Thursday, February 24, 2005

'Round go the interviews again

The interview game is going around again, but this time I'm not going to ask any questions. I'm going to answer these questions, posed by Amey, and if you want any questions of your own, you have to go ask her. ;-)

1. Early bird or night owl?

Neither. I always need more sleep than I can manage to get. :-) I'm usually at my best late morning or late afternoon. I have a little bit more of a morning edge than DOB, though.

2. How did you and your husband meet?

The answer we give when we don't want to explain is that we met in law school. The answer we give when we want to get funny looks is that we met online. DOB was the president of the debating society for our distance-learning school, and we met when I signed up for a debate. Everybody else backed out of debating me, so he had to do it himself. And won, much to my annoyance (we still argue over whether he fought fair or not).

At the time, due to my mistakenly typing my birthdate on a website, he thought I was ten years his senior. So it took quite awhile for that mistake to be corrected and anything to move forward. Maybe I'll tell the rest of the story sometime.

3. Describe your favorite meal.

This is a bittersweet question, and it ties into number four. My favorite meal is the kind my extended family used to have for holidays and get-togethers, with a huge spread of at least two kinds of meat (one poultry and one not, because Grandpa hasn't eaten poultry since WWII), salads, vegetables, fruit, mashed potatoes, Grandma's rolls, and one of Aunt Dee's delicious desserts. Plus munchies ahead of time and leftovers enough to last the rest of the day. But now I live far away and as people pass on things are never the same as they were.

4. Tell us about the family you grew up in.

I am the middle of seven children, with an age span of twenty-two years between oldest and youngest. The family runs in three clumps: except for the oldest, who is adopted, there's an older sister, then a brother about two years younger, then several years' gap. So by the time the next round of diapers came, Mom had someone to help with them.

My father is very serious to outward appearances, but very sarcastic and silly in private; my mother was very bright and cheery in public, but often quite serious in private, though she had a great deal of silliness as well. (She died a couple of years ago.) We lived on a weekend farm which we called "The Funny Farm," and for many years published "The Funny Farm Mooos" for our friends and relations--now it exists as the Christmas letter. My siblings are all very smart in one way or another, but not necessarily particularly ambitious. All the ones from me on down were homeschooled. Mom's health was bad, so although she always had grand goals mostly we learned, while she napped, by reading from the thousands of books she filled the house with. When she was awake we could go outside and get muddy.

My grandparents and a couple of aunts all lived close by; one grandma lived with us for years until she died.

5. What is the absolutely best way to eat carrots?
If you have the right kind of carrot, the best way is to eat them straight out of the ground, after you knock the dirt off. (I once had a little boy grow me the best variety of carrots for this purpose, but I don't remember what it was. You had to grow them in special soil and treat them carefully because they were very tender and not resistant to bugs.)

And a bonus question: What do you do on most Saturday nights?
I want to be flippant and put "sleep. " Before that, though, we usually watch a movie, or if we watched a movie on Friday, read a book together. Watching a movie is a lot more work, because we don't have a TV. DOB has to remember to bring his laptop home, and then we have to bring the monitor and speakers from the office computer out and set it all up on the coffee table and keep D1 distracted so she doesn't get in the cords or look at the screen. It's probably good, because it keeps us from using movies as a substitute for spending time together. We have to really want to see something to bother. Also if we're going to have someone over (and we try to average it at least once a month), Saturday is usually the day.

3 comments:

Amey said...

Hi QOC! Thanks for answering the questions. I agree about eating the carrots fresh out of the ground. I tried growing them myself, but the clay around here makes it next to IMPOSSIBLE. I (meaning my husband) even added a ton of stuff to the soil to break it up.

Here's a comment about you and your husband's first debate in law school: who were the law school students who backed out of debating you and are they actually practicing law now? Isn't that what law students do (other than reading and studying like crazy)? Debate? (I studied education myself, but that had always been my impression of law students)

Bruce said...

I got some of the carrots from the backyard garden the other day. With store-bought carrots, it takes a deliberate effort to chop them. With those five-minutes-out-of-the-ground carrots, it was like slicing a stick of butter.

Amey: Think "container gardening". Alternatively, or in addition, keep working organic material into your garden's soil as and when you can. After a few years, you should have a rich, deep bed of soil. (Raised beds also help.)

-- Bruce A.

Queen of Carrots said...

I think we have the same soil type, Amey. I should try container gardening one of these days. Last year I only tried tomatoes and herbs, and only the basil did well.

On the students not available to debate, I think it was just scheduling conflicts. Most of us were working full time, studying law, and usually volunteering for politics on the side. So sometimes debates had to slide. I was already graduated, so I had a little more free time than most.