Questionable Answers to Unanswerable Questions

Of course no question is unanswerable because you can always say I don’t know.  Or answer it with another question, such as “why in the world would you need to know that?”   I’ve also found ‘get away from me you weirdo’ can get you off the hook at least temporarily, giving you some time to think up a more intelligent response.

There are so many plinky prompts I’ve missed!  Where the hell have I been and what have I been thinking, letting them all gang up on me like this?  I’m going to pretend that there are people out there just dieing to know what I think about random things.  So here are my answers.  Some of them considerably less well thought out than others.

What’s your favourite place to grab a cup of coffee?  That would be in my kitchen, in my housecoat, in a state of semi-consciousness.  Next favourite – McDonalds.  Their coffee here is that good.

What was the last thing you got really excited about? I tend not to be a very excitable person.  Or exciting either if you want to get all personal.  Getting ready to go on a trip with my sister to Scotland was pretty thrilling.  That was five years ago.  I’m kind of seriously overdue for hysteria of some sort or other.

Make a list of things you’ve accomplished so far this year. I have lived through yet another dreaded month of January without going mad.  I have managed to stay gainfully employed.  I have used up every last millisecond of my holidays until mid September.  I’ve reconnected with my brother.  Visited family.  Got rid of a closet door.  Eaten enough salad to choke a very large rabbit.

Have you ever written your own music or song lyrics?  Sort of, but not really.  I have been known to make up my own lyrics for tunes that are already out there.  I’m the only person I know who can sing along to instrumentals.

What famous monument do you hope to see one day? The Eiffel Tower, at night, by elevator, with all of Paris at my feet.  But if I never get there, that’s okay too.  Probably couldn’t stand the excitement anyway.

Do you have a favourite work of art?   No.  All works created by skill and imagination are beautiful to someone.  Even if it’s simply a mom in love with her childs crayon scribbles.  There’s no such thing as the best beautiful thing.

Pick a new pet to take home for free.  I think I’m done with pets for this lifetime.  It’s hard enough to tend to the care and feeding and grooming of me.  I’ll just enjoy other peoples pets and go home to my own lint roller when the day is done.

How many books do you read each year?  Since I got my Kindle, I sometimes average one a week.  So over fifty would be a reasonable estimate.  Because I still buy real books too.  I don’t really know.  I’m too busy reading to add them all up.

If you were going to open a shop, what would you sell?  Coffee beans, cups, creams, pots, filters, cakes, grinders, makers and machines and presses, and many different types of the brewed stuff.  Perhaps I should just go work for Starbucks.

When was the last time you visited a library?  My library card expired a decade ago.  I honestly don’t remember.

Make a list of all the countries you have visited.  It’s a short list.  U.S. and U.K.

Have you ever tried to grow your own fruits and vegetables?  I grow tomatoes every summer.  They flourish and thrive in spite of me.

What’s the coolest airport you’ve been in?  Can’t even imagine what would make an airport cool.  It’s a necessary evil on the way to somewhere else.

Should coffee shops limit the amount of time that lap top users can occupy tables?  Yes.  No longer than 48 hours at a time seems reasonable to me.

What’s your favourite foreign film?  I love all foreign films as long as they have subtitles.  I like subtitles for films in English too.  Actors mumble.  It’s SO annoying.  Especially for the people I’m watching the film with when I’m constantly asking ‘what did he say??’

Should the U.S. get rid of the penny?  Yes, please.  Canada is phasing it out and American pennies showing up in our country would just piss us off.

Would you ever visit a psychic or palm reader?  Been there, done that.  Will live to be 93.

Do you ever purchase lottery tickets?  No.  W does.  If he wins I’m hoping he’ll share.

Have you ever had something stolen from you?  My prescription sunglasses.  I hope the person who took them goes cross-eyed with migraines.

Do you ever listen to the radio anymore?  Well, funny you should ask.  Since W got satelite radio I’ve been listening to it non-stop.  He has found a station he likes that plays about 90% Carole King 24/7 and that’s what we’ve had playing for two days straight.  I have tried to convince him to look for other stations because to me that seems to be the whole point of having a satelite working for you. I read the list.  I made suggestions.  But Carole King it is. He will be taking it with him soon to the island and I hope he and Carole King have a very nice summer together.

Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning?  Not really, but if I don’t have any at all I’ll never last through an entire afternoon without a nap.

What type of hat suits your personality?  A tall black pointy one with a wide brim and a silver buckle and lots of stars.

Just in Case You Really Want to Know….

…..And even if you don’t.  I’m falling way behind on my Plinky Inspired Answers to Inane Questions Which Are Reallly Just a Lame Excuse to Talk About Myself Ad Nauseum.  So I’ll just get at ‘er.

Share something you’ve changed your mind about.  I change my mind about inconsequential things roughly every 30 seconds, so my answer to this prompt would be interesting only if I’d ever had a complete change of heart about something earth shatteringly important.  Like global warming or the economy or celebrity nose rings.  I prefer to hover somewhere in the middle when it comes to such weighty issues, looking at both sides of the story and not ever actually making up my mind at all.

What do you think of reality television?  I think it’s about as real as anything else that’s written and scripted and edited to death before it goes on the air.

What’s the most unexpected thing a stranger has ever said to you?  So, not just strange, weird, rude, crazy, incomprehensible, far out or completely ludicrous?   Merely unexpected.  That certainly narrows it down.  Well there was this one old guy at work who came in and sat down and proceded to tell me that I had always given him the most incredible customer service and he really appreciated it and he’d bring all his business to me because I was one of the nicest most knowledgeable opticians he’d ever come across.  I have no idea who he was, and strongly suspect he got me mixed up with somebody else.

Come up with an idea for an awesome prank.  “Awesome Prank” is an oxymoron.  Pranks are rarely awesome.  I would describe them as mostly idiotic, moronic, and pointless.

Could you pull off a different hair color?  I guess that depends on what exactly I’d be trying to pull off or accomplish by changing it.  Jet black or green or flaming orange (orange is in this season!  I read that somewhere, but I don’t think they were talking about hair color),  would probably capture a lot of attention, most of it negative.  My current natural hair color, which is salt and pepper (heavy on the salt) seems to go well with the rest of me right now, so why mess with that.

Milk, dark, or white chocolate?  A question that’s not really a question.  Like “window, middle or aisle?”  Just pick one and get on with your life.  I’m not sure why, but for me, white chocolate easter bunnies just feel wrong.  As do chocolate easter tractors and soccer balls.  Bars and cakes, on the other hand, no matter what time of year, feel right and normal.  Dark chocolate can be bitter, and white chocolate too sweet.  Milk chocolate is okay, but I’d rather have chocolate milk.  With a straw. Out of a little brown carton.

Describe what it feels like when the season begins to change.  Could you not just haul your dumb ass outside and find that out for yourself?  Sorry, but sometimes you just have to say dumb ass or you’ll explode.

If you could be an editor for any magazine, which would you choose?  Magazines are so full of glossy eye blinding advertisements that I can’t be bothered trying to search out the articles.  Half the time it’s impossible even to come across a table of contents.  Editing out the ads would probably not make good business sense, so I’m quite content to leave the editor’s job to somebody else and all those over priced floppy books full of ads on the shelves.

When you need a good laugh, who/what do you turn to?  The Dilbert comic strips and Savage Chickens come to mind.  Yesterday I went to Chapters to get in on their “buy 4 get one free” book deal and picked up “I’m Better Than Your Kids” by Maddox and I’ve been laughing ever since.  It is definitely not everyone’s idea of funny though.  I read a couple of pages out of it to W and his face remained set in stone.

What game are you the champion of? Angry Birds, but only in my own mind. I work on getting all the stars and try not to look at any one else’s stats and get discouraged that there are people out there who are better at blowing up pigs than I am.

Would you ever take a cruise?  Maybe a river cruise would be okay, but for one on the ocean I think I might have to be heavily medicated the entire time.  I don’t like the idea of all that deep water everywhere.  Having never been on any kind of cruise I suppose it’s not fair for me to judge but my uninformed opinion is that sitting around on dry land would be a lot more fun.

Flavor of the Month

Once again I can’t get Plinky to come up, but I know what todays prompt is via Facebook;  If you were a flavor, what would you be?  So I guess we’re revisiting our childhoods here, trying to answer a sneaky question that makes us think of words to describe ourselves and what we’re like.

I’m suffering from introspection overload, and I’m no child on normal days, so why not ask some actual children for their answers to this?  I’ve got a few of them handy as it happens, since today is a snow day and there are four grandchildren milling about willing to answer grandma’s weird questions.

Kale hardly needed to give it any thought at all.  His answer was immediately “Annoying Orange.”  Anyone who knows Kale will appreciate the very subtle humor in that.

Corey decided (with a little help from his brother) on “Kung Fu Coconut”, because he is evil and funny and a bit nutty.  Then he had second thoughts about it and made ‘annoying apple’ his final answer.

Omayja chose “Minty Ice Cream” because she is smooth and cool and sweet and delicious and everybody loves her.  All true.  You can ask her grandma.

Madison thought she might be more like “hot and spicy pizza”, so hot that she could make people cry.  Everybody knows Maddy has this side to her personality.  Then she grinned and told me she’d be a honey dip donut instead.  We would all like the donut girl to surface more often.  Especially on snow days when we’re all cooped up inside trying to be quiet so mom can rest and get better after her surgery.

We’ve made it all the way from 7 a.m. to noon!  Yay me and my flavorful crew!

My End of Day Routine

What’s the first thing you do when you get off work?

If it’s at all possible, I go straight home. So I can hurry up and relax.

If I’ve got stuff to pick up or things to run around doing, I get them done as fast as possible so I can get home and kick off my shoes and sit down and do absolutely dick-all for as long as I can get away with it.

Does that qualify as a routine? It’s a hard one to stick with since there’s always some kind of work that needs to be done after I’m finished with my day job. I wish the pay was as good at home. I throw some laundry in the machine, mess around in the kitchen getting something to eat, check Facebook and my e-mail and do my on-line banking and pay bills and see if Plinky has anything interesting to add inspiration to my day. Wow. Sounds like I’m totally on top of things.

The truth is I’m often too tired to do anything except read for a while and fall asleep.

Home Is…

The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything. ~Dave Barry

Home is a key on my laptop between delete and end.

Home is what I click on when I’m lost on a website so I can start again.

Home is a base where I’d start off batting, and strive to end up back there safe.

Home is a verb when I’m homing in.

Home is where I can’t be homesick but I can be home sick.

Home is my refuge, my shelter, my nest.

Home is not just a place, it’s the people I love.

Home is in my heart and a memory in my mind.

Home is a workplace.

Home is the best place to get a good night’s sleep.

The News

What section of the news do you read first? What sections could you care less about?

The section of the newspaper that I read first (because it’s usually in big bold type and hard to ignore) is the front page headline.

Tsk tsk, plinky. Asking me what I could care less about is actually asking me what I do care about, because if I could care less it means that I already care to some extent. If what you really wanted to know is what I COULDN’T care less about, no matter how hard I tried, it would be pretty much the whole rest of the paper.

Except maybe for the comic strips, but often they’re so buried in such strange and hard to find places that it’s hardly worth the effort. And sometimes I pick up the sports section to see how they’ve re-worded the fact that the Oilers are still pathetic losers. Also I hate all the advertising and all the pictures of houses and cars for sale. Okay, let’s face it. I don’t even remember what else is in there, it’s been so long since I read one.

Normally I don’t see the paper at all, because W gets to it first and reads it from beginning to end and mixes up all the sections and throws them into the ‘paper basket’ in a huge unholy mess. I never feel the urge to sort that out. If he’s away I put a vacation stop on receiving the news. If I get to the paper first I take out the fifty pounds of glossy flyers and throw them into the paper recycle bag. And then throw the remaining bits of the paper (all sections neatly in order!) on his footrest so he can read them from beginning to end and sort them into a huge unholy mess. Tomorrow we will repeat this whole process in the same order, or some variation of it.

So, are you sorry you asked me yet? I could go on for a bit about the black newsprint finger marks on the inside of our front door, or how sometimes the paper comes in a skinny orange plastic bag if the weather is dismal. Or how it’s very useful for starting fires and lining the compost bin.

But perhaps you COULDN’T care less about that. So I won’t.

Belonging to a Group

I used to belong to the Alberta Opticians Association, but now I belong to the College of Opticians of Alberta.  Because the name got changed.  And I have to belong, otherwise I can’t be licensed and practice opticianry.  Or whatever the hell it is I do.  I am regulated by the Health Professions Act.  I suppose there are worse things to be regulated by.

Also used to belong to book clubs but now that I live about a block away from Chapters and own a Kindle, there’s really no point.

In school I was never the club joining sort, lacking the passion I suppose for anything in particular.  When I was a stay at home mom living in the NWT I joined a Stitch and Bitch club, but the bitch percentage of our evenings was way too high for me.  Plus sewing makes me a little crazy.

Belonged to a chat board once that was great fun.  A select few, who were completely fed up with the Canadian Idol Forum and wanted a safer more sane place to converse, formed this group.  Then Facebook kind of took us over, but I still consider the people I came to know there, who are now my Facebook friends, as highly valued as any of my friends in real life.

And then there’s Plinky of course.  A group of blogging writers in various states of seriousness.  A wordsmith motley crew. Where some pretty amazing people keep me coming back for more.

Insomnia Haiku

She can’t sleep at night.

Laptop glow is blinding but

Still her eyes won’t close.

Filling In the Blanks

Once again I’ve managed to skip a week of prompts and decided to play catch up.  So it’s not a full-blown cop-out,  merely a semi blown one.  I am very good at those, and as everyone knows, one should always do what one does best.

You have ten minutes to interview a celebrity.  Who will it be?  I have no idea, but if I’m actually doing this it is under duress or at gunpoint or because of a death threat.  But if any celebrity would like to interview me, I’m fine with that.  The ten minute time limit is good, since then there would be only one question, because God knows I can blather away about being completely unknown and without any real talents or accomplishments for way longer than that.  I’d pose for pictures too.  And look for myself in the tabloids to see what kind of garbage lies they had to come up with to make me interesting.

List the cities you would consider moving to in the future.  Aquitaine or any similar seaside resort in the south of France.  Puerto Baquerizo Moreno in the Galapagos.  Edinburgh Scotland.  London England.  Marrakech in Morocco.  Montego Bay, Jamaica.  The list is endless, really.  Get me an atlas.

What is the best live musical performance you’ve attended?   Strangely enough I’d have to say Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  With Donny Osmond.  Way back whenever it was at the Jubilee.  I don’t get out much.

What are your favourite things to photograph?  Ha.  You’re asking a grandmother.  One guess.

Ever won a contest, giveaway, lottery?  Nothing big, but I’ve won small things.  The one that immediately comes to mind is from a sort of field trip I was on with the Women’s Institute to which my mom belonged.  I can’t remember why I was tagging along, and I could not now name the place.  It was some kind of rehabilitation centre.  Not for criminals, but maybe for the mentally ill.  I remember being mildly excited to get a glimpse of real live crazy people.  If that was even what they were.  I was young, and obviously not paying attention.  We were given a tour, and one of the therapeutic activities that was pointed out to us was the manufacturing of stuffed animals by the patients.  Or inmates.  The resident nutballs.  There was either a door prize, or some kind of draw, and that’s what I won.  A little fuzzy yellow and white thing that could have been a dog sitting up on its haunches looking rather pathetic and sad.  I named him Delmore.  The first three letters were the backward initials of my current boyfriend, of whom I wanted more.  Who says teenagers aren’t deep.

What was your childhood dream job?  Marine Biologist.  But when I found out it involved dealing with oceans and aquatic creatures, I changed my mind.

Trouble in Plinkyplonk Paradise

I’m having a problem with Plinky in the last few days since it refuses to complete a ‘share with your blog’ process, and thus I’ve been doing a bit of cutting and pasting instead.  Yesterday it asked me to describe my sense of humor.  Good Gawd.  If you have to sit down and think about how to describe the damned thing, chances are you don’t even have one worth talking about.

Today I’ve been prompted to share my professional goals for the next year, and then the next five years.  I would be thrilled beyond belief to be able to share my professional goals for tomorrow if I actually had any. I’m going to a professional conference to learn our professional code of conduct rules in a couple of weeks.  Kind of late in my ‘career’ to be making any major changes in that department.  How sad is it that we have to be coached in the art of treating other people with fairness and respect.

I live in a state of constant hope that tomorrow’s prompt will inspire, motivate and challenge.  And that I will rise up and hit the lofty heights of brilliance!  Or just have one minor little epiphany or something.  How’s that for a freakin’ goal.