Dork Meme

This one’s from dulcinbradbury :

List five reasons why you are a dork. And make them good reasons. Justify them. Explain them. Be loud and proud about how big of a dork you are! Then pick the five biggest dorks you know and have them do the meme.

In no particular order:

1. I have this geas from which I have no desire to seek relief – I must read whatever is written in my eyerange. This geas has caused me to learn to read multiple languages. Not speak them, just read them. With a decent English/(fill int the language) dictionary, I can read anything, from Russian to Egyptian heiroglyphs to Sumerian petroglyphs to Japanese kanji.

2. I used to spend time in the computer in college. Yes, that’s in the computer. They were room sized back then. And to demonstrate my utter geekiness, I wrote a punch card program (in BASIC, as that was the only programming language back then) to determine all the possible male Vulcan names, assuming all male names began with “S”, ended with “K”, and were 5 letters long. I still have that printout…

3. I own 7 differnet complete sets of encycolpedias, only one of which is a general all-purpose one like you’d find in a high school. I have read all of them from cover to cover.

4. I carry 2 dictionaries, a thesaurus, a copy of the Constitution, along with a measuring tape, a plumb bob, a multi-head screwdriver, an Opinel, a small notebook, and several different kinds of pens and markers in my purse. Just in case I need them.

I used to be in the SCA, but I moved up to a bigger game, and now help coordinate a RenFest every year. While I was in the SCA, I started 5 newsletters (all still going strong) and helped found 3 Baronies, and got people interested in creating both an Herbalists Guild and a Brewer’s Guild. But now I coordinate the demonstrating artists at a RenFest, from glassblowers to bookbinders to pewterers.

How geeky is that?

Book Meme

So, I saw this meme around and decided to play with it.

I also saw a variation of it, and decided to extend it a bit further.

How many books do you own?

A lot more than the Lone Wolf Public Library! I’m not totally sure. See, this new bookstore just opened in town that sells new books at 75% off, with no book costing more than $5.00. Yes, they are remaindered books, but you’re still likely to find gems among them. So I upped my book count by a considerable lot. The last time I took inventory of all my books was when I bought this house 7 years ago – and then I had 11,315 books. I’ve done a lot of book buying since then. The garage was converted into a library with floor to ceiling books on three walls (the other wall has 2 doors in it and a curio shelf of knick-knacks), there are shelves full of books in the living room, the kitchen, both bedrooms, the hallway, and the bathroom. I think I may have in excess of 20,000 books now.

Yes, I am a living embodiment of the bumper sticker that says: Friends help you move. Real friends help you move books.

Last Book Purchased:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Unfortunately, it won’t be the British version like the first 3 I bought before they became popular in the US, so the last ones don’t match the first ones. Real pity, that, but then, I am not a book collector, I am a book owner/reader. I don’t buy books because they match my decor or because they are valuable. I buy them because I want to read them, not once, not twice, but several times.

Last Book I read:

That would be Barry Hughart’s Story of the Stone. If you like Chinese mythology and haven’t read Barry Hughart’s trilogy The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox you so must give them a try.

Five books important to me:

Only five? From among thousands? This is where I really started sorting things out.

See, I own around 500 cookbooks, most are historical facsimiles or reproductions, several are sets of encyclopedias on cookery, the rest are recent books or treatises on cookery. And I’m not counting all of my food journals. So, even here, it’s difficult to narrow it down to just five important cookbooks. Even if I keep it to English-only books, that’s still a staggering number.

I’ll go with: Apicius’s Cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, the very first cookbook I owned. It was written in Latin and German, and I purchased one also written in English. I still use it today. Good cookbooks never become useless.

Then, Betty Crocker’s Cookie Cookbook, the second cookbook I ever owned and still use frequently today. I’m on my second copy and purchased it hardbound this time around.

There’s Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre’s Food in Russian History and Culture, covering a thousand years of Russian food.

Grace Firth’s Stillroom Cookery was the book that started me down the path to involving myself in all sorts of fermented and preserved foods, from pickles to dim sum to brewing. It still remains one of my favorite books to just read.

And I am a big fan of Jeff Smith’s Frugal Gourmet and own most of his cookbooks, from The Frugal Gourmet to Immigrant Ancestors to Cooks with Wine to Three Ancient Cuisines to Keeps the Feast.

There are more, of course, A TAste of History, Sallets, Humbles, and Shrewesbury Cakes, To the Queen’s Taste, Salt: A History, In the Devil’s Garden, and more.

Now, I also happen to own 133 herbals, some handwritten, but most are published. Which 5 would I consider the most important? That’s hard to say, as none of them cover everything I want covered in an herbal. Culpepper’s, as full of false information as it’s possible to be, is still a classic because so many people refer to it. I have to know what’s in it so I can debunk it, and understand where others are getting their information. Ditto for M. Grieve’s A Modern Herbal, except hers is more outdated and disproven than half myth, half fantasy like Culpepper’s. Joerg Gruenwald’s PDR for Herbal Medicines is essential for any skilled herbalist to use when consulted by doctors whose patients have added or would like to add an herbs to their treatment regimen. Michael Castleman’s Healing Herbs offers solid information for basic herb use. And there’s Phyllis Shaudys’s two books: Herbal Pleasures and Herbal Treasures.

Then we move into other categories: Romances, Gaming, History, Crafts, Home Improvement, Comic Books, SF&F, Westerns, Gardening, Dictioneries and Encyclopedias (Yes, I own several different specialized sets of encyclopedias – doesn’t everyone?), and Men’s Adventure Novels (Anyone else love Chiun from The Destroyer Series?).

Really, there are just too many books to discuss, and not enough pixels or time to mention them all.

10 Dumb Kid Stunts

From Aurorealis by way of The Zero Boss: A Meme about the 10 dumbest things you did as a child.

I’m glad it’s limited to childhood, and only 10 things. The absolute silliest things I ever did were as an adult. The childhood silly things can at least be attributed to the inexperience of youth. My adult peccadilloes have no such excuse.

So, laugh all you will. Just remember, these incidents aren’t the funniest ones. Those had to wait for adulthood.

1. Traumatized by my first haircut, I demanded the hairdresser brush my hair back on. All of it. Right then. I even stomped my foot, encased in little red cowboy boots. Then, wily even as a young child, I offered to pay her to brush my shorn locks back on – a whole penny, because that was a lot of money to me back then.

2. I locked my teacher up inside an egg. We were making the props for an Easter play at school, and we’d made this 6’ tall easter egg, only none of us children were tall enough to paint the inside top of it. We coaxed the teacher inside it with paint and a brush, and when the evil woman was inside (she had to be evil, when I’d broken both arms, she still made me turn in written homework – she also gave me a lifelong hatred of basic math), I slammed the egg shut on her and tied it closed with a rope. Then we spent the rest of the day listening to her thump and shout as we colored and read books. We were very well behaved. The principal finally came by and let her out after we confessed to accidentally knocking it shut (we took the rope off by then).

3. I was visiting my aunt and uncle who lived in a big city. I was raised in a small rural village with chickens in the backyard, taking care of geese and pigs, and I’d heard stories of the crime that happened in big cities. So, terrified of criminals breaking in, I couldn’t sleep. My cousins couldn’t sleep either, but that’s because they were starving, and wanted ham sandwiches. So we were sneaking around in the kitchen, devouring leftover ham when a noise came from outside the back door. Only criminals would try to enter a city house by the back door, right? In a panic, I convinced my cousins to grease the floor with butter so the thief would slip and we could tie him up in Auntie’s tablecloth to await the police. Only, it was my uncle, coming home from a late night emergency at work. He duly slipped on the well-greased floor, hurting his back, and we kids spent the rest of the week waiting on him – after, of course, scrubbing the floor grease-free.

4. Pirates were my passion when I was much younger – so much so that landlocked and too young to build a real pirate ship, I pretended the chinaberry tree was a pirate ship sailing over a green sea. I convinced neighbor children of this fact, and made them all call me Captain. My captaincy ended when my crew mutinied over vanilla wafers and lemonade. I refused to share until they’d sung the Pirate Song, and they wanted cookies now. In the ensuing tree climbing chase for cookies, I took a nose dive out of the tree and smashed my mother’s glass pitcher. The cookies were still edible, though, but my crew never forgave me and the ship became instead a desert island inhabited by insane monkeys.

5. The two broken arms I mentioned earlier? We had this really cool swing set that soared up at least 20 feet in the air. I decided I was going to swing so high I’d wrap around the set – my goal was for three wrap arounds. I managed two before a teacher spotted me and freaked out. She grabbed the chain from the swing, bringing my trip to an abrupt halt and flinging me from my seat. I landed and snapped both arms. If they hadn’t removed the swings from the swingset, I’d have tried again – only this time I’d be smarter and not do it when teachers were around. Grown-ups can spoil the best fun, yanno?

6. Being a small child, I could do things the bigger, heavier kids couldn’t do – like walk on water. We moved after the pirate incident to a place with a pond nearby. A scum-filled pond. I was light enough to be able (if I walked just right) to walk on the pond scum without sinking into the water. I used to perform this trick to the amazement of all my friends, until That Day. On That Day, two of my friends brought their parents along to watch me walk on water – one of whom was a preacher. I did my walking-on-water trick, walking farther into the pond than ever before. The middle of the pond didn’t have any scum. See where this is going? Good thing we moved shortly thereafter.

7. Did I mention I was small? Well, I was. And I was the village goose girl. In the summers, I had to watch the geese and collect the down they dropped for stuffing mattresses and pillows. My pockets were always full of down, as well as the bag I carried. Those geese were huge, too. So, one day, I decided I was tired of walking, and having ridden pigs and ponies before, I thought I’d just ride me a goose. Once that ride was done, I wasn’t the Goose Girl anymore. Which was a shame, because then my job was chopping off the chickens’ heads – harder work and less time to goof off.

8. I have a piece of pencil lead lodged in the bone above my soft palate, acquired when I was leaping like Superman from chair to sofa to table and back again – with a sharpened pencil in one hand because I was writing down important information – like how high I was leaping, and how far away, and how fast. Until I missed a jump and rammed the pencil up and into the roof of my mouth, where it had to be surgically extracted. The doctor told us I would be brain damaged from it, but I think it was something else that got me.

9. Since cats always land on their feet and toast always lands buttered side down, I thought I’d tie buttered toast to the back of a cat and see what happened. What happened was a buttered up slick cat with very sharp claws!

10. I grew up in rural Germany, before indoor toilets, and everyone in the village had outhouses. I’ll tell you why people get mad when you drop stuff down the hole of an outhouse, no matter how fascinating it is to watch rocks sink into the effluvia. Eight rocks and a scolding later, I thought my punishment was over. But with spring came the pumpman – to pump the outhouses clean for the coming year. And when my big rocks clogged up the pumpman’s hose, who do you think had to unclog that hose and clean it out? So, don’t throw anything into an outhouse you aren’t willing to clean up after.

And if you think these were funny, you should have seen what I did once I became a teen!

Unitarian Jihad

Thanks to sunfell, my Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister/Brother Garrote of Looking at All Sides of the Question.

Get yours.

Except, in the spirit of Unitarianism, I remove all gender references and will take the honorific of “Sibling” rather than “Brother” or “Sister”.

So, just call me Sibling Garrote of LASQ.

Thank you.

Edited to say:

I appealed to the Unitarian Jihad’s mercy, and my new, improved name is Sibling Dagger of Mercy.

I like that.

A Meme

A word (or several) concerning your altar: Deity-licious
Brand of humour: punnish, puckish, slap-stick, subtle, layered.
Family: children, friends, friends of my children, neighbors
Fave chant(s): “Lemon tree, very pretty, the flowers are so sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat”
Fave deity(s): Paul, Siobhan, Diane, Cat of the Fragrant Tail, Oma, Opa
Fave force(s): tornadoes
Fave form of divination: botanomancy
Fave magical item(s): shoes
Fave ritual(s): Cookie Day, First Fire
Fave story: Dragon Kisses
Fave element(s): wood, time
History of your own Paganism: I was named for an obscure German Goddess, and should have become heathen, I suppose, but I immigrated to the US and found Numenism instead, which suits me very well. Or I suit it.
How do you live your spirituality: Daily, with every breath I take and word I speak.
How long you’ve been studying/practicing: Officially? About 47 years.
Important personal beliefs: Apologies and reparations for harm must always be given, harm must be minimized as much as possible and never maliciously enacted, betrayal is the only sin, strive for excellence, look deeply.
Personal totem: N/A
Pets: 2 cats, 3 ferrets, 2 fish, 1 snail, 2 dogs, 1 turtle, 1 rat, 1 rabbit, 1 vixen, 1 tailless squirrel, 1 possum family, 1 duck.
Physical age (if you don’t mind sharing) followed by mental age: 59, oh – I’ve been every age, so it’s easy to fall back into any of them.
Points of interest: embroidery, sourdough, cookery, costuming, wine-making, painting (mostly acrylics), sculpture, wildcrafting, distilling, perfumery, reading, writing but not ‘rithmatic, RPGs, gardening but not yardwork, and jewelry-making.
Public Craft name: N/A
Recommended book(s): The Numenous Way, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, Norito, The Way of the Gods, The Fox and The Jewel,
Recommended Pagan music: Brobdinagian Bards, Bilge Pumps, Boru’s Ghost, Jethro Tull, Heart, Mozart, Liszt
Recommended websites: The Onion, Encyclopedia Mythica, Wikipedia
Religion/tradition you were raised in: Eclectic
Religion/tradition/path: Numenism
Sexuality: asexual
What do you hope to give/receive within this community? Heh. Whatever.
Where do you call home: Any place I can cook and sleep.
Your definition of sacred space: wherever I am, or you are. Everywhere.