11 posts tagged “qotd”
What's your favorite foreign accent?
French or Welsh. English accents are no longer foreign to me, which may be why I prefer Antoine to speak to me in French.
What are your plans for the holiday weekend?
Erm, this assumes one is in North America, which...no. Funny to see such a US-centric question on here.
Our holiday weekend was last weekend, which was blissful and sunny and active for us. I had hoped for a similar two day respite upon my return from France, but no such luck. The weather here is rainy, grey, horrible, and depressing. I have spent all Saturday catching up on email and RSS, and feeling torn between going out tonight and staying home. Looks like home wins, with a Scrabble game the big treat of the evening.
Sigh. It's far too early in the year to be developing Seasonal Affective Disorder.
What books are on your nightstand?
Annabel: An Unconventional Life: The Memoirs of Lady Annabel Goldsmith (I keep reading this out of order, and always end up tearful)
The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard (solid)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (talk about a page-turner!)
With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant (funny and baldly honest, but too much of the ALL CAPS used for EMPHASIS)
Our Bodies, Ourselves (frighteningly stupid when it comes to the politics of socialised healthcare, but a good resource on all the woman stuff - fertility, pregnancy, nutrition, and all aspects of women's health)
What's your morning beverage of choice? Coffee, tea, juice? Homemade or store-bought?
Juice is full of sugar and lacking in fibre; I am not really a hot drinks person, either. In the morning, I'll have a diet pop, if anything. Usually I don't bother drinking anything until lunchtime, though.
When I do drink coffee, I only drink Ristretto Roasters, the best coffee on earth. Din Johnson, husband of my good friend Nancy Rommelmann, hand roasts it in small batches in his vintage Probat roaster. He's obsessive about his coffee, and his passion has seen Ristretto romp to huge success in less than a year of operation. Seriously, talk to me if you want the hook-up, or order it from their site. It is, as Amy Alkon says, like drinking liquid velvet. (Below, a photo I took of some Ristretto beans prior to grinding.)
What was the first movie you remember seeing in a movie theater?
Question submitted by mainmor.
ET: Extraterrestrial. I cried and cried. I could cry this second just thinking about it, but maybe that's because there's 6000 miles between me and home right now...
How cute were you as a baby/child? Let's see those baby pics!
All I can say is: It was all downhill from 1979:
What's one thing that you'd like to get done this weekend? Is there anything holding you back?
I would really like to sleep and get over my jetlag. The obligation I feel to make the most of my time in the Bay Area is most certainly holding me back.
(Bonus item: I would LOVE to eat healthful food this weekend. Being in the US - and having little willpower when I'm back in the homeland - is TOTALLY holding me back. My nutritious snacks cache consists of unroasted, unsalted, unoiled almonds and dried apricots with no added oil or sugar. Sadly, I've also helped myself to completely un-nutritious snacks: Cracker Jack, Oreos, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups have all passed my lips over the last two days. I disgust myself, truly.)
If you could get someone in your life to start a blog, who would it be and why?
My father has always been a prolific letter writer when it comes to companies that screw him over or do him a good turn. Instead of all those letters gathering dust in someone's inbox or a drawer, they should be on a blog and contributing to the search engine karma of hundreds of deserving companies.
My dad just cracks me up whatever he writes. A random sample from some recent emails:
I hope your presentation went well and you didn't crap your pants. I have faith that you didn't. [...]
Now that I have you all cheery and everything, enjoy the climb to the top of the Tower tomorrow. You can do it!!! Take some french fries with you for a mid-climb snack.
The food was generic and tasteless as usual...It is amazing how somebody who cooks as much as [she] does can make such awful food.
After much bantering with Sears National Customer Relations (which happens to be an awful reflection of the company) and getting nowhere with our washer that stains clothes, I called the local manager in Chillicothe and he authorized us to receive a brand spanking new one. Bonnie is thrilled as you can imagine and quite proud of my persistence. I never got abusive or used profanity with the national group but they never got my washer fixed after 4 service calls and taking vacation days to be there. When the dust settles, it will all be in my report. I am sending it to the BBB, Attorney General, and the CEO of Sears. They messed with the wrong guy!!!!
But maybe I'm biased.
What was the highlight of this past weekend?
Hmm. Probably the VRWC BBQ we attended last night. Our friend Scott Norvell, who's the European bureau chief for Fox News, invited us to his house to eat awesome food and plan our takeover of the planet. My friend Greg Gutfeld and his beautiful wife Elena showed up shortly after us, and it was such a fantastic surprise. (I had no idea that Scott and Greg knew one another, and was briefly very puzzled over how these two people could POSSIBLY know each other without having been hooked up by me.) Antoine and I were both really tired from travelling back from Paris, upon which we'd had to race to a big party, that I feared I was too wiped out to enjoy Scott's barbecue. How wrong I was!
What did you do this weekend?
Hung out in Paris, sweated, complained, laughed, ate, slept. It was awesome. And I have five more days of it to go!
