time to take a break with a meme

While many lovely food related posts sit in the wings (or in this case knocking around my head), it is a long weekend here in Melbourne, rather grey and wintery. Over at Other Rants I've have wasted a precious hour doing a meme. As much of it is about food, excuse the laziness but I though you'd enjoy it here as well.

All about me!

What was I doing 10 years ago?

A stunned, hard working, newly single, numb kind of year. It began with having to relocate my business at short notice at Christmas, segued into a serious relationship ending (we’d bought the house, planned the kids and learnt as best we could how to co-exist) and left me moving into the communally owned house temporarily. It took a year to resolve the property issue, leaving me feeling vulnerable and rootless through those twelve months. In the meantime I was working in my business and had my teaching load doubled. I remember enjoying the solitude of the house and garden, the friendship of my cat waiting for me at the end of the day and working bloody hard. Oh and celibacy!

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

1. My mum’s chocolate mousse.
2. French pastries, especially Filou’s apple slice.
3. Black & Green’s peppermint chocolate.
4. Perfectly crispy, hot potato chips with mayonnaise.
5. Rich, fruity cocktails.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

1. Lindt 85% chocolate.
2. Raw almonds
3. Fresh fruit, feijoas at the moment but I’m craving mango season already.
4. Smoky babaganoush from Tiba’s with plain rice crackers.
5. Kalamata olives.


Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Finish my house and pay it off.
2. Travel more, at the moment New York (have just turned down a trip later in the year due to being sensible about finances), Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Mexico are whispering my name.
3. Get a writing coach, pilates instructor, massage therapist and tailor.
4. Continue working in my business 2-3 days a week, take on an apprentice – basically do what I do but with greater flexibility.
5. The clincher is I’ve always dreamed of setting up a philanthropic trust. My vision is to provide seeding grants for small projects that encourage wellbeing and personal empowerment, plus some study grants. Actually I’m looking at doing this on a smaller scale with my sister in our post-mortgage-pre-death years as we are the last branches on our family tree.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Data inputting Swedish childrens’ dental records, 1986 on a home PC (you had to do a back up every 5 minutes or you lost the lot).
2. Actor/entertainer in summer festival – I don’t remember much except it was hinted very loudly that taking drugs at the big public party that opened the festival was encouraged in order to look like we were all having a good time.
3. Creating online communities for a sadly short lived site for women at the height of the dot.com boom. Basically creative writing as different characters on the forums we were setting up. I’d wished for a job that paid me to play on the internet and I got exactly that.
4. The above new media also paid me approximately $2 per word to write articles relevant to my real day job as a resident expert (life has never been so good!)
5. Cleaned a private hospital as a summer job at high school. The percentage of old men who used the hand basin in their room as a urinal, instead of going to the en suite bathroom, was remarkably high.


Three of my habits:

1. Nitpicking. Awful I know but I have a pedant streak that the Significant Eater is seriously trying to liberate me from.
2. Talking to cats, not just mine but any feline that crosses my path.
3. Spending too much time on the internet and not enough on the pursuit of exercise.

Five places I have lived:

1. Wellington, New Zealand.
2. Stoke Newington, London, UK.
3. Cremorne, Sydney, Australia
4. Out of my backpack in Europe – beaches, hostels, hitch hiking.
5. Melbourne, Australia.

Feel free to share the meme.