1) A new guy shows up at church and shows an interest in you. Turns out he's Mr. Right. What are the top 10 criteria that he meets?
2) After a whirlwind romance, Mr. Right proposes and you accept. Tell us about the wedding you plan.
3) A couple weeks after the honeymoon, you're suspicious. Another couple weeks and you're sure. You're pregnant! Not only that, the doctor says it's quadruplets! What do you name your two boys and two girls and why (Mr. Right leaves the decision to you)?
4) The last several weeks of your pregnancy you're restricted to bedrest. Mr. Right is, of course, pampering you as much as humanly possible. He offers to bring you the sun or the moon or anything else your heart desires. Since you're already feeling a bit crowded, you opt for something smaller than celestial orbs and tell him you'd like to catch up on some videos and some books that you haven't had the chance to see/read yet. He offers to pick up five of each post-haste. What are they?
5) The quads are born happy and healthy. Three months later the grateful Mr. Right wants to celebrate your anniversary in style. Since you're not quite ready to leave the babies, he springs for a chef to come to the house and prepare whatever your heart desires. What's on the menu?

1) How did you discern your call to the ministry?
2) Why the PCA?
3) If you could change one decision made by the PCA GA in the past five years, what would it be and why?
4) If you could go back and talk to yourself at age 18, what advice, warnings and encouragement would you give yourself?
5) Far into the future, when you are old and full of years, you decide to write out some instructions for your funeral. What hymns and scriptures do you select, and what other specific instructions do you make?

• My house. It would be really hard to give up the house I grew up in.
• Knowing where things are. My sense of direction is the stuff of legends. The sort of legends that leave people rolling on the floor in helpless laughter. I get lost often enough around here. Learning a new town would be downright painful.
• Crabs prepared the right way.
• Friends and family who live here or who are closer here than they would be if I lived inland.
• Um...I can't think of anything else. I really don't have any great attachment to this place except that it's home.

I'm going to be lazy in answering this and just pick a piece for each Sunday. If I were really a choir director, I'd be much more concerned about picking songs that suited the day's sermon themes.

The first two are audio links:

• "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by J.S. Bach -- It don't get no better than that
• "Glory to Glory" by Fred Hammond -- This recording actually is our choir -- my favorite song that we sing. We sound way better than this in person, though. For one thing, we don't tend to skip while we sing. ;-)
• "He Was Pierced" by Maggi Dawn -- Couldn't find a recording online. This is a lovely, sweet setting of Isaiah 53 published by Thankyou Music (the same folks who publish Graham Kendrick's stuff). I did an arrangement for a trio a few years ago that I think would work for a choir, too.
• One of the hymns I've written -- Conceited choice, perhaps, but I sure would like to hear one sung by more than me!

Dang, you really want to expose my sin nature, don't you? I've got enough pet peeves to open a zoo, and plenty of 'em claim the supermarket as their natural domain. Here are a few that come quickly to mind:

• Do you think I've got nothing better to do than stand in the aisle converting pounds to ounces? Put the unit prices for similar products in the same units, fercryinoutloud!
• Oh, child, I know you're not in front of me in the 10 items or less aisle with 16 items. I don't care how small they are so they don't look like much in your basket or if a dozen of them are the same thing, it will take me 30 seconds longer to get through this line and that is simply intolerable!
• Would you please make some attempt to parent your child who is climbing the shelves or whining for the Sugar-Coated Candy Bombs?
• Cleanup in checkout aisles 1-12! Get rid of this sleaze, please!
• Figures. Completely out of the one item I particularly came here to buy!
• So let me get this straight. I can write a check for over the amount of my purchase if I've written and cleared 10 checks in a row here, but you can't tell me how many checks I've written and cleared already...I would have to waste a check over the amount and then rewrite it if it didn't clear? I'm going to SuperFresh where they actually want my business.

My radio fritzes out often enough that I usually only have the local Christian station set. If I'm not in the mood for whatever dreck is being preached or whatever schlock is being sung (in other words, most of the time), I might scan for the oldies station or the classic rock station, but usually I'll opt for a tape or just shut it off. I go through NPR phases from time to time, too.

Old Faithful, I guess. Since I didn't get a chance to spend much time in that area of the park, I didn't get too attached to the geysers. Give me my waterfalls and I'm much happier!

1) What was the first job you ever had and how has that experience impacted your current work?
2) What is your church/denominational history?
3) What is your favorite story about one of your ancestors?
4) Congratulations! You've just won an all-expenses-paid, 30-day trip to anywhere outside North America. Where do you go and why?
5) Alas! Upon returning from foreign parts, you are arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to five years in solitary confinement. You are allowed to take a Bible and three other books with you. Which books do you choose and why?

1) My piano has not been tuned in probably over 30 years. Should I be sentenced to a) a term in solitary confinement (specify length), b) a term of hard labor (specify length and nature of work), c) a term in the public stocks (specify length), or d) other (specify specifics)?
2) Speaking of sentences, you've just been sentenced to 30 days of solitary confinement. They've given you a walkman and enough batteries to play a total of about 15 hours of music. What CDs do you take and why (home-burned mixes not allowed!)? How do you allot the 15 hours?
3) Tuning pianos is your forte. What sort of job would you consider yourself least qualified for and/or least interested in doing?
4) How did you propose to your wife?
5) What are the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of being a deacon?

Read. (That question was way too easy!)

Hmmm...I'm still pretty high off that Chicago trip, but I think I'll still go with my Montana/Wyoming vacation in 1995. (Yikes! It's been that long?) I'd worked in Yellowstone during the summers of '88 and '89, which had been good but stressful. This time was just for pleasure. I got to spend over a week with my friend Martha, who at the time was my most kindred of kindred spirits. (Alas, she's since gone to Rome, while I've settled in Geneva, and we are much less kindred now.) I visited my old haunts in the park. I made my favorite hike to the brink of the Lower Falls. I stopped for a bit at the little unnamed waterfall that isn't exactly spectacular, but it's a nice idyllic wooded place to sit and munch an apple and read a book and meditate on God's grandeur in creation. Then I hiked back up all the many switchbacks (I was in much better shape then!) and headed for the Grand Tetons. I stopped on the way at a museum (the Whitney Gallery of Western Art?) that Martha's husband Dan recommended. I got a quick look at the mountains before heading back to Martha's and Dan's in Gardiner. This was really too far to go on a day trip!

The three of us visited Virginia City on another day. That was not too far to go for a day trip, and it was lots of fun. I remember listening to "Through the Fire" by The Clay (a recording made in Hungary by a now-defunct band that included a friend of mine) and "Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws" by Bruce Cockburn (one of my all-time favorite albums) in the car on the journey. Martha called the latter "perfect park music."

I extended my stay with Martha and Dan as long as possible, but since I'd promised my friend Linnae that I'd visit her, too, I eventually bade them goodbye and headed for Bozeman. Linnae and her husband, John, took me hiking and I ate the best meal of my life on that outing -- antelope meat (from their freezer, having been hunted by John) and onions roasted on a camp fire. Mmm, mmm good! I can't remember if we camped out or if we just went on another outing the next day, but I had to get from wherever we were back to the airport that evening to return my rental car.

I hadn't left enough time, so, this being the glory days of no speed limits in Montana, I drove back at a hundred miles an hour. Wooooo-whee! And then I couldn't find the car rental place! So I called 'em. Turns out they didn't actually have an office at the airport, but they told me where to leave the car so they could get it the next day. Happily spared the unpleasantness of a planned night in the airport lobby, I headed off to a cheap motel for the night and returned to the airport in in the morning for my flight back to Baltimore.

I'd become a whole choir and sing the Agnus Dei set to Barber's Adagio for Strings.

Are those my only two choices? I'm not gaga for either, but I guess I prefer Gauguin's boldness and vibrant colors to Renoir's mushiness.

"Morning"...isn't that what you do when someone dies?

Harry has entertained me greatly, but Narnia was my bread and meat during my adolescence. Nothing will ever supplant the place Narnia holds in my affections.

Luxury. Sports cars have never looked very comfortable to me. My great hope for my next car is enough legroom that I don't get cramped when I drive for long distances.

I love complimentary colors...the ones that say, "Valerie! You look fabulous today!" or "You are such a nice person!" or "Wow! You are such a genius!" Oh...maybe you meant complementary colors? ;-) Um, I thought complementary colors were contrasting colors. I knew I should have taken a color theory class!

Addendum: Complementary or analogous colors?

Depends on the context. For clothing, probably analogous in most cases. Today's ensemble is turquoise with green, blue and purple. I can't imagine wearing turquoise with orange. I guess I tend toward analagous colors in design work, too -- e.g. this blog layout. But complements can be nice, too. My Christmas layout was red and green. And I've done more contrasting colors in some other folks' blogs, but generally with subtler colors than primaries and secondaries.

I left home at about quarter past seven. I tried to sneak out through the back yard to go pick up my car from its other home at the repair shop, but Mr. Henry, my next door neighbor, was lying in wait again and would not hear of my walking down to the service station alone. He shanghaied Maurice, the neighbor on the other side of his house, to give me a ride. I had the not-so-pleasant experience of paying a hundred and fifty bucks for the work (repairing the map sensor and replacing the spark plugs and wires), and then I had the so-pleasant experience of starting the car and not having it stall three times before I go on the road.

And just in case you meant that question in a different sense ;-) I never really left home. I went away for a while a couple times, but I'm back where I started.

The first time I left was my freshman year of college. We packed all my stuff in the Little Blue Chevette (baby, you're much too slow!) and headed to New Hampshire for an August vacation, not knowing whether I was going to Simon's Rock or not. We stopped at the college for a tour and interview and were told that they'd never received my application. Although I feigned surprise at this news, I knew they couldn't have received it, because I'd never sent it. I was such a compulsive little liar! That lie was so big, though, and so easy to get away with, that it scared me. I didn't confess, but I did get much more truthful after that. Wish I could say compulsively so, but the old man dies hard and very, very slowly. Anyway, they let me in. Mom had to get back to B'more, so when we made our usual stop at my cousin's in Connecticut she left on Sunday, the 28th. The next day I turned 16 without the fanfare that often accompanies such an occasion, and Maryann drove me to Great Barrington on the 30th.

The next year, having already blown my entire college fund, I went to Towson and lived at home.

The year after, still attending Towson, I moved out to live with my friend Chris and her two golden retrievers. I was working as an assistant manager at a bookstore, which paid the rent and kept me fed. My tuition was stolen from the U.S. taxpayers of the time. Sorry 'bout that. If it's any comfort, I'm pretty sure I've given back way more than four times as much. I wonder why my mom, who would never in a million years have taken welfare (though we surely would have qualified), didn't have qualms about government financial aid. I'll have to ask her about that sometime.

I moved back home for my remaining years of college, did my second Yellowstone stint after my May '89 graduation, and then lived with friends upon returning to Baltimore. First I lived for a year with Eileen and Joe and their little daughter Kate. It was Kate who nicknamed me Bobbie because she couldn't say Valerie. Then I lived for nine months with Pat and her yellow Lab Jessie.

When mom announced she was going to live in New Hampshire long-term to take care of Nana, who had Alzheimer's, I moved back home and I've been there ever since. I became a proud mortgage owner in 2000. Just 12 more years and it's all mine, baby.

We're all a little broken,
We're all a little odd,
But the foolishest among us
May be blest and used by God,
So be patient with each brother,
with each foible, with each flaw --
If you could see what he's becoming
You would look at him with awe.
Believe in the beauty of the bride --
Though it may not seem so now,
She will soon be glorified.