A Little Bird Told Me
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For the Thursday Challenge we are asked to make a list of thirteen things, our choice. I am listing thirteen questions I would like readers of my blog to answer. You can either do it on your own blog with a link to my blog or in comments on my blog. Since turn about is fair play, I’ve answered them myself.
1 What could you do with an artichoke rather than eating it? I would dry it and put it in a flower arrangement.
2 What is the strangest name you have ever heard and what is your association with it? Illgemara Lillcox. It was the name on a fake i.d. I borrowed in college.
3 What is the most embarrassing thing your parents ever did? We took a two week car trip when I was 12. Actually, about everything they did at that age embarrassed me, but what bothered me the most was that they sat in the front seat and held hands for most of the trip. Also, my dad knew he embarrassed me so he made it worse by making funny faces and walking oddly when we would walk down the street in towns or cities. I would walk as far ahead of them as I could.
4 What was your most unusual pet? A raccoon. And a mole.
5 What is your most favorite holiday and why? I like Christmas because I love having the Christmas tree up for three weeks to a month. I like the lights and when I have the energy, the nacimiento displays that I put up.
6 What is your favorite footwear and why? My Croc sandals because they are so comfortable and so easy to get in and out of.
7 What is your most irritating habit? It really irritates people that I have no irritating habits.
8 If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Where I live, in San Juan Cosala on Lake Chapala in Mexico. If that is cheating, I’d like to live in Florence, Italy for one month. Dolly can come visit!
9 What is the most unusual place you have ever visited? Lalibela, Ethiopia. It was so remote and beautiful and I was the only American living there. It was home to 13 underground churches carved out of the solid stone of the mountain. An amazing place.
10 How did you meet your spouse or significant other? At a poetry reading. I heard him read and knew he was the man I was supposed to marry but I didn’t meet him at that reading. A few months later I was giving a reading where he was in the audience and he came right up to me afterwards. We were married a year later.
11 Who do you most admire? Michele Obama.
12 If your pet could name you, what name would they give you and why? Patsy. For obvious reasons.
13 What is the most romantic thing that ever happened to you? I was in a very third world country and was going to meet my lover but there was no way to communicate with him to tell him when I was coming, yet when I got off the plane, he was waiting for me with an armload of flowers. I asked him how he knew I was coming and he just smiled and said he just had a hunch. Later his best friend told me that they had met the plane with flowers every day for a week. That night we went to dinner at a little hotel that had a small garden but there were no flowers in it. The hotel had given him permission to pick flowers for me and over that week, they had picked every one!
I’ll bite – some of it. Nice questions!
What I would do with an artichoke is cook it and let others eat it.
The strangest name is Dazdrasperma. It is an abbreviation of “Long Live the First of May,” and it was on the list of names suggested for naming babies during Stalin’s time (“sperma” is “sperm” in Russian). This is not a joke.
Most unusual pet was an iguana called Azzie, which was short for Azazello, a character in Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.” He used to sit on my shoulder and eat grated apples from my finger. Strangers were not amused. Some never came back.
Most favorite holiday is Sukkot because it is spent in a booth outside. I feel like I am back in our dacha (summer house) in Odessa.
Other than Jerusalem, my most favorite place in the world is Florence, Italy, and I’d love to live there at least for a while.
That’s enough for now, I think.
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Thanks for playing along, Dolly. I love learning new things about friends. You were very tricky with the first question. Should have expected that. Florence was my favorite place in Italy, too. I, too like to live places and not just visit them. Let’s go live there for a month if we ever get to leave our homes!!!!
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I was actually thinking of teaching there for a year. A former colleague of mine and his wife opened an English school for adults there. They bought a house in Fiesole – could you imagine? I have been invited, but The Boss has to run his business here.
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Dolly, after you answered the questions I decided it was only fair for me to do so. If you want to see my answers, go back to the blog..
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Going…
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1. Photograph it
2. Keith Weed is the new president of the Royal Horticultural Society
3. My mother got the prize for this one when at parents’ evening at school, being introduce to Fr Battersby she said “Oh, you’re Father Bats”
4. I don’t do pets, but a number of the children had rats, and https://derrickjknight.com/2012/05/21/rabbits-on-the-roof/
5. Christmas, especially now it goes on for several weeks (in retirement)
6. Sandals for the same reasons as you
7. Spinning out a story, I’m told, but people keep interrupting me and sending me off on tangents
8. Where I am – England’s New Forest
9. Nowhere, really. I’m not a pioneer
10. At her sister’s 21st birthday party. https://derrickjknight.com/2012/07/18/directions/
11. Maybe a cheat, because he’s dead, but my late friend Wolf Blomfield who came to England aged 10 on Kindertransport and survived so well
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Especially loved your # 1 and 2 answers as well.
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Sorry, pressed post too soon.
12. Children’s dogs might have called me Curmudgeon
13. See 10.
I enjoyed your answers and reciprocating, too.
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1. I’d stamp on it and then put it in the bin.
3. Drank too much and threw up while away at a holiday camp with relatives one Christmas back in about 1968. It put me off alcohol for life!
8. I’d love to live in Ryde, Isle of Wight.
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Ha, to #1.
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Hi Judy and welcome to 13 Thursday. I’ve been doing it since 2006! I look forward to browsing through your blog. I picked out a couple of questions to answer: I met my husband in the laundrymat after he came to our town to be a teacher at the independent parent run cooperative school my young sons went to. Most romantic thing I can think of was taking a bath under the stars in a bathtub that was outside and heated with woodfire when my significant other washed my hair and then said, “Can I kiss you?” for the first time.
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You answered my two favorite questions. Yes–very romantic! I wrote this in another comment but must not have hit “send,” as I don’t see it here.
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Hi Judy and welcome to 13 Thursday. I’ve been doing it since 2006! I look forward to browsing through your blog. I picked out a couple of questions to answer: I met my husband in the laundrymat after he came to our town to be a teacher at the independent parent run cooperative
school my young sons went to. Most romantic thing I can think of was taking a bath under the stars in a bathtub that was outside and heated with woodfire when my significant other washed my hair and then said, “Can I kiss you?” for the first time.
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Love your irritating habit, Judy. Your most romantic moment is unbelievably romantic!
P.S. I do not remember my parents ever embarrassing me. I have always been immensely proud of my mother, and I idolized my father. Is this “embarrassing parents” the American thing?
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Mainly a teenage thing, I think. Perhaps mainly in the states. An interesting question.
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I left home for college at 15, to live with my great-grandfather, a distinguished Rabbi. Before that, while at school, I was too busy preparing for piano competitions to pay attention to parents, and anyway, at that time I lived with grandparents. But I think teenagers of my circle had too much respect for their elders to even allow a thought of parents doing something embarrassing. Never occurred to us.
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Pingback: Thursday 13 – This, That, and The Other
This was such a fun post, I’d play along except I don’t have clever answers, or any answers to most of the questions. (There was a guy in high school whose name was Marshall Sheriff…)
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Ha. Do you think they did it on purpose?
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What an interesting life you’ve had! I like questions but really have no viable answers to this set.
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Thanks for reading..
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https://lyncrain.com/2020/08/07/13-questions-for-judy/
There was a writer on Writing.com also called Lifelessons would it be you?
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No, I’ve never been on Writing.com that I know of. I need to look it up!!
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I was curious about Writing.com so checked it out and decided to try to register under the name Lifelessons..It didn’t say that that name was taken, but I didn’t complete the registration because I wanted to ask if you think that person has dropped out. Doesn’t seem like they’d let two people sign up with the same user name. Can you check and see what comes up under that name? It sounds like an interesting group..
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I will check in the morning and get back to you.
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Wow. That was fast. Thanks.
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Lifelessons is still active on Writing.com, Judy.
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Thanks, Lyn. I want to try it out and didn’t want to use the same name..See you there, perhaps.
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I’m elusive4lyn on writing.com
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