Big Alice did this thing, and I'm doing the procrasti-writing thing, so I will too:

1) What was I doing 10 years ago?

Doing my summer of field research revisiting as many of the INAI prairie sites as possible. I griped about it at the time but looking back it was probably the best summer of my life - tooling all over the state, getting to see plants I normally never saw, running up and down hillsides looking for hill prairies. (Drinking a lot of Gatorade too. That was the summer I was diagnosed with anemia and had to be really careful not to overheat and stuff)

2) What are 5 things on my to-do list for today

Make the literature cited for this paper

Write a results and discussion section (whoops, hadn't done that before...I have all the stuff, just not written up)

Apply the Dread Lespedeza Tea (which is brewing as I write this) to my little plants in the tea treatment

Look up the recipes I have for baked beans that can be made in a crock pot and see what I need to get for them (there is a potluck Sunday and I got my arm twisted into doing baked beans)

Possibly go out to lunch. (If I get "enough" work done. That will be the reward.)

3) Snacks I enjoy

salted nuts
popcorn
cookies (at least I'm honest...)
peanut butter (not a sandwich, just a spoon of peanut butter...)


4) Things I would do if I were a billionaire

Well, first of all, I'd hire some kind of good money manager to set me up with investments so I could spend the interest and dividends but not really spend down the principal.

There'd be a number of charity-groups finding themselves richer. (And after I'd gone, they'd probably get the residue of the billion and its investments)

I'd find a the biggest plot of semi-natural land with native vegetation on it, buy it, put up a fence, hire a bunch of people who understand site management to help me take care of it, and just preserve the thing. Maybe let people occasionally come on to it and hike or do some low-level fishing (and hunting, if there were a deer herd that needed population control), but protect the site as much as possible.

(As much as I love my little house...) buy a big plot of land somewhere just outside of town, build a nice not-too-big house smack in the middle of it, and have a big big "sound buffer" between me and the nearest neighbor. And put a lot of storage space in the house. And have a room that could be dedicated as a library.

Hire someone to clean my office and do my filing for me.

5) Places I have lived
Oklahoma
Illinois
Michigan
Ohio (probably the longest span of time at this point from 4 months of age until 18)
West Virginia (just four months - I was born there but my parents moved shortly after)


6) Jobs I have had
Working back in time:

Associate professor

Assistant professor (Which morphs into Associate upon getting tenure)

Teaching assistant

"Instructor" at a community college

Research assistant

Behind-the-scenes museum worker (I did the background research for and wrote a bunch of "teacher's guides" for the traveling cases of rocks and fossils and plant specimens and stuff they had. The museum closed up shop a year or two after I did that; I often wonder what became of all my work)

Dormitory cafeteria wage-slave. (not so bad, actually. Except for working the "dish room." Dear people, please do not make it hard on the dish room workers by doing horrible things like mixing milk and orange juice brimful in a glass, and upending bowls of the famously sticky mashed potatoes on the plates and stubbing your cigarettes out in the jell-o. I could never eat very soon before or for several hours after working the dish room.)

Wrangler of high school students for a summer enrichment program (plus dish-washer, plus Atomic-Absorption Spectrophotometer babysitter. Those were the more fun parts. Wrangling eight teenaged boys [one of whom was my brother] was the not-fun part.)