mmegaera | 5 things meme

sraun associates plants, fabric arts, national parks, Pacific Northwest, and librarian with me. A good assortment. So.

Plants -- I am what some people call a confetti gardener. When I go to a nursery (one of my three favorite kinds of shopping, the other two being books and fabric), I have this tendency to say, oh, I need one of those and one of those, and, ooh, one of those... So I bring them home, and plant them, and my garden winds up looking like confetti [g]. But it makes me happy, even if I'll never win any garden design awards, and would probably drive Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan out of her tree.

Fabric arts -- My mother taught me to crochet and embroider out of pure self-defense when I was a child, because I do not sit still well, and I tended towards inadvertent destructiveness, and it kept my hands busy. I learned needlepoint and cross-stitch and crewel work as a teenager, and as an adult, when my ex and I moved to a small town for his first job, one of his co-workers took me under her wing and introduced me around. One day she said, why don't you come to the quilt guild with me, and I said, but I don't quilt. She smiled at me and said, we can fix that, and the rest is history. I've been quilting for twenty years now. I still cross-stitch and crochet, too. But I do not make clothing.

National parks -- The first time I can remember going to a national park I was six, and the park in question was the Grand Canyon. It was not my first park, though. That was Yellowstone when I was four. I spent most of my childhood summers in the back seat of a car, and by the time I moved out of my parents' house, I'd visited almost every national park and monument west of well, well east of the Rockies but not quite to the Mississippi, including Denali National Park in Alaska. My recent obsession has more to do with "my" mountain (Mt. Rainier -- I'm an hour and a half from Paradise), and Yellowstone, where my most recent novel was set. I've been back to Yellowstone eight times in the last ten years.

Pacific Northwest -- Home for the last fifteen plus years. I am a very place-oriented person, and made the mistake of letting myself be talked into moving to the Midwest in the late 80s. It took me six years and a divorce to get myself back home again. And it's going to take wild horses and dynamite to get me to move away from here again. I fully intend to die here, although preferably not for a few decades.

Librarian -- is how I used to earn my living. I loved librarianing, as one of my patrons used to call it. What I seriously, intensely hated was working for large library systems. I was a garden-variety generalist (which is one reason my LJ is entitled "A Professional Dilettante"), and I sincerely loved helping people find information and good books to read, and never knowing what I was going to be asked from moment to moment on the reference desk, but I just as sincerely hated the bureaucracy and the cliques and the ugliness that goes on behind the scenes. I would love to librarian again, but on my own terms. Which probably means I won't. [sigh]

I'll give a try at if I know you, you've just to ask and I'll come up with five things I associate with you. If I don't know you, I may amuse myself by picking five arbitrary things (or not).