Two Monday Memes and a Whole Lotta Fives

(Please excuse all the bizarre formatting. Blogger despises cut and pasted posts.)

Meme #1:

I’ve done five things and seven things and eight things, I think, but now Charlotte’s put a new twist on the Five Thing Meme by adding “Fluffy,” which has made it great fun, and I couldn't get around the fact that I'd been (very creatively) tagged for this one, so here we go again.

Five Fluffy Things About Me:

1. I don’t know which I like more: gummy bears or Swedish fish. They both have their distinctive pluses and minuses and are both probably the reason I had so many cavities as a child. And I now live in an area where all the local shops tempt me with bags of them at their registers.
2. I love roller coasters. The bigger, the higher, the scarier, the better. I’ll ride any, but I prefer the good old-fashioned, wooden, rickety kind. I still think Coney Island’s Cyclone is the best I’ve ever ridden.
3. I love pink. It isn’t my favorite color (green is), but I definitely love it all the same.
4. I get more excited over a brand new package of magic markers than most kids. I especially love the kind that smell like different candy flavors.
5. I wish someone would deliver a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers to me everyday the way they do for the reception desks of many businesses. No day could possibly be bad if it starts off with a delivery of flowers (even if I can’t identify all the flowers).
   

Copying Charlotte, rather than tagging five people, you are to consider yourself tagged if any one of these pertains:

1. You’ve eaten at least one gummy bear or Swedish fish sometime in the past year
2. You’d rather ride a roller coaster than a carousel
3. You wish pink would get more respect
4. The pen and marker aisle in office supply stores has a certain pull for you
5. You don’t feel you get flower deliveries nearly often enough
   

Meme #2:

Then, Ms. Make Tea went and sort of tagged me for this one, with lots more fives (or multiples of fives, I guess).

What was I doing 10 years ago?

I was approaching my third wedding anniversary. I was working as an acquisitions editor for a reference publishing company and had a boss who was a micro-manager to the nth degree. Bob was also working for that company at the time (in the marketing and sales department), and he and I would soon be adopting a wonderful two-year-old sheltie named Lady with whom we would enjoy 9 years together.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

(I'm changing this to a perfect, MSG-and-trans-fat-free world)

1. Doritoes
2. Cheese Doodles
3. Pepperidge Farm coconut cake (I'm waiting for them to get rid of the trans-fats, which reminds me, it's been a while since I checked that)
4. Things like ready-made onion and crab dips
5. Hotdogs (luckily, I can still manage to eat up to two at a time with no ill effects as long as I am very, very vigilant about my MSG intake for about three days afterwards, but they are worth it)

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

1. Chips and guacamole
2. Any kind of cheese and cracker
3. Any kind of nuts
4. Fresh fruit
5. Greek-style yogurt

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Quit working
2. Give away lots and lots of money
3. Buy a small house on the water near Acadia, ME and an apartment in New York on Riverside Dr. with a view of the Hudson River
4. Start a quarterly print magazine composed of original book reviews written by book bloggers (who are a much better lot than most of those reviewing books in most of the print media I read)
5. Have a fresh-cut bouquet of flowers delivered to me every day

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Grocery store cashier
2. Nurse's aide in a nursing home
3. Language therapist for dyslexic kids
4. Library assistant
5 . Editor

Three of my habits:

(Why 3 and not 5? I think I’ll do 5, even though we all know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)

1. Drinking coffee every morning
2. Reading in bed before I turn out the light every night (even if only one page)
3. Obsessively checking email
4. Turning on the radio the second I get in the car when I'm driving alone
5. Keeping track of books I read and my thoughts on them in a book journal

Five places I have lived:

1. Winston-Salem, NC
2. Kent, England
3. Charlottesville, VA
4. Fairfield Country, CT
5. Lancaster County, PA

Five people I want to get to know better:

Besides Ms. Make Tea, of course, and I’m going to try to tag those she didn’t tag to spread this meme a little farther: Mandarine, Pete, Eva, Susan, and Sarah.