a. People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blog and replace any question that they dislike with a new, original question. Must, huh?

b. Tag eight people. Don't refuse to do that. Don't tag who tagged you.

( I'm not gonna tag anyone. Do it if you want to. :P )

From siobhankha

The CONTROVERSIAL meme

Would you do meth if it was legalized?
No.

Abortion: for or against?
What a stupid way to ask that question. Who is for it? I don't think it's any man's place to tell any woman what she can and can't do with her body, nor any other woman's place either. The way to end abortion is to give people education about and access to birth control that works for them, so that there are no unwanted pregnancies, not to make women criminals for taking care of their mental and physical health.

Would our country fall with a woman president?
Another stupid question. It's falling with a man president. How is gender relevant at all?

Do you believe in the death penalty?
I believe it exists, yes. I also believe it's wrong.

Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?
If alcohol is legal, marijuana should be too.

Are you for or against premarital sex?
Premarital sex FTW!

Do you believe in God?
Yes.

Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?
Do I think all consenting adults should be given the same rights to legally commit to their partner of choice, regardless of gender? Of course. Duh!

Do you think it's wrong that so many Hispanics are moving to the USA?
The hell? No, but I think it's wrong that so many Anglophones are moving to the USA.

A 12-year-old girl has a baby... should she keep it?
I think it very much depends on the girl and the situation. I don't think it's my place to tell her what to do with her body or her child. If she were my child, I'd support her in making her decision either way.

Should the alcohol age be lowered to 18?
No. It should be raised to 30.

Should the war in Iraq be called off?
We should never have started it, but now since we took away all their infrastructure and order, we're stuck for a while.

Assisted suicide is illegal... do you agree?
No. I think you should be able to end your life if you're terminally ill. I've seen too many people die slow, painful, agonizing deaths.

Do you believe in spanking your children?
No. Never have. Never will. Not even for endangering themselves or others. How does hitting them teach them anything? Now here's something REALLY controversial: I also don't believe in punishing them or heaping empty praise on them. No "Good job!" around here.

Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?
They may. But that's more about them than about me.

Ganked from fairoriana

http://www.bankrate.com/bos/news/pf/20080603_new_necessities_a1.asp

Here's their list of the 12 new necessities... how many do you fall into?

1. Daily latte -- nope. MAYBE I have one on the weekend, but since I gave up dairy (mostly) I just don't like them anymore. I don't really care for soy lattes either. I do generally have an iced tea daily, but I often make it myself or have it with my lunch.
2. Cable TV -- Yep. And we definitely get our money's worth. The ability to skip commercials alone probably saves us hundreds of hours and dollars of missed child begging.
3. Manicure/pedicure -- Hmm, I had one on my anniversary last year and I took Bob for one with her friend last fall. I think the time before that was when my brother got married about three years ago.
4. Botox -- Heh. Um, no.
5. Bottled water -- We do buy the large 2.5 gallon containers for the fridge. We're in the process of deciding which filter system to have installed on our kitchen sink though, so that will soon be a thing of the past. I have a glass and carafe at work which I refill several times daily with the filtered tap water. Trying to reduce my family's ecological footprint as well as our exposure to plastics.
6. Second car -- Yep. And we need it, because we work different hours and have two kids to shuttle in two different directions.
7. Cell phone -- I admit, I could not survive without it.
8. Lawn service -- My condo complex has lawn service, but I'm on the board and we've reduced watering and banned chemicals.
9. Clothes -- I never buy ANY clothes full price EVER, except for the Circo brand at Target for the kids, which is super cheap already. Edgar wears about 95% hand-me-downs from her sister, and I still have shirts I bought in college. We probably spend about $500 on clothes for all four of us annually. The only thing I spend money on for me is shoes. With my foot problems over the last year, I've been trying to find a pair of shoes that will help or at least will not make it worse. Payless just doesn't cut it anymore. KEEN, Teva and Propét seem to be the ones.
10. Private school -- Nope. One of the reasons we live in such an expensive-property town is because the schools are world-class. Bob's school is everything I'd ever hope for in an elementary/middle school and Edgar will go there as well.
11. Childhood parties -- We have only ever done one that wasn't at a park, a relative's house or our home. Usually we just go to the park and have a BBQ and a piñata.
12. Pet grooming/walking -- Luckily, cats don't require walking. They play enough Kitty Racetrack (tm) every day that walking them would be redundant and annoying. I groom them with the Furminator and am constantly amazed at how much fur I get off of them with that thing.

Also ganked from Oriana : which other things do you think belongs on a list of newly invented necessities but which you, personally, are doing without?

Energy drinks, vitamin water, flip-flops

Questions from earthmoon

1. What is your job? I can never tell from the context :D
Department Administrator. I do inventory management and administrative minutia and superviser the admin asst for the publishing department in a company that does research in several fields. Vague enough for you? Ask me again at class on Thursday.

2. How old are you? (yes, nosy parker that's me)
I will be twenty nine again on my next birthday, thereby finally becoming younger than my husband. ;)

3. Where would be your dream place to live (anywhere in the world, no money issues, no language issues) & why?
I pretty much wouldn't want to live anywhere but where I do. My family is all here. If they would come with me, I think I'd like to live in Ireland for a while. I think I'd also like to live on the Mediterranean coast, maybe the islands of Greece.

4. Excluding parenting (cause we all know it wins) what is the hardest process you've ever done? (learned most, hurt most, whatever)
Putting myself through college. I had no help from family, except moral support, and it took me nine years to do it because I had to work alternating quarters. I'm also pretty darn proud of myself for doing it.

5. What was the best thing about your childhood that you loved at the time? What was the best thing now that you look back on your childhood with adult judgment? Same questions about the worst :)
I loved the freedom I had. I'd leave the house in the morning and come home for dinner on the weekends. Looking back, the relationship I had with my maternal grandmother. We were very very close and she was an incredible person.

Worst would be how my mother allowed my brother to treat me. I don't think it was good for either of us. I hated it at the time and now that I have kids of my own, I can understand it even less. He'd be hitting me and I'd go to her to get him to stop and she always told us to work it out between ourselves, which just meant I had to give in to whatever he said or get hit. I'd be watching TV and he'd come in and change the channel and if I so much as expressed disappointment, he'd hit me. We're not close, even as adults and I think a lot of that has to do with our relationship growing up. I see my husband and his sister and what a lovely relationship they have and I wish I could have had a nice relationship with my brother. At this point, we're too different to be close.

1. With K. I had no other child at home so it was easy to spend lots of time in the NICU. HOW did you manage it? I know you just do what you have to do, but where did you find the reserves?
I don't know. I just didn't know what else to do. My baby was there. I had to be with her. Bob was in preschool most of the day, and they kick parents out 6:30-8:00 pm, so I went home and spent the evening with Bob, and then sometimes came back to the hospital in the evenings.

2. What did you want to be when you were little?
A marine biologist. But then I went to college and checked out the reqs for that major and went "Chemistry??? Screw that!"

3. Tell me about a beautiful day.
It's the weekend, the weather is warm, but not hot, sunny. I'm with my kids and my husband and we're spending the day just doing whatever strikes our fancies. Checking out open houses, going to the farmer's market, walking around town.

4. Do you see yourself in your children? Do you see your husband?
Already answered in comments on another post.

5. If you could go anywhere at all for a vacation (money is no object, time is no object, and of course you can take the kids!) where would you go and why?
I think I'd like to go to Hawaii. I've never been. There is a lot of gorgeous scenery there, and a lot to do. And a lot not to do. I could relax on a beach with a book, a drink with a little umbrella, and a cute cabana boy to bring me guava juice. Or I could go snorkling and check out all the undersea life. Or I could take a helicopter ride all over the islands and maybe find the Lost set. ;)

1. Everything I've heard about your job and co-workers (other than your boss) sounds like a bad dream. Assuming it were financially feasible, have you ever been tempted to go the stay-at-home-Mom route?
It's really not that bad. The co-workers I bitch about are not in my dept, they just sit near me. I would absolutely love to be with my baby all day. I don't know if I could take it having both the baby and Bob after school, unless I was able to go someplace with them just about every day. Bob gets nutty when she's at home and bored, and I get nutty when she gets nutty. She's at the stage where she NEVER. STOPS. TALKING. and even for an extrovert like me, it's hard to take a five year old yapping in your face for hours at a time. When we're out, it's less intense and less focused on me. What I'd love to do is work part time in the evenings so the baby woudln't have to go to daycare and get sick all the damn time.

2. You and I are both older than our husbands; have you found any interesting effects from the age difference?
Mostly just pop culture stuff, where I grew up in a different pop-culture era than he did. Certain musical groups and tv shows were never in my awareness, but played a big role in his childhood.

3. Is it strange at all to have two biological children whom, while beautiful and cute as a jar of buttons, look a bit more like llnaughty than like you? Do people give you odd looks, etc.?
Not strange, no. They're just my babies. In person, Edgar looks a lot more like me than she does in the pics. She looks a lot like I did as a baby, with different coloring. I've never gotten any looks out here, but when Bob was a baby and we lived in SE CT, people would ask me about her all the time when I was out without llnaughty. Once, a teenager in Sears at the Crystal Mall asked me where I got her from. I played dumb and she kept trying to clarify "No, where did she COME from?" "From here." "No, I mean where was she born?" "Norwich." She just couldn't get it through her head that she was my biological child. A few times out here, people have said that they look mixed, or asked if they were mixed, but never with any sort of malice. Usually the person has mixed kids of their own.

4. What is the ideal life you see yourself living in five years versus what do you think you will actually be doing in five years?
Ideally, we'd have a house with a yard, I'm in business with my brother with our own successful bakery. Reality will probably be that we're still in our condo and I may or may not still work here. Probably not.

5. Clear this up for those of us who are planning to have children: does sex really cease to exist because of parentood?
No. For the first year, especially with breastfeeding, there are hormonal issues that make it more difficult to do certain things. But with some creativity and less emphasis on traditional ideas, there's plenty that can be done. The hormones CAN cause a loss of libido, but they don't always, and not in everyone. I know some people who were doing it in the hospital after giving birth. That's not the norm, but it does happen. I think the more common scenario is gradual return to pre-baby levels, over the first 9 months to a year. And even with co-sleeping, there are plenty of places in the house to have sex. Also, when baby is little, they likely sleep through any bed movement or noise, and even if they do wake up, it's not like they know what you're doing.

Questions from claris

1. Now that you've had two children, would you ever want another? And given the health consideration involved for you, would you adopt instead? If so, is there a nationality you would want to try to adopt first?
I have always wanted three kids and before having Edgar, we had planned to have three kids. I do want another. But I will not be giving birth to another. I would love to adopt, however it's quite expensive, so it's not likely unless we get some huge windfall or a child falls in our laps. If I were to adopt from outside the US, I'd like to adopt a Chinese or Vietnamese baby. Gender doesn't matter. I'd prefer to adopt inside the US, however from what I understand, the hurdles are higher and it's even more expensive. All those kids needing home and so many roadblocks for the people who want to do it. A friend of mine has gone through all the steps and has now been waiting for a baby for over a year.

2. Considering your boss, once both girls have reached school age, would you think about switching to another job?
Heck, I'm thinking about it now. I applied for one a while back but didn't get an interview. I may keep looking. Have to see how things work out here over the coming months. I do really like my boss though and I'm learning a lot from her. If she were to leave, I'd want to follow her.

3. As your girls get older, what do you think you will do in your household to try to instill in them a sense of ethical responsibility & world awareness that is a major part of your life?
I already try to teach conservation and doing good. (Good, not well.) We recycle, we have recently started saving scraps for the compost bin at school, I go around turning off lights and bitching at the people who leave them on about saving electricity. I talk to the older one about not wasting things, reusing, reducing our impact. As they get older, I will talk to them about how life is in other parts of the world. We donate things that we no longer use. She helps me pick out toys she doesn't play with anymore and we take them to the bins for children without as much privilege as she has. There was talk last Christmas about skipping the party this year and having hte whole (60-person) family go to a soup kitchen and help out for Christmas. I'd like to do stuff like that more often with them and show them that we really do have a lot and that there are a lot of people who don't have what we do.

4. Do you think your family will ever go vegan?
No. They like meat too much. I have been vegetarian in the past, but not strictly vegan. I didn't eat meat, fish, fowl, milk products, eggs, but I wasn't as conscientious about things like sugar, etc. I don't tend to eat a lot of meat all the time, but ever since I was pregnant with Bob, I've been more into meat than before. Psychologically, I'd like to cut down or even eliminate beef in particular. Practically, I find it difficult, and I'm anemic and I've been having more issues from that lately, so it may not happen.

5. Just because I tried it for the first time last night - Green Tea ice cream... yay or nay?
YAY!

Want me to put the old interviewers Light on you?

1. Leave me a comment saying, "I too am an egomaniac."
2. I'll then respond by asking you up to five questions. You will answer them, because you like talking about yourself.
3. You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

from lawgeekgurl



Yay! I <3 all of them!