Judith Proctor's Journal

Is there a song that your MP3 play or iPod always plays on random?

Mine is clearly Australian as it manages to play "Advance Australia Fair" almost every journey whilst studiously ignoring numerous tracks that I haven't heard in ages.


What tune does your system insist on selecting for you?    (This is the first meme I've actually started off myself - let's see if people like it)

It's well established (seriously, they've done the research) that one of the things that will reduce your stress levels is to think at the end of each day about five things that you have to be happy about.

So, in an effort to counter all the doom and gloom on much of my flist, here are my personal reasons to be happy today.

1.  After 28 years, I'm still happily married to a cuddly man with a beard who is kind and loving and sexy and a good cook and a dab hand at gardening and DIY and a great person to play board games with and good in bed and just generally nice all round!

2.  I have two amazingly gorgeous sons who have managed to beat all the statistics about how horrible the youth of today are by being intelligent, helpful, kind and loving.

3.  We own the house we live in.  No mortgage to hang around our necks.

4.  We have a garden and an allotment.  Both causes for relaxation and fresh food.

5.  I have lot of books.  Books, my Precious....  We reads them, we does.

Consider this a meme and post your own reasons, no matter how trivial for being happy.

(If I were adding number 6, I would quote from  a Heinlein book that I can't recall properly, which says words to the effect that any world that contains little girls and butterflies cannot possibly be all bad)

nhw asked me:  Tell me about your interest in marine conservation, and explain your  poi icon!

The interest in marine conservation is something that has gradually build up over time.

A - Accent: Manchester 'stockbroker belt'. The nearest the north of England has to a BBC accent. Means I still say 'path' rather than 'parth' in spite of 25 years down south.
B - Breakfast Item: porrige or muesli with fresh fruit and a helping of pre-soaked linseeds.
C - Chore you hate: driving.
D - Dad's Name: Charles - our family had many generations of Charles - you could track them back in the Lincolnshire parish records. The family name is Lindsey and Lindsey is one of the three parts of Lincolnshire, so no prizes for guessing the origin of the name.
E - Essential everyday item: asthma inhaler
F - Flavor ice cream: hardly touched the stuff this last year or two, but possibly rum and raisen at Wimborne Folk Festival in the little shop by the Minster.
G - Gold or Silver?: I've always preferred the look of silver. The only gold item I own is my wedding ring.
H - Hometown: Corfe Mullen (near Poole)
I - Insomnia: it always takes me a while to fall asleep, but cross-stitch for the last half hour before going to bed and 5-10 mins meditation help a lot.
J - Job Title: tutor/editor/fanzine agent/occasional recruiter
K - Kids: micavity and exalted_mugwump - the only things in my life more important than trying to save the planet.
L - Living arrangements: Me, waveney (almost as important as the planet, and far more cuddly) and 30 sparrows.
M - Mom's birthplace: somewhere in Somerset
N - Number of significant others you’ve ever had: Not many, but I'm not about to give details.
O - Overnight hospital stays: excluding being born: appendix (necessary), tonsils (not necessary - there seemed to be a fashion for having them out when I was young), two births, and operation on my feet, staying with micavity when he was in with a bad asthma attack as a child.
P - Phobia: Something bad happening to someone I love. Politicians acting too late to prevent the Gulf Stream reversing and too late to prevent mass extinction of lots of lovely, interesting and valuable species.
Q - Queer?: No much. 98% heterosexual. 80% monosexual. 50% kinky.
R - Religious Affiliation: devout agnostic, with leanings to Church of England and Buddhism and Taoism and Paganism and several other branches of Christianity and Islam. (I don't understand it either)
S - Siblings: two living sisters. My youngest sister died of cancer a couple of years ago. My brother is estranged from half the family including me.
T - Time you wake up: 8 ish, plus or minus and hour. I can't oversleep for long, it makes me stiff and cranky.
U - Unnatural hair colors you've worn: none.
V - Vegetable you refuse to eat: There's none that I won't eat, though if they've been on my mother's hot tray for ten mins and dried to a tasteless mush - then it's a pretty close call.
W - Worst habit: Letting stuff pile up on my desk.
X - X-rays you’ve had: mostly for dental work. In spite of eating all the right things and brushing and flossing regularly, I still have a lot of dental problems.
Y - Yummy: Christmas pudding
Z - Zodiac: a load of nonsense which isn't backed by any decent statistical study that I've ever seen.

Make a list of all the characters in your icons. (Although you may have more than one icon of a single character, they only go on the list once.) Alphabetize it. Take the first two people on the list; that's your first pairing. Second two people; second pairing. Etc. ( Read more... )