More top fives
5 things you have learned about life in the last 10 years
1. Physical activity is good. Exercise can be fun (I have finally mostly purged the ghosts of aweful P.E. classes past, though I won't be partaking of any team sports any time soon), and keeps me sane.
2. Success means different things to different people. It sounds obvious, but for a good while at the end of college I dithered about the fact that I should be "successful" doing "important" things. And then I realized that many common, modern ideas of success would just make me miserable, so I started to chill out. As it turns out, I'd rather be a bad-ass organic gardener than a wealthy investment banker. Go figure. Along those lines....
3. Eight hours a day is too long to work on something I don't care about. Duely learned during my dot-com time.
4. Committment to anything takes faith. I have a tendency to dabble and dither, and I didn't used to like closing off doors. But that mainly leads to not doing anything, so I make choices and do stuff. But it's still scary sometimes.
5. Boredom can often masquerade pretty successfully as comfort and security. (Not all comfort and security is boredom in disguise, though). Sometimes it's important to do scary things.
Top 5 books you'd take to a desert island with you.
Okay, I'm going to tell you right now that I'm going to cheat a little bit. And that these are not necessarily my favorite all time books
(though some of them are), but are the books that are a combination of enjoyable and re-readable.
1. "The Lord of the Rings", J.R.R. Tolkein. (this is the cheating... are they one book? Are they three? I'm conveniently going to call them one).
2. "The Hero and the Crown," Robin McKinley. How I love it so. I re-read it every year and don't get sick of it.
3. "The Bible" It's big. It's rich. And I have always meant to read it all the way through, anyway. I'd make sure to get a really good annotated version, too, hopefully with some of the apocryphal stuff, because, dude, some of that is pretty weird shit from what I remember.
4. "The Way Things Work," David Macaulay. Simple to complex machines explained, with a lot of basic physics. Illustrated with lots of mammoths. Entertaining and handy.
5. "Animal Dreams", Barbara Kingsolver. Another one that I re-read a lot. The particular corner of the world she depicts is incredibly vivid, important in escaping the realities of the desert island.
Five fantastic foods
1. Red peppers! Preferrably really good ones from our garden, but in a pinch, especially in the winter, any red pepper will do. Raw, roasted, sauteed, stir-fried, broiled.... so good.
2. Boston Cream Pie. (Two layers of yellow cake with yellow pudding in between, with dark chocolate glaze). It was always my childhood birthday cake, and lately sylvantechie has been making one from scratch for me for my birthday. It's so good.
3. Sweet Alison. A dessert that sylvantechie and I had at Madeline's, a restaurant in Ithaca we visited this summer. It was eight very thin layers of cinnamon flavored cake, with a chocolate chantilley cream in between. It was so good. They hire a full time pastry chef, and to order dessert, you go oogle the two dozen or so offerings in their dessert case. If you're ever in Ithaca, go.
4. D.'s Sweet Potato Stuff. D. is the long term S.O of sylvantechie's second cousin. They come to the big family thanksgiving do, and every year, D. brings Sweet Potato Stuff. It varies from year to year, but the year I'm thinking of, it was sweet potatoes mashed with vanilla infused cream (simmer cream with a vanilla bean), with a brown sugar pecan topping. Sweet, but not as sickeningly sweet as the stuff with marshmallows (I just can't get behind that). I love a good Sweet Potato Stuff.
5. My mum's Pecan Rolls. She makes them only at Christmas, and she makes them in huge batches, because everybody who has ever had them wants them again, and she gives them to her siblings and coworkers and aides and.... They're rich, buttery rolls with a divine mixture of brown sugar and butter on top, with pecans. Really, they're so good. My mum is not traditionally a successful baker, but boy, she does her pecan rolls.
6. I can't resist adding another. My sister-in-law makes some awesome rum balls. They're chocolatey and sweet, with nuts, and LOTS OF RUM. The first Christmas she celebrated with us, I couldn't stop eating them. Since then, she's given me my very own stash as a present under the tree.
Five birds or animals you'd like to see (unconfined)?
Sylvantechie and I have actually been watching a lot of nature documentaries lately (yes, we are big geeks), so I'm full of ideas for this one.
1. Elephants. Elephants are the bomb. And a bit scary. But herbivores, so not nearly as scary as some of the big predators, which, frankly, I hope never to see in person.
2. Giant Tortoise. They can live longer than humans! And tortoises are just cool.
3. Dolphins. Wicked smart. And cute. And not really inclined to eat people. Off topic, but I read recently somewhere that back in the 40's, there was a pod of killer whales that cooperated with humans to hunt another, larger species of whale. When the larger whales showed up on their migrations, the killer whales would swim to the village, and smack their fins on the water to signal to the humans. The humans would then come hunt the larger whales, and leave them in the water a day or so. The killer whales would eat the tongue, and leave the rest for the humans. Cross-species cooperation. And dolphins are every bit as smart as killer whales. Actually, seeing killer whales not in captivity would be pretty cool.
4. Octopus. There are a lot of different ones, but they're all fascinating to watch move, and again, wicked smart. Did you hear the story about the fish store owner who couldn't figure out why all of his fish kept disappearing? He thought maybe someone was sneaking in to steal them, so he installed a security camera (or somesuch). Looking at the tapes, he discovered that the octopus that he had in one of the salt water tanks had learned how to climb out of the tank, over to a neighboring tank, eat all of the fish in it, and climb back to its own tank. Damn. And they open jars and solve puzzles.
5. Wolves, provided that I could do it without being eaten. I've been interested in their behavior since I was a wee thing (though it's kind of been love/hate: intellectually fascinated by them, but they appeared a lot in archetypal form in my nightmares. If you ever saw "The Never Ending Story" movie, that giant black creature that's chasing Atreyu? That was my "wolf" in my nightmares.