Answers to the meme Steph tagged me with: 7 Things I Plan to Do Before I Die: 1) Write & publish. Writing is a love-hate thing for me. I've established that I can't live without it, but I've also established that writing is a major pain in my ass. It's introspective, personal, and challenging, yet without it I feel an absence of purpose. I believe deeply that writing can affect change, and I feel that it is one of the ways that I can affect change in the world. Yet I procrastinate about writing whenever I possibly can. It's a vicious thing, this writer's bug I've got.
2) Teach writing at a university(dream job.)
3) Keep bees and chickens and grow an organic garden. The first thing I plan to do when we have land again is to learn how to keep bees, I love honey and as I mentioned here, bees are becoming threatened throughout the world by bee blights that are resistant to most traditional treatments. This will ultimately affect food production world wide, and on a small scale I can make a difference by learning bee keeping techniques, and growing organic vegitables and flowers. As for the chickens, I kept chickens when I was a kid. One chicken, named Blackie, came when I called her and sat on my shoulder. She was the fancy breed of chicken that lays green and blue eggs. And I loved having fresh eggs. Nothing quite like them.
4) Learn to sail. I would love to take my kids on a sailing trip around the world for a few years & home school them, but if that's not possible, at the very least I'd like to have a small boat we can spend summer weekends on, diving off the deck, basking in the sun, and sleeping like sardines in a can packed below deck.
5) Live in a foreign country for a year (or more) with my kids and husband. DH and I have many roots in Italy and Germany, and I would love for Bean to grow up knowing that culture is an expansive thing, that horizons stretch farther than the eye can see, and that diversity is a necessary and vital part of human existence.
6) Learn a second language fluently (see #5)
7) Hang glide I've always wanted to do this since I was little & I'd look up in the sky in Colorado where I lived and see hang gliders circling like birds in dizzy winged spirals.
7 Things I Can Do: 1. Figure out how kids learn, and help them with that process. 2. Rescue a 6 foot, 220 lb guy from the bottom of a swimming pool (or from the ocean---which I once did, for DH in Puerto Rico when his blood sugar went low when we were snorkeling over a coral reef.) 3. Use grammar & punctuation rules correctly. (My freshman year in college one of my writing teachers tore apart a piece of my writing, telling me to get Strunk & White's book and use it, and that she was not "my writing janitor." Later she said, "once you know the rules, you can break them." I now know them well enough to break, though I'm still a TERRIBLE speller--thank god for spell check! 4. Articulate my ideas in conversation. 5. Listen. 6. Make some wickedly good scones. 7. Forgive people easily.
7 Things I Cannot Do: 1. Play any musical instrument. 2. Order drinks at a bar without feeling self-conscious. 3. Go to a party without obsessing about my outfit. 4. Understand religious or political extremists. 5. Spell. (For years I spelled water, w-a-t-t-e-r, different as d-i-f-e-r-e-n-t and just last night I realized I’ve been spelling destruction as d-i-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n for years now!) 6. A downward dog that doesn’t make other people cringe watching me. 7. Sex in a public bathroom.
7 Things That Attract Me to the Opposite Sex: 1. Self confidence. 2. Beautiful eyes (love smiley lines!!) 3. The ability to build things and fix things with his hands. 4. Someone who can do sports with me without feeling the need to compete (seriously, I'll NEVER have pecs like that, so no, I'll never be able to jump a log on my mountain bike like that. Sorry.) 5. The ability to cook really well. 6. A sense of humor. 7. Willingness to grow, change & listen. 7 Things I Say Most Often: 1. I love you. 2. Who's a little bean? 3. Shhhhh! 4. It's your turn 5. Just let me finish this! 6. Ow (in response to my hair being pulled by Bean a million times a day) 7. Hmmm.
7 Celebrity Crushes: Because I grew up without TV in my house, I have a huge popular culture void that I'm still trying to accommodate for. That said, it's nearly impossible for me to name five celebs I even find interesting, let alone have crushes on.
7 people I want to do this: If you're inspired, go for it. Leave your answers in the comments or a link to your site!