A great big thank you to jd126 at Dads View Points for nominating me for the Liebster Award. I highly recommend you check out his blog for a wonderfully varied range of posts about challenges, curiosities, fun, and hilarity of life, from, of course, a Dad’s viewpoint.

As per the award’s rules, here are 11 facts about me:

1. I have surprising difficulty pronouncing the s in specific.
2. When I shave, I always leave myself with a moustache for a few minutes to see what it looks like.
3. I’m coming to like cats more and more as I get older, and though I’ll still always love and prefer dogs, sometimes I imagine think I might end up becoming a crazy cat lad(d)y.
4. My favourite writer is George Orwell.
5. I understand why native speakers make trivial mistakes in English, but still can’t help the feeling that they’re stupid for doing so.
6. When I’m teaching, I get annoyed when all my students do their writing homework, because I have to spend more time correcting it.
7. According to highscore.com, I managed to achieve the 3rd-highest score in the world (222) in the Rambi Arena minigame on Donkey Kong 64 in 1999. Yet I’ve never submitted the score anywhere, though I probably could if I wanted to as I’m sure the N64 and game are still about somewhere.
8. I can wiggle my ears.
9. I’m terrible at making smalltalk.
10. I can take incredibly long to notice very obvious things, like the fact that t-shirts are shaped like the letter t.
11. I once appeared on television giving a negative review of the film X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the Irish language on an Irish-language channel, and immediately felt bad and worried that Hugh Jackman might somehow see it, manage to understand what I’d said, and get upset.

And now, to answer jd126’s questions:

1. What is your favorite Undersea Creature? An octopus, because it looks like something a child would make up.
2. Why did you initially start your blog? Because I was annoying my colleagues with my thoughts about English.
3. Are you writing for the same reasons or has it changed over time? Still the same: I still annoy them.
4. If you could only tell me one interesting thing about yourself, what would it be? My feet are quite ugly.
5. What is your favorite food to make? Pasta, as in actually making it from flour and eggs with a roller, because it’s one of the few chances I get in life to feel like a 90-year grandmother in mourning clothes living in a shack on a stony hillside.
6. What one piece of advise would you give to a fellow blogger to help them out? Just write what’s in your head.
7. If you could live anywhere in the world that spoke a different language, where would it be? Paris: beautiful language, beautiful city, beautiful food.
8. What is the best way to travel: car, boat, or plane? Car, because driving along a good road in good conditions is great fun.
9. Would you rather be stranded on an island by yourself or trapped in a city crowded with people? On an island, because my imagination would be able to work without distraction.
10. If you were stranded on an island what three things would you need to keep from going crazy? Tetris, the collected essays of George Orwell, and The Lord of the Rings.
11. What one thing do you think the world needs to make it better? (And expand on it, can’t be as generic as just saying love.) Dogs, because they enjoy life in a simple, infectious way, they’re so loving, and just make people happy.

And now for those who get to answer my questions:

november child

DIY in a Dorm

itsagirlsdream!

anotetohuguette

If Mermaids Wore Suspenders

83 Unsung Heroes

And those questions:

1. What book has influenced you the most?
2. What would you change about yourself?
3. Would you like to see a ghost?
4. What’s your favourite word (in any language), and why?
5. What would your dream job be?
6. What fact about you would most surprise people?
7. What’s your favourite of the four classical elements?
8. What do you dislike that everyone else seems to like?
9. What’s your favourite room?
10. Could you live without music?
11. What’s your favourite thing about the world?

Thanks again jd126, and all of you for reading this! Blog on…