Our First Tag

We’ve been named for a game of question tag by Ramblings of a Renovating Couple. We’re flattered. Since we’re two, our answers may part ways.

1. What did you do 10 years ago?

This one I can answer for both of us. We were looking for our first house. The one we ended up buying was only three doors away and around the corner from the one where we rented a main floor flat, but we resisted looking at it at first. We were through with grad school and had been recently married and were starting to form an attachment to our leafy downtown neighbourhood and the easy walk to the library, art gallery, and local farmer’s market, not to mention a 5 minute commute to N’s office, and lunch times spent together. I was giving up my warehouse studio lease and preparing to move my small business home. We had no idea what we were getting into, but it was a time of big dreams and optimism.

2. Five items on your to-do list today:

S. This one makes me smile. I am a compulsive list maker, but seldom refer back to my lists once made. Every item on my list usually requires 10 or so prior steps before it can be accomplished.

So, looking at my most recent (non work-related) list, I read

• Prune the boxwood hedge
• Write letters to...(I like to think of myself as someone who writes timely notes, but although I compose them in my mind while working on other things, I seldom actually write)
• Test the new paint colours on the house (which means first scraping, washing, priming, and possibly stripping/re-puttying the windows)
• Roast a chicken on the barbecue
• Begin laying/digging out the future parterre vegetable garden

N. I don’t make lists. My next todo is: Tear out the old plaster, flatten, and drywall the ceiling in the kitchen, without making any mess or disrupting its day-to-day use. (counts as > 5 items)

3. Snacks you enjoy:

S. This is so contingent on time and place. Is wine a snack? If so wine, wine and cheese. Wine, (artisanal) cheese, and dark chocolate…and, local fruit in season, but not necessarily together. I’m not really a big snacker, but I love to eat. I am a gourmand (somewhere in between the competing meanings of glutton and epicure).

N. Chocolate (preferably dark). Bananas. Any sort of baked good, bars, squares, cookies, cakes.

4. What would you do if you were a billionaire?

S. Oh you know, the usual—become a wonderful benefactor to friends and family, set up some kind of trust/bursary to allow creative people to take a year away from their workaday lives to wholeheartedly pursue a creative endeavour (this, inspired by a story from author Camilla Gibb whose career as a writer was enabled by a no-strings donation which allowed her six months of uninterrupted writing), collect art, buy a tract of farmland and a woodlot to be sustainably farmed and managed in perpetuity (or as long as climate change allows), indulge all of my current whims, but moreso: travel, dining, wine collecting, cooking, hiking in gorgeous places, gardening, reading, painting. Too bad money can’t buy more time in a day. Finally, I would have a house designed and built by a like-minded architect and be done with home renovations forever.

N. Build a carbon-neutral, zero-footprint, eco-friendly, computer-automated, fully-self sustaining, solar/wind powered compound/island to weather the coming apocalypse. S. says she probably wouldn’t want to live here.

5. Places you would live:

S. Of the places I have visited and could truly envision my life, I’d choose mostly cities: Toronto (which I still regard as my own), San Francisco (if I weren’t so attached to Canada), some parts of Montreal, or Halifax; if I were truly bilingual (and wealthy), Paris; if I needed a rural refuge, then the unfathomably beautiful south shore of the Saint Lawrence between Quebec City and Riviere du Loup, or the equally beautiful south shore of Nova Scotia, or someplace in southern France. I’d also love to live near a large body of water. But so much about where we live is circumstantial and, as others have mentioned, family keeps me from thinking of life too far afield. (I think if this question had come in January, my answers might have been different. I crave a longer spring, shorter winter, and more sun all the time.)

N. ditto (until the compound is completed)

6. Who will be next?

The blog authors I would like to tag are not necessarily readers of our blog, so I hope I won't make a tag etiquette error by notifying them by email of my choice to tag them. Also, I notice that many blogs have participated in other games of question tag and I don’t want to fatigue anyone. The blogs are Toronto Gardens, Ellis Hollow, 247Reno, The Krakow Files, and Are You Gonna Eat That?

We’d like to add bonus question of our own for anyone who’d care to answer: Why do you write a blog?