of the importance of simply sharing the spotlight with others. And it reminds me so much of my friend Kim that I lost recently. She personified this. Fear robs us of so much in life and keeping everything all for ourselves does cut us off from the whole. You can call it the whole of humanity in a spiritual sense or the whole person that you and I are meant to be. It doesn’t cost me anything to help someone or cheer them on along their path, but it costs me dearly to not do it. It diminishes us I think.

This book has so much more to it and it challenges me and I like that. I imagine that I will refer to it time and time again during my life. I love it when a book stays with you like that.

As for passing this one on, I will just open it up to you my dear readers. Please feel free to take this tag if you would like to participate. Have fun!

7 Things About Me

I have been tagged by my bloggy buddy Jewelry Rockstar to tell 7 things about me. This is my first tagging like this, so I’m excited. :-) Here it goes.

#1 – When I was in middle school, I was tapped into the Junior Beta Club. This is as, the name implies, the junior version of the National Beta Club. It’s an academic achievement society. I mentioned being "tapped in" when I was in middle school. Well in my school, they had us in an assembly and had us to put our heads down on the table and then they came around and tapped you if you were being taken into the club. Well, they didn’t really tell us what we were doing or perhaps I was talking to my friend at the time. So it was all a surprise to me. :-) And as a kid, who knows about these things? LOL. Anyway, I got tapped and for a moment I was kind of puzzled and thought that I was on the way to the principal’s office or something. LOL. I still remember my momentary panic. But I was cool on the outside though and followed the girl up to the front of the room. So I used to be a brainy kid…now, I’m just beautifully average. LOL. ;-) My pin and certificate are somewhere in storage.

#2 – I played the flute when I was a teenager and I won a few ribbons in competitions. I just took to it like a duck to water. However, I haven’t played in a long while now. I have to pick this up again. Might be fun. :-)

#3 – This week I have been getting back on track with my fitness. I worked out today and even though it is hard to start, I felt better after I finished. I am even cutting back on drinking the sodas. That is tough…eek! :-) I'm am such a soda fiend. I just had some green tea, so I am on my way to doing better.

#4 – I have been growing my hair out over the past year or so. I've been wearing my hair closely cropped for about ten years, so for a change of pace, I am now sporting longer, wavy curls.

#5 – I love watching TV shows and movies about ghosts and haunted places. I just don’t want to see a ghost though…I would probably break my neck trying to run away. LOL.

#6 – I am about nine months older than my husband, Brit Boy, so I love to call him, “My Younger Man” ;-)

#7 – I love to read and I love to write… I love my books. So one day I hope to walk into a store and see my book on the shelf.

There you have it. I scratched my head a lot, but I finally came up with seven. Now I’m going to pass this on and tag some others out there. They are:

Regina's Family Seasons
Health Nut Wannabee Mom
The Leaping Thought
Cutie Booty Cakes
Red Pine Mountain
Just Me
Confessions of a Fitness Diva