Thank you, Bess

Bess, over at Like the Queen, nominated me for a Stylish Blogger Award.

Like me, she's a blogger who tends to "write more." I know sometimes in the earlier days of blogging I'd get dismayed when I ran across someone who wrote on their blog how they liked "all pictures all the time" and didn't like those "wordy" blogs.

But "wordy" is what I'm good at - most of the time - and it's how my mind operates.

(Also, I'm busy enough that I don't finish stuff all that often to have pictures. And I don't really design, so I don't have shots of the design process, and I don't think I could teach beginners any better than what's already out there...) So I use words instead.

One of the requests of the nomination is to share seven things about you people might not know. That's going to be difficult, because I think I've shared a lot of the stuff I feel comfortable sharing already. But anyway:

1. I am a very picky sleeper. I sleep badly a lot of the time; I require a dark, quiet room - ideally cooler than 72 degrees F - in order to sleep well. I don't sleep well in unfamiliar beds, which may be why I'm not so crazy about travel. Also, it's a big part of the reason I don't camp - the few times I've been camping, it seems that I wind up setting out my sleeping bag and camp mattress and a large stone seems to appear in the middle of the night right in the small of my back.

When I do travel anywhere overnight, I always carry a dark eyeshade and earplugs. I've spent nights in hotels where the curtains weren't really light-blocking, or wound up somewhere off the highway where there was traffic noise all night long.

2. I have an excellent auditory memory, in the sense that I can remember pieces of music well. (This doesn't translate as well to being able to play piano by ear as I had hoped). It makes for some odd moments when a snippet of a popular song is used on a commercial when the song is incongruous to the product or how it is being used. (See: "Little Bitty Pretty One" repurposed as a Zen-style chant to sell a brand of iced tea). I'm also pretty good at playing "guess the composer" when it's an unfamiliar piece, though I do sometimes tend to mix up Brahms and Dvorak.

3. I sometimes "run out of words." It's not by accident that I usually write blogposts first thing in the morning, or, if I write them late in the day, it's typically on a weekend. During the week, when I teach and counsel students and talk with colleagues and go to meetings and all that - there just comes a point where I don't want to talk any more. I refer to it as "running out of words" though it's really more just not wanting to talk. I think that also may be why a lot of my hobbies tend to be visual (knitting, quilting, embroidery, gardening...) rather than word-related. (I have a colleague who writes fiction in his spare time; I don't think he quite gets the "run out of words" concept).

4. I don't get very angry often, and I have a hard time getting angry at people to the point where I would go and talk to them about it. When I do get very angry about something, my usual response is to get up and walk away from the situation for 10 minutes - to just go and walk, even if it's just walking across campus and back. Usually that calms me down enough to be able to deal with whatever the problem is. I also get angry less often than I used to; I don't know if that's a function of age or the fact that I've been taking a B vitamin complex for a couple years (Supposedly the B vitamins can affect mood).

5. I tend to remember where stuff is by "landmarks." I'm good at reading maps but if I've been to a place even once, I can usually remember how to get back there - or how to get around in the place - based on landmarks and a general sense of spatial relations. It's similar with stuff - I remember where I put stuff on my desk, even though my desk is a giant mess, because I remember where something was "last." It's only when I clean and move a lot of stuff around that I forget where stuff is. (Which is why I usually only clean my desk between semesters....)

6. I've always loved small cute things. I had a dollhouse (well, several, actually) when I was a kid, and actually kept the dollhouse going fairly late into adolescence (Well, really: it could be argued that "miniatures," in the sense of doing scale-correct, historically-correct stuff, is as much an adult hobby as a child's play). I still like small cute things, which is why I have such a collection of Re-Ment food. I keep thinking I'd like to get a small dollhouse or a shadowbox for the little toy tardigrade (Wilbur) I made some years back.

7. One of my big, and probably irrational, fears is that other people find me boring. Probably it's because I often don't fit in that well with peer-groups. (And right now, when most of my peers are in the middle of raising families...that's still the case). And it's also a side effect, I'm sure, of my people-pleasing mentality - I want people to "like" me, maybe even people that aren't worth my tying myself into knots over.

And then, three other blogs.

I'm going to go a different route with this and choose blogs that are image- heavy: where I envy the blogger's ability to take good photographs, or where the layout is nice, or whatever.

1. Doe-C-Doe,, which is largely devoted to embroidery and thrift-store finds. But she takes such great photos!

2. Comfortstitching. This is a fairly new one to me, but lots of quilting stuff, lots of nice photos of fabric.

3. And Yarnstorm An old favorite (originally published under a different name), but I really love her photographs. And I kind of envy her life.