It seems that the estimable CJ of the bloom.planted.north blog has done me the honor (or should I write honour?) of nominating me for the Sunshine Blogger Award. I was momentarily thrilled until I read that the hono/ur actually entailed a fair amount of work. As I’m twenty years retired, I try to avoid work whenever possible.

But thank you, CJ! I realize you went to a lot work yourself to bestow this nomination on me and ten other bloggers. 

So here are the tasks that CJ has burdened me with rules that I have to follow:

1) Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog 
2) Thank the person who nominated you 
3) Provide a link to your nominator’s blog 
4) Answer your nominator’s questions 
5) Nominate up to eleven bloggers 
6) Ask your nominees eleven questions 
7) Notify your nominees by commenting on their blogs

I’ve completed the first three tasks above, now to answer CJ’s questions. Thankfully, her questions are actually pretty good, and I don’t mind answering most of them.

1. Do you ever or have you ever swallowed your gum?

I haven’t chewed gum since I was a kid. I think I may have swallowed it once just to see what happened. I don’t think anything special happened. I’m still here, right?

2. Do you remember the first time you really felt like a grown up?

No, because I still don’t feel like a grown up.

3. When you use a public washroom do you line the toilet seat with the disposable paper they provide?

I tried that once. It took me so long to get the seat lined with the paper, and then I realized that I had touched the seat with my hands anyway that I wanted to wash them but I had already started to loosen my trousers so I would have had to touch them to go back out to a washbowl and thus contaminate them anyway so I just felt icky, so I never did it again. It seems to me they ought to supply disposable, flushable gloves with those toilet seat liners, otherwise, what’s the point?

4. Side sleeper, back sleeper or stomach sleeper?

Side sleeper, because if I sleep on my back my sinuses drain and I get way too much post nasal drip and my throat fills with mucus and I wake up and start coughing my guts out. TMI?

5. Do you like coffee and if not, have you really given it a fair chance?

Love coffee, but I have to drink half-caff cause if I get too much caffeine too quickly my system goes ka-blooey and you wouldn’t want me to describe the results. That would definitely be TMI.

6. One breakfast everyday for the rest of your life, what is it?

Same breakfast I’ve been eating for the past I-don’t-know-how-long. Half a cup of yogurt and my own concoction of rolled oats, sunflower seeds, roasted peanuts, and walnuts with fresh fruit like bananas or blueberries or strawberries and milk plus a sweetener like Stevia.

7. If you had to go on a twelve hour road trip where there are no gas stations to stop at to buy snacks and you can only pack one snack, what would that be?

That’s easy. I don’t eat snacks. I suffer from IBS. That’s irritable bowel syndrome (the diarrhea variety), and one of the ways I keep it under control is to eat regular meals at regular times and no between meal snacks. You really don’t want to hear what happens if I deviate from that regularity.

8. Do you take reusable shopping bags with you to the grocery store?

No. I take a backpack. Since I’ve been using a backpack, my shoulders have thanked me.

9. What activity do you get so caught up in that you lose yourself in it and you have to consciously step away from?

I don’t do it so much anymore these days, but when I was developing apps on the computer, I could get lost. Any kind of programming effort or tracking down a bug and I could get lost for hours. These days I sometimes write a simple shell script or work out a regular expression, and occasionally that takes longer than expected and I get caught up in it. Also, now that I think of it, I like to tinker with ebooks that I download (such as the free ones from Project Gutenberg) in an app called Sigil to reformat them, fix typos, correct the table of contents, add images, etc., and sometimes that can take hours till I get it right. Or the blog posts that require research, like the Richland history stuff, some of those often take me forever to get right, if I ever do. So yeah, I guess I still get caught up and lose track of time in stuff.

10. Do you remember how you felt when you learned there was no such thing as Santa/Easter Bunny?

Sure, my reaction was “Oh, that makes sense.” 

11. If you could spend the day or even just the afternoon on a platonic “date” with your first crush, would you?

Sure, why not?

Those were good questions, CJ. I enjoyed answering most of them.

The rules state I can nominate up to eleven bloggers, not that I have to nominate eleven. There are only a couple that I think I’d want to nominate and CJ’s is one of them. The Moya View is the other one. 

Now the hard part, coming up with eleven questions of my own.

1. If you had to choose between reading a science fiction or a mystery novel, which would it be?
2. And who would your preferred author be?
3. Do you remember your dreams? If so, what is the weirdest dream you recall?
4. If you could banish one vegetable from this world, what would it be?
5. Beyoncé or Beethoven?
6. Of those TV shows that had a concluding series finale, which one did you find most satisfying?
7. If time travel were possible and you could take one and only one trip either into the past or the future for one hour, where would you go and why? (If the past, you could not change the past but you could take a video camera along to film anything.)
8. If you had a chance to go to the moon, would you take it?
9. Speaking of awards, how would you improve the Oscars show?
10. Which is more important to the final result of a motion picture—the screenwriter, the director, or the editor?
11. Who is your favorite historical figure and why?

Gee, that was hard. And I don’t think mine are nearly as good as CJ’s but there they are.