Tuesday, October 23, 2007

seven random things

I've been tagged! This is a first--how exciting! So, I was tagged by snowy, and here are my 7 things:

1. I have wanted to live in Europe (specifically France, but maybe somewhere else that I could speak the language, too) for as long as I can remember. I've only been out of the country for up to six weeks at a time, however. It's very hard for an American to get a visa to work in France. I would love to have to conduct my daily life in a language other than English. A friend of mine told me she thought I mostly just wanted everyday life to be challenging. Hmm, maybe.

2. I have a weakness for those "organizer-y" things, you know, like the kind they sell at The Container Store or other such places. Boxes, cubbies, things with drawers, etc.

3. I'm afraid to ride my bike on city streets. Even with a helmet. I'm surprised I don't see more bikers hit by cars. (People around here drive like lunatics, in my opinion.)

4. I know how to sew (maybe not well, but well enough), but I have a huge bag of clothes that need to be mended, and the bag has been full for years already. Maybe I should come to grips with the fact that I'm not going to mend them? And I refuse to buy pants anymore that need to be hemmed. Either they come the right length, or they are hemmed by the manufacturer (as at Lands End, where they hem for free).

5. I first heard of email eighteen years ago, but I had no idea what it was (and I wasn't the only one). I learned how to do basic HTML about five years ago, long before I became seriously interested in the internet. I've had a professional website (a website for my work, although it looks pretty professional, too) for about five years (when I learned HTML in order to work on it), but I only started a blog a few weeks ago.

6. I was painfully shy when I was young. I always thought of myself as shy until one day in my late twenties/early thirties I noticed that I was speaking in front of a group in a way I *never* could have done even a few years before. I'm not exactly sure when the change occurred, but I can be very forthright now, and most people would not consider me shy.

7. My all-time favorite unusual flavor of ice cream is Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby. Weird combination: chocolate-covered pretzels with peanut butter filling, ice cream is peanut butter and vanilla (I think), with caramel swirls. I haven't had it in many years, and I don't even know if they still make it. If not, it would be a shame and completely my fault, as I stopped buying it. It had enough sat-fat to instantaneously clog all the arteries in your body, however, not that I cared about that then, but it was definitely yummy!

I'm tagging super des, From my French window, and kittycafe. I hope you don't mind, as this is my first time doing one of these....

Here are the rules which you must abide by if you are tagged.
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
3. Tag 3 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ack, you have to back in my archives as I have done this before, twice.
Both times badly.
I'll have to think hard if I am up for another go.
(I think we have dancing, pottery and fountain pens in common)

Anonymous said...

That was you have to LOOK back in my archives.
Clearly, "needs to edit and reread" should be a not so random and very well known fact!
Interestingly, I am a very good speller. Typing, not so much...

might I add...? said...

Well, you could just let it drop. I didn't realize (or maybe remember or maybe I hadn't started reading your blog yet at that point) that you had already done it. But it's interesting (to me, at least) that there appears to be a circle that people are connected in, even though we don't know it.

Katherine said...

Thanks for doing this, how wierd that you would like to live and work in France. I didn't realise it was difficult for americans to get to work here. It might be easier if you visited and then tried to get work?

might I add...? said...

Nope. Totally impossible. Maybe I'm just too easily frustrated by the bureaucracy to figure out a way through the rat-maze. I've tried, believe me. I remember having an appointment with a Mme Kennel to discuss this, and trying so hard not to burst into laughter throughout the meeting. (I don't know if this would be so funny outside of Lyon, where quenelles are a spécialité?) It appears to be a vicious circle. You can't get someone to hire you unless you have working papers. The government won't give you working papers unless someone is willing to hire you. And so on....

It also didn't help that the unemployment rate was so high in France when I was trying (not sure what it's like now). I thought I would be able to teach English, but with the EU, they said that someone from the UK would have preference over me.

Katherine said...

Ah, yes, it depends entirely on being able to offer something they need...which is why I'm able to get by. It was extremely irritating at first, (this is after all the country that loves to say non) but at the end of the day they did need nurses and didn't have enough...
This was why I thought that being here would help, because this is a place where rules can be bent or ignored if they want to. They don't actually employ "english" english teachers if they have a french person available! (This resulted in my daughter getting 13/20 at her Bac, because she "stupidly" translated "wasp" in a Katherine Mansfield story as an insect, when of course it was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant!)
I can get quite heated about it, but hey, that is how it is here.
The trick would be, if you could stand it, check out the vacancies in the Unemployment Agency, and offer to do whatever no-one else can or will. (You can look at vacancies online, Google "ANPE", to get an idea of what's available)...and if you want more useless advice/help email me, snowydavid@gmail.com. I can understand this is day-dreaming mostly, but who knows?

super des said...

I've also done it before. Stick around long enough and you'll learn plenty of random things about me :)