Hello! and happy 2026!  I have just had a nice, long Christmas vacation, and it is amazing how nice everything seems when one is rested.

Last year about this time I did a 20 Questions post, made up as a new style of post for me because my brain was just about the consistency of luke-warm soup and I was out of oomph for writing entertaining words.

Now, a year later, I think I am slowly starting to recover my oomph.  But, I think another 20-Questions-style post might be fun as a re-visit, and also, I’m trying to be very gentle with my oomph just now and not scare it away.

So, below, 20 semi-random questions—some, but not all, of them the same as last time—and my current answers:

1. What song is stuck in your head right now?

“High Hopes” by Panic! at the Disco.  It was one of the songs we sang for our last Family Karaoke (sing-along) Night about a month ago, and it’s been on semi-permanent loop ever since.  Fortunately, it’s been fairly polite about it, more like a peppy background soundtrack than a maddening earworm.

2. What’s the last book you gave 5 stars on Goodreads?

Blind Date with a Werewolf by Patricia Briggs.  The books in Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson universe are always pretty fun, but actually I think I am even more fond of her short-stories in that universe.  This book is a bonus!  A novel’s worth of story framed around five shorter stories (dates).  And the main character is the very-old werewolf Asil, who is an awesome, grouchy character I’m happy to see get more page time (and is also apparently a fabulous dancer!).

(Additional bonus: The first date is set in my hometown of Missoula, MT, and if I don’t know the restaurant it starts out in, then I know a very convincing (and fabulous) back-up double for that restaurant—I approve!)

3. What part of your house is currently most in need of a cleaning intervention?

My kitchen counter.  Yep.  The one right next to the microwave where I do most of my cooking.  And yet, also the part of the counter that I pile the most other stuff of mine that I don’t have a good place for or otherwise need to do something with.  (I’ve never gotten the hang of the ‘a place for everything’ part of being tidy…)

4. What is something mundane you’re grateful for?

Plumbing.  I realize this is a pretty standard answer.  Who in their right mind would really want to live somewhere without plumbing.  But, I was thinking about this further recently.  Not only does plumbing mean we have great baseline sanitation and lots of domestic chores are way easier than they otherwise would be, but the fact that plumbing gives us such great baseline sanitation means that I can get away with being terrible about housework without dooming my family and me to living in diseased squalor.  It allows me to be crazy lazy domestically and still have a great life.  Plumbing gives me So Much!

5. What really obvious programming syntax did you google most recently?

“Introduction to if”.  This gets me a webpage I reference all the time to look up the correct bash syntax for writing if-statements based on the states of files or variables.  Yes, I should have all of that memorized by now, given that the vast majority of my programming has been bash scripting for the past many years.  And yet, I do, and will continue to, google this webpage again and again.

6. What word did you last look up in the dictionary?

Perspicacious.  Which I looked up after reading this prompt, but based on having come across it recently and thinking (again!) what the heck is that supposed to mean?  Apparently, it’s supposed to mean something like: having acute mental vision or discernment.  …Which is still not tracking for me, and I strongly suspect that ‘perspicacious’ is actually a made-up word.  It sounds like a made-up word.  Except, it also doesn’t.  A real made-up word would sound like it could mean whatever the word-maker-upper is trying to convey.  But if that were true, then ‘perspicacious’ would ‘mean’ something like: really sweaty.  E.g., “I can’t give you a hug right now; I’m perspicacious.”

7. What plant are you scheming to add to your garden?

Hmmm.  That depends on your definition of ‘scheming’.  I did order several new roses to arrive this coming June.  But at this point I think maybe that doesn’t count.  Ordering and murdering new roses is something I do on a semi-regular basis.

However, this past summer I planted two blackberry bushes and a wisteria, and I’m attempting to keep them alive (watered) over the winter.  The blackberries appear to be currently still alive.  The status of the wisteria is indeterminate (but I really probably ought to give it some sort of fencing protection—there are rabbits everywhere.)

8. What’s a recipe you’ve tried or been working on lately?

This is maybe a cheat answer, but rather then working on a recipe directly myself, lately I’ve been trying to convince my husband to make fruit crumble (started in the fall with peach crumble) as often as is plausible.  It’s easier to make a crumble gluten free than a pie, and I really wanted apple-cranberry pie this Christmas—and lo! I magically convinced my husband to make apple-cranberry crumble without having to do any work on it myself.  This is like some sort of magic secret, and I must not let it disappear.

9. If you suddenly didn’t have food restrictions, what would you eat right now?!

The linguini alfredo from Olive Garden.  It’s so yummy!  And when my throat doesn’t swell up in the face of dairy, it’s so comforting.  Also, over Christmas break we watched Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, and her (goofy-happy) response to linguini alfredo is pretty much my response.

10. What cartoon have you been watching lately?

We’ve not been watching many cartoons lately, but we have (slowly) been wending our way through the last The Dragon Prince extension, Mystery of Aaravos.  It’s been kind of slow going, though.  The early seasons of The Dragon Prince had so much great stuff, but lately the plotting seems to be…less than optimal (characters being stupid for stated but yet insufficient reasons).

11. If you could conjure the perfect book to read or movie to watch right now, what would it be?

I would like a new mini-series in the same vein as an Agatha Christie mystery, or the Knives Out movies, except make it SciFi and set it on a space station!  I got myself the 2015 mini-series of And Then There Were None for Christmas, and it was great!  But I’m really hankering for some good set-in-space sci-fi and am not sure where to get my fix—I may plunder my mother-in-law’s set of DS9 dvds as a stop-gap.

12. Random movie quote – Go.

“An unhappy alternative lies before you.  From this day forward, you must be a stranger to one of your parents.  Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins.  And I will never see you again, if you do.”

(Of course, the 1995 Pride & Prejudice mini-series (with Colin Firth) is permanently imprinted on my brain and also it follows the book very closely, so maybe that’s also a quote from the book.  Either way, it’s an excellent line.)

13. What sort of weather do you miss right now?

Snow!!  We had two days of proper snowy weather in (early!) December.  It was so very lovely when it was here, and…that was it.  We did get a tiny bit more snow at the very end of the month, but not anything to make things properly snowy outside.  I feel automatically more restful when it’s snowy out…and not, when it’s not…

14. What’s a made-up garden or forest you wish you could visit right now?

Lothlorien!  (The very best setting from The Lord of the Rings.)  If I can’t have a snowy Christmas, what better more beautiful + restful place (forest) could there be?  A quiet, magical city up high in the very tall and shady trees.  And also, again, magical.  I’m sure I would get tired of it eventually, but it would take a very good long while before that happened.

15. What’s something beautiful you’ve seen out in nature lately?

The view from Saddle Rock trail up on the Flatirons west of Boulder.  We went for a hike a couple weeks ago, and because the weather’s been so warm and dry, it was very nice hiking weather (and also not scary slippery like it gets when there’s been snow—ah, trade-offs).  We’ve maybe been up to that part of the trail once before, but otherwise usually not, so that was also a nice treat.  And, I have to say that the view looking south from high up on the Front Range is pretty much always great, once you’ve managed to get all the way up there (like on my birthday!).  From up there you really get a view of the geologic folding of the earth that’s happening here, with a beautiful mix of contrasting grassy slopes, wooded slopes, and giant slabs of rock.  And, if it’s at all overcast, the clouds will usually cooperate with something grand and pretty too, since the boundary from mountains to plains is not nothing, weather-wise.  All-in-all lovely, lovely.

16. What’s a book you both do and do not want to see made into a movie?

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell.  I’m not sure why, but I’m slightly obsessed with this book.  Part of it is that at least some of the flavor, at least character-wise, is a bit like Red, White & Royal Blue, but then the setting is 100% sci-fi in a universe that feels a lot like the one in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (very formal in some places, but also way bigger than just the human-scale spaces).  It’s so great!  But I have a hard time picturing it translated into a movie or mini-series.  The movie adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue was fine, but so much slighter than what was in the book, and I can’t image how much that effect would be compounded in a new-world sci-fi setting.  But I really want to see Jainan fight a ‘bear’ (lizard/dragon thing), and watch Kiem try to feed the ‘sparrows’ (terrifying flying lizard things).

17. Random music lyrics – Go.

‘And I’ll tie a knot around my heart, connect it to my lungs, and breathe with all my might, ‘til my heart swings around the sun.’ – “The Hitching Post of the Sun” by Janah, which was a great band I saw (and with a great CD I picked up) when I was on an REU internship in D.C. once summer.

18. What’s some media (book/movie/music/etc) you’re desperately waiting to be released?

Bubble & Squeak, book 7 in Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series.  Originally, the first book I read by Victoria Goddard was The Hands of the Emperor, and that was amazing, despite being probably twice as long as it needed to be (which was already very long).  So, the Greenwing & Dart series (set in the same universe but not the same world as THOTE) at first seemed silly and slight by comparison.  THOTE is extremely earnest, and if you like that Kool-Aid then it feels like a step down to take things so lightly as in Greenwing & Dart.  But.  But, the full series of Greenwing & Dart unfolds in such a way that it becomes clear that silly and profound intertwine very effectively, thank you very much, and more so because the characters have become so much more tangible for being smaller-scale and flawed (i.e., human).

19. What’s a classic from your childhood you totally forgot about until recently?

Pippi Longstocking.  We had a Pippi Longstocking movie we used to watch when I was a kid, and I know for a while it was kind of a staple, but it had completely fallen off my mental radar of existence until recently (and I’m really not sure how it re-surfaced, either.)  All I can really remember is that Pippi Longstocking was sort of like having adventures with a neighborhood Peter Pan, and she had red pig-tails that stuck out to the sides.  …Yeah, still not sure what made me (vaguely) re-remember her.

20. What ridiculous dream have you had recently?

So, recently I had a very distressing dream that my husband had hidden the washer and dryer and filled the laundry room with furniture.  He insists now that he did no such thing, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the dream I was very upset.

And, on that silly note, ta-ta for now.  I hope everyone’s starting off with a Happy New Year!