It's all about Meme

I should probably save this for November, but after several days of constant blah blah blah Al Gore's Peace Prize (cool) blah blah blah Ellen DeGeneres gave away a dog (sad, but sometimes necessary) blah blah blah Dumbledore is gay (who cares?), I'm feeling annoyed and uninspired.

So, here's a meme I stole from my darling Chick:

1. What kind of soap is in your bathtub right now?
MB's Irish Spring with aloe and my delectable Lush Happy Hippy bath gel.

2. Do you have any watermelon in your refrigerator?
No, but I have a cucumber, which always reminds me of watermelon (I know, I'm weird).

3. What would you change about your living room?
First, it would be in a house that we owned instead of an apartment. Then, it would have a hardwood floor instead of this all-too-easily stained beige carpet.

As it is, though, I'm pretty happy with our living room. I think the only thing I'd realistically change would be to get rid of the monster draft from the patio door. (It's so bad that the curtains move in the breeze in the winter.)

4. Are the dishes in your dishwasher clean or dirty?
Dishwasher? What is this strange technology of which you speak?

5. What is in your fridge?
Milk, juice, leftover fish / shells & cheese / corn / rice from last night, leftover Stovetop stuffing from tonight, lunchmeat, cheese, butter, brown sugar, eggs, the last 1/3 of Kitters's current can of food, uh...cream cheese, mustard, some Mountain Dew, strawberry Quik, that cucumber, mayo, sweet pickles...ok, that's all I can recall.

6. White or wheat bread?
Wheat. Or honey wheat, if you have it.

7. What is on top of your refrigerator?
Our crock pot, a plastic veggie tray thing with a lid that I used for Christmas cookies last year, MB's giant 1.5 Liter Nalgene bottle, a pouch of dry erase markers, a partial jug of distilled water for my carnivorous plant terrarium, and a few miscellaneous jars.

8. What color or design is on your shower curtain?
The background is sort of frosted white / clear, and it has pale green bamboo on it. I really like it.

9. How many plants are in your home?
Right now, there are 5, if the terrarium counts as one. I also have my pineapple and three little aloe plants. In a few weeks, these will be joined by a ficus tree, a huge ass palm plant, a very tall potted pine tree, a nice shade-loving plant of some kind that Spanish Monkey gave me, two spider plants, a hoya plant, a broccoli plant, some spotted thing that I bought for MB years ago, some little green thing that's sharing its pot with a crop of clovery shamrocky stuff, and a dawn redwood seedling that I bought at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I'm not really looking forward to battling to keep Kitters out of the salad bar all winter.

10. Is your bed made right now?
Not likely.

11. Comet or Soft Scrub?
Scrubbing Bubbles?

12. Is your closet organized?
It's not too bad.

13. Can you describe your flashlight?
I have an LED Petzl Tikka headlamp. It's the bomb. I got it back when they were new and cost twice as much as they do now, but it was worth every penny.

14. Do you drink out of glass or plastic most of the time at home?
We have more plastic glasses than glass glasses, so odds are, I drink out of the plastic more often.

15. Do you have iced tea made in a pitcher right now?
Nah. I only drink iced tea at restaurants or at MB's mamaw's house.

16. If you have a garage, is it cluttered?
No garage for us.

17. Curtains or blinds?
Curtains, except in our room, where we have the old school roll-up kind of blinds with curtains over them. There was a vertical blind over the patio door when we moved in, but it was missing a slat, it was ugly as sin, and the first night we lived here, the cat ran through it and knocked two more slats off. I went to Walhell the next day and bought lovely dark sage green curtains and we said good riddance to the blind. It was one of the best decisions we've ever made. I can't imagine looking at that fugly vertical blind every day for 3 years.

18. How many pillows do you sleep with?
Two for me, two for MB.

19. Do you sleep with any lights on at night?
Nope.

20. How often do you vacuum?
Honestly, if I remember to do it once a month, I'm doing well.

21. Standard toothbrush or electric?
Standard.

22. What color is your toothbrush?
It's blue, but it's going to be replaced any day now, and I can't remember what color the reserve toothbrush is.

23. Do you have a welcome mat on your front porch?
No, but we have a plain tan mat inside the front door to cut down on the dirt that gets tracked in (very important since I only vacuum once a month).

24. What is in your oven right now?
Uh...the rack that it came with?

25. Is there anything under your bed?
Some cool Chinese panel things I bought at Goodwill and may someday get framed and hung, a plastic tupperware box thing with batteries in it that I used to use to carry my Discman and headphones when I went on trips, and probably about three hundred cat toys.

26. Chore you hate doing the most?
Cleaning the bathroom. Luckily, MB does it.

27. What retro items are in your home?
Hmmm...I have a few records, and there's a turntable in the spare room closet that used to belong to my parents, which I've been meaning to hook up to our stereo for three or four years now.

28. Do you have a separate room that you use as an office?
When we first moved in, the spare bedroom was our office, but MB hated sitting in there to work at the computer with the door shut to keep Kitters out of the plants in the wintertime, so we moved the computer and the giant desk into the "dining room" area of the apartment. Now that we have laptops, the couch is usually the office.

29. How many mirrors are in your home?
One in each bathroom, so two.

30. Do you have any hidden emergency money around your home?
I used to have 15 bucks hidden in my underwear drawer, but I'm pretty sure I raided that a long time ago.

31. What color are your walls?
White. God, I'm sick of white.

32. Do you keep any kind of protection weapons in your home?
My fists of steel and feet of death. Oh, and my psycho bloodthirsty cat.

33. What does your home smell like right now?
I don't smell much of anything at the moment, but I know that the kitchen smells like the vanilla candle I lit earlier.

34. Favorite candle scent?
Vanilla, but it has to be a nice, subtle vanilla and not an obnoxiously strong fake vanilla.

35. What kind of pickles (if any) are in your refrigerator right now?
Sweet pickles, for grating into my tuna salad.

36. What color is your favorite Bible?
What?

37. Ever been on your roof?
Nope, but when the trashtastic girl with the elephant-children lived up there, I had an enduring fantasy in which I climbed up onto the roof around 2 in the morning and did my best Riverdance impression with tap shoes on my feet.

38. Do you own a stereo?
Yep, I've got a 3 disc Sony. We run the sound for our TV and all of the assorted accoutrements through it.

39. How many TVs do you have?
Just one. Is that unusual?

40. How many house phones?
Zero. Well, one...but it's on the top shelf of the front closet.

41. Do you have a housekeeper?
Only when I have time to clean.

42. What style do you decorate in?
We don't really have a style. I think we're finally getting away from obvious college -dorm style, though, so that's good. All of our shelving is faux-wood in maple finish, so at least that matches. We've got lots of framed snapshots around the place, and various knickknacks. I'm at a point now where I only keep knickknacks that remind me of a trip or of a certain person, and don't just buy stuff because it's cute or cool.

43. Do you like solid colors in furniture or prints?
I prefer solids, but if you pay attention to most of the Kitters pictures I post, you can see that our couch and loveseat have a pattern that looks like a cross between a Native American design and a Norwegian sweater motif. They're not awful, though they're not what we'd ever pick. We inherited them from my parents, and I have to say, they're a lot nicer than anything we could've afforded at the time that we got them.

44. Is there a smoke detector in your home?
Yep, and a carbon monoxide detector.

45. In case of fire, what are the items in your house which you’d grab if you only could make one quick trip?
MB and Kitters, obviously. After that, probably my teddy bear (my mom made him for me when I was four years old), our wedding / honeymoon photo album, and the external hard drive with all of our digital pictures.



Reading:  Promises to Keep by Charles de Lint

Playing:  the Cowboy Junkies on shuffle on the mpMonster