Bribe Meme

herbmcsidhe posted it and I decided to play.

I am listing the 5 most effective things to bribe me with. If you get tagged, your mission is to do the same, then tag 5 or more people. The assumption stands that lots & lots of money is always a good bribe.

Bribes. Hmmm. They won’t work in every case, there are some things upon which I am absolutely un-bribable. But, for small things, these generally work well.

1. Dr. Pepper. The original or with chocolate added. Do not attempt to bribe me with diet sodas of any sort.
2. Flowers. The cheap grocery store bouquets will work, as will freshly picked from your own garden or wild-crafted flowers. Picking flowers I grew and presenting them to me only works if you’re under 12 years old.
3. Paper. Blank paper, as typing sheets, as notebook paper or spiral bound notebooks (I prefer college ruled, but I’m not that picky), colored paper, white paper, 3×5 note cards, blank books, end rolls from mass printers, freezer paper, onion skin paper, card stock, you get the idea. Paper.
4. Washing dishes. All the dishes, not just one or two obvious ones. I’d give room and board to someone who would always wash the dishes. Yes, bribe me with clean dishes.
5. Road Trips. To anywhere. I like kitschy tourist-trappy places, wine tours, cheese tours, cutting garden tours, Geocaching, picnics, anything that involves a small amount of travel. It doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive, just fun.
Bonus: I can also be bribed with books, dinners, buttons with funny sayings on them, swans, coffee talks, candy for the candy dish, among many other things.

As I thought about this meme, I wondered about the things that were an anti-bribe – the things that would convince you to never, ever do whatever it was the other person was asking you to do. Are there 5 things that, if offered to you, would ensure you’d never comply with the giver’s request?

1. Okra. If anyone over the age of 8 offered me okra, you can be sure I would be guaranteed to look disfavorably upon their request. Plus, I’d mark them down mentally as someone to deal with reservedly. I’d always think twice or thrice about any future requests they made. I dislike okra that much.
2. Money. I am probably the least bribale-with-money person there is. If you offer me money to do you a favor, especially if you do so arrogantly (and we all know people who think money will buy them anything), I may be offended enough to drop any acquaintanceship or association with you.
3. Most controlled substances. Although I might make an exception for the sinus medications with pseudoepinephrine in them, as I hate extracting the stuff myself. If you’re in doubt about the status of the substance, ask. I’ll go ape on you if you pluck an endangered plant and offer it to me (seeds are another matter, seeds grow).
4. Effusive compliments. Insincerity annoys me, and too-fulsome compliments sound insincere to me. Simple compliments are tolerable, just don’t go overboard. I suspect anyone who extends gratuitous and over-blown compliments to have ulterior motives and to be setting me up for some sort of prank or crime. Paranoid? Yep.
5. Excessive anything, especially if what’s being offered far exceeds the effort or value of the favor. I’m going to assume, again, that I’m being set up.

If you’re a good friend and you offer any of the above 5 bribes, we’ll have to have some heart-to-heart talks. If I barely know you, you will have to work very hard at earning my trust enough for us to become friends. If I don’t know you at all, you pretty much guaranteed we’ll never become friends. And in every case, you’ve pretty much scotched any chance of me doing you the favor for which you were attempting to bribe me.

Scores

According to this site, I am a “benevolent inventor”.

I scored exceptionally high (over 95%) in openness, trust, and “agency”. I have no idea what “agency” means.

I scored over 70% in confidence, extroversion, masculinity, spontaneity, empathy, and “earthy imagination”. I guess that’s a kindly way of saying my mind is in the gutter.

I scored below 15 % in authoritarianism, attention to style and fashion, and aesthetics. I think perhaps the one about aesthetics was skewed. While I value function, a large portion of the function is that it must please my senses as well as work well. I didn’t see any way I could convey this during the test questions..

Where did my femininity place? It was at least over 50%, but less than 60%. I wonder what they base the gender percentages on?

For Myers-Briggs, I score as an ENFP, which pretty much falls into line with this. I’ve always said I was more a catalyst than a leader.

Name Meme

Found at bored_brainless

1.MY STAR NAME
(name of first pet + street I live on):
Trouble Stiles

2. MY MOVIE STAR NAME
(grandmothers/fathers name + favourite snack)
Odahertha Bread

3. MY FASHION DESIGNER NAME
(first word you see on your left + favorite restaurant):
Dancing Wong’s

4. MY SOCIALITE NAME
(silliest childhood nickname + first town where I partied):
Gridley Pforzheim

5. MY “FLY GIRL/GUY” NAME
(first initial + first three letters of my last name):
Sbro

6. MY DETECTIVE NAME
(favorite animal + name of high school):
(Ummmm – I didn’t attend American Schools, so I have no high school name equivalency – so I’ll use my first university’s name)
Flicker Goettengin

7. MY BARFLY NAME
(last snack food I ate + my favorite drink):
Chips Dr. Pepper

8. MY SOAP OPERA NAME
(middle name + city where I was born):
(I wasn’t born in a city, or indeed, on land. How about the name of the ship I was born on?)
L’Rene Star’s Hope

9. MY ROCK STAR NAME
(favorite candy + favorite musician’s last name):
Fudge Pumps

10. My OPPOSITE SEX NAME
(name of [opposite sex] friend + cell phone company you use):
(I use neither a cell phone nor a land line, how about my ISP?)
Tarryn Cox

11. MY STAR WARS NAME
(first 3 letters of your last name + last 3 letters of mother’s maiden name /+/ first 3 letters of your pet’s name + first 3 letters of the town – or state – you live in)
Brooma Itzokl
This was a lot harder than I thought it would be, since I’m apparently not like most people: I didn’t attend an American High School, I don’t have a cell phone or land line, I wasn’t born on land, and I have weird tastes in snacks

Four by Four Meme

Four Jobs I Have Had in My Life:
Pig castrator. Herbal Apothecary. Billboard artist. Personal Chef.

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again:
Lilo and Stitch. Court Jester. Cirque du Soleil’s Allegria. Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion.

Four Places I Have Lived:
Hoeckelheim, Germany. Venice, Italy. East Grinstead, England. Austin, Texas, USA.

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch:
Numb3rs. House. Numb3rs reruns. House reruns. Do reruns count?

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:
Stuttgart, Germany. London, England. Den Haag, Denmark. Edinburg, Scotland.

Four Websites I Visit Daily (or at least weekly):
Livejournal. Yahoo Groups. Something Positive. Kevin and Kell.

Four of My Favorite Foods:
Bavarian farmer’s bread. Blueberries. Potatoes. Cabbage.

Four Singers I Can’t Live Without:
I’m tone deaf, I could probably live without all of them.

Four Hobbies In Which I Indulge:
Sewing. Natural jewelry making. Cooking. Geocaching.

Four Pets I Had or Currently Have:
Itzl the dog. Wudje the ferret. Catmatyx Catastrophyx the Curious called Calumph the cat. Valentine Michelle the dog.

Four Fandoms I Like:
Numb3rs. Star Trek. Potter. Vorkosigan.

Four of My Favorite Beverages:
Dr. Pepper. Hot Cocoa. Soft Mead. Water.

Four Favorite Leisure activities that are not hobbies:
Cloud Watching. “Fishing”. Gossipping with friends. Reading.

Four Comfort Foods:
Sugar bread. Gruel. Beef Jelly. Hot Oat Toddy.

Four of My Favorite Authors:
heinlein. Elgin. Heyer. Bujold.

Four Places I’d Rather Be:
At any lake. Visiting friends. Karlsruhe Teirgarten. Right here.

Retirement Home

Although I’m going to be 61 in a very short time, I don’t anticipate retiring any time soon. I reckon I have at least 30 more years of productivity in me before I retire. That’s long enough to get a nice retirement all planned out.

So, I posted a while back about my Dream House, with all the bells and whistles.

Now, I propose to post about my actual, real, achievable retirement house.

I have already started saving up to buy a few acres of undeveloped wild land. The reason I haven’t actually started buying it yet is because I haven’t yet found the place I want. I’m still looking. I want between 5 and 20 acres, with a creek or stream or little pond or spring on it. I’m willing to pay a little extra for that. I would prefer that it not be lake-front property or somewhere “desirable”. Remote is good. Probably it will be in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, or northern Louisiana, but I’m not locked into those places, not until I buy the land, anyway. I do want somewhere that’s in Zone 7 or warmer.

I’m willing to invest a little extra to build so the house is “off the grid”, meaning I don’t pay anyone for water, heating, cooling, waste disposal, sewage, and most of the electricity. Maybe even all of the electricity. I will have to have electricity to run the refrigerator and the computer, and possibly a small clothes dryer for winter use. That’s not a whole lot, so I can probably provide all the electricty I need myself. I am willing to pay for internet connection, something I can’t provide for myself, and chances are, it’ll still be AOL. Their service seems to be the most adaptable to remote needs. Of course, that could change. We’ll see.

I’ll invest in a decent composting toilet, solar panels, geothermal energy, and manual pumps and back-ups.

The house itself will be a cob house, probably a deeply sunken or bermed dome or tipi shaped house of 3 rooms: a bedroom, a decadent bathroom, and the main room which includes the kitchen. I’m thinking a 20-40 foot diameter house, with a central fireplace, and skylight and sola-tube lighting. There may only be walls to partition off the bathroom, just for the sake of putting up shelves. The bedroom may be partitioned off with just a pretty screen.

The fireplace will be an integral part of the design, taking up the central position, and burning “in the round”. It will also be large enough to use for cooking, with pot hooks and such, and an oven built into the side of it. For what cooking I plan to do upon retirement, that will be sufficient. I will either learn chimney cleaning or find a good chimney sweep who will come out yearly to clean it. growing up in a town that was heated predominantly with fireplaces, I know the value of a good chimney sweeping.

Being a cobb house, I can form the shelves right into the walls, so the whole house (except the bathroom) will be a library. I like the thought of living inside a library.

I also plan to build a root cellar, accessible either from within the house, or just a few steps away. That was one of the things I most disliked about my grandparents’ house – we always had to go outside to access the root cellar – out the front door, down the street to the gate at the side of the house, through the gate, past the hens and hte outhouse, and through the door in the side of the house and down the stairs into the root cellar – and all the way back with whatever we were fetching. My root cellar will be easily accessible.

I may make a covered pavilion for outdoor cooking and leisurely activities, but I’ll wait for that.

There will also have to be a shed for gardening tools and greenhousing plants. This will be critical, since I will be living off a lot of my own garden produce.

I may also have a small smokehouse, assuming I decide to keep meat in my diet, and hunt or trap it.

Towards that plan, I am learning new skills, saving money (what I can after taxes and required insurance payments and useless retirement fund payments), and searching for hte best and most economical ways to fund my retirement. I know, beyond all doubts, that I will not have much to retire on. This is a far cry from my younger days, when I worked for company that had great retirement benefits. I vested in the retirement, and kept working to increase it, when the company was bought out and I lost my retirement in the buy-out. The “new” company didn’t offer a decent retirement plan, so I sought another job, and did the same thing, except instead of the company being bought out, it went bankrupt and had no retirement funds to disburse – so I lost two complete and good retirements. I’m now working on my third retirement fund, only this one is controlled by me and not some outside company or agency. They’ve proven themselves untrustworthy and greedy with my hard-earned money. The money that is currently being siphoned out of my paycheck is money that I count as a loss that I will never, ever see again. It’s theft, actually, but it’s legal theft, and there’s not a thing I can do to prevent it other than vote the people out of office who keep sticking their fingers deeper into my empty pockets, scrambling for the pennies hiding in the seams, and agitating for fair and reasonable tax laws.

On the up side, I have started a “Retirement Chest”. You know how young girls once kept “hope chests” filled with bride clothes and linens and such? It’s sort of the same idea. I plan to store away nice linens, toweling, fabric for sewing, arts and crafts supplies, tools, and such to make my retirement more pleasant.

When I do actually retire, I will give away my old, worn linens and towels and clothes, and take up my life with new stuff, sturdy and capable of lasting the rest of my life.

I’m going to add a nice set of dishes, and a few other luxury items to it.

I have a decent set of dishes now, but I plan to give it away when I retire so I can have the dishes I want to have.

I’ll take my cast iron cookware with me, and probably some of my Visions cookware, but I won’t need all I have now after I retire.

My stills all go with me, of course, and I may add a few new ones, because you can never have too many stills.

I’m going to stock up on canning jars and lids, and carboys for fermenting my own meads and country wines.

And paper. I will collect spiral bound notebooks, typing paper, and just assorted ends of paper runs and such. I can make my own inks and pens, but my homemade paper isn’t as fine as what I can buy. And being a prolific writer, and assuming I will have at least a decade to enjoy my retirement, I will need lots of paper. I know I store much on the internet (I have my own private wiki for that), but I may not have computer access when I retire (I hope I do, but just in case…).

I may also collect manual tools and machines – spinning wheel, manual bread and meat slicer, manual cherry pitter, manual tiller and gardening tools, fix up my old treadle sewing machine, and so forth.

I’ll be the crazy lady living in the hills.

Brief Interlude

We are experiencing a brief interlude in our regularly scheduled drought. Please be advised the damage will be limited to moisture, and we will have the drought up and running as normal within the next 24 hours.

We ask that you stay indoors during this unfortunate malfunction in the weather. If you must go outside, protect your elbows with macaroni. In the event of moisture contact, proceed to the nearest car wash for decontamination.

This will only last 24 hours.

Don’t panic.

Twenty four hours is not long enough to starve, so there is no need to sacrifice your pectorals to the sustenance of your pets. They will survive.

More New Season Stuff

There are some interesting holiday specials coming up.

I’m particularly enamored of the Bacchanalia and the Cerealia. I love Post Toasties.

For the space nuts, St.Nick Storms Space Station Three is replaying. That’s a classic chickflick with lots of mixed signals.

I’m jonesing to see the Klingon Love Poets Final Recitiations. All that leather, all those knives. And they do mean Final Recitations. Only the winner lives. It’s one of my favorite annual poetry competitions for Lupercalia, followed very closely by the Vulcan Pon Farr Run-offs.

Yummmmmmm

A coworker just brought in fresh asphalts with real road crew relish! I love the way their booted little feet feel on my tongue, adn the crunch of their hard hats is delightful. My tummy climbed out and followed her through the mirror to her office and pulsed for a bite. I tried to send Itzl after it, but he had his tongue stuck on Mercury and no amount of tail-tugging was going to get him down. Fortunately, the Balloon Man came by. I bribed him with some crushed apple seed cookies and crisp fried potato sprouts. He should be returning with my tummy tucked among the cyanide balloons, and then we’ll go have our own lunch.

New TV Season

I just got the new issue of the TV Trends, and it looks as if I may have to become a couch potato. I need to stock up on popcorn and Mike and Ikes.

Itzl tells me he wants to watch the new outdoor series designed just for pets, with the Scratch ‘n’ Sniff option. It looks as if the whole family could enjoy it, even Thing One and Thing Two. The first 6 episodes of Rockin’ Hood will take us to various people’s backyards, and we’ll get to meet the beagle that poops in the front yard every day, the dachsie with the lovely operatic voice, the squirrels at home (and let me tell you, that episode looks truly hilarious), listen to the wisdom of the koi in the Still Pond, and exchange gossip with the Green Jay Family. I’m particularly looking forward to the “In Their Kitchen” segments, and the “Playhouse Minute”.

I’ll read more and see what other gems are coming up this season. I gotta tell you, the pics look mah-velous! If hte shows hold up to the still in this newsletter, we are in for some radical treats.

Daily Notes

I took the books back to the Secret Library this morning. And naturally checked out a new volume just so I can find it next time. I really like the new due date cards. It’s much cleaner to be able to just glance at them to find the new location of the Secret Library than it was to sacrifice mice whenever the books were due back.

I need to get by the new Stonehenge Shopping Center this afternoon. I hear the Pict Hair Salon is having a sale, and the new batch of woad is ready. I really need a professional haircut, and they have the sharpest swords. I’m thinking I might show off my new haircut by taking one of the roles in the Altar Theater. Do you think I should change genders while I’m at it? That new suntan lotion works like a dream and it tickles only a little during the gentalia changeover.

I’m really looking forward to the new federal holiday, too. It’s about time the government had the guts to purge the last vestige of religious partisanship by taking Christmas off the list of federal holidays. I think we can have more fun with the American Pride Day that will take its place. I’m looking forward to the Constitution Readings, the poetry, the songs (oh, we have some great patriotic songs!), and the cute kitsch that always accompanies holidays. I’m also oddly looking forward to reading the student essays about why they are proud to be American. It’s going to be some real tear-jerker stuff, adn maybe I ought to buy Kleenex stock, you think? And I have this great costume design for the American Pride Ball. Since I have that new sequiner, it should be a breeze to fashion it, and I’ll love twinkling under thte disco lights. Bring your shovels!

Another upcoming event is the Citizen Appreciation Day the police are sponsoring. I think it’s so great that the police decided to hold a party to thank us for paying them. I know so many of them love their jobs so much they’d do it for free, so us paying them is like icing on their cake. And I have to say, being police, they know where the best goodies are and have the best parties ever!

And the plans for converting the White House to a half-way house for people with Down’s Syndrome are almost complete. They just need to finish the playground out back, put in the plasma screen TVs, and get the health inspectors in for the final OK.

Itzl wants to go visit really badly because he heard Popeye’s Chicken would be hosting an Open House there to welcome the new residents.

(In case you haven’t figured it out – it’s Down the Rabbit Hole Day)