Lindsay Loves

Hooray! The Friday Five is back. Well, sort of. These questions were actually posted for August 3, and there haven’t been any since then. Any is better than none, though.

1. How many times have you been in love? Either once or never. If true love can end, then just once. If true love never ends, then never.
2. Who was your first love? My old boyfriend, Greg. I have no idea where he is now, but I hope he’s doing well.
3. Valentine’s Day: love or hate it? I’m neutral. I haven’t had anyone to celebrate with in a long time, but I try not to wallow too much in sadness over my singleness. Just think of how much pent-up Valentine’s Day energy will come bursting out someday!
4. What was the last romantic thing you did for someone? I can’t remember. That can’t be good.
5. Soul mates: do you believe in them? Not really. Too many people try to use “finding their soul mate” as an excuse for passing up a perfectly good opportunity for marriage or being unfaithful to the one they’re already in. I think lifelong, loving marriages are possible even without the concept of soul mates.

I had a lovely weekend marred only by the fact of its ending. I didn’t even have to be out in the blazing sun that long. Then again, this summer has had far fewer scorchers than last year. We might even avoid catching on fire this time!

1. Would you rather be too hot or too cold? Why? I would much rather be too cold. I hate sweating, and when you get too hot, you eventually have to stop taking off clothes before you get indecent. You can put on as many layers as you can fit over the others.
2. What’s your favorite way to stay cool? I believe very strongly in cross-circulation. I like to let my fans oscillate. My friend Sabrina taught me a new trick recently for cooling my car off quickly: roll down the windows and turn the A/C way up. The hot air gets blown out while the system starts blowing cool air, and then you can start with a car full of fresh (A/C) air.
3. What’s your favorite way to stay warm? Layers are so crucial. Trapping in your body heat and the warm air between layers is so nice, and you can take off layers if you wind up somewhere warmer.
4. When you see or hear the word “summer”, what comes to mind? Sanders? I haven’t actually watched the reboot of Figure It Out, but it’s been on my mind anyway.
5. Any major summer plans this year? Not really. I go on a retreat with my Austin friends in August, but other than that, it’s just the same old same old.

Sure, it’s Saturday, but the questions only turned up in my RSS feed today, and I prefer this on Saturday to 7QT on Saturday.

1. Do you have any sort of allergy? If so, what are you allergic to?I don’t have any persistent allergies. During my second year in Alabama, though, I had an awful reaction to pollen.
2. What kinds of symptoms do you experience during an allergic reaction? Are they mild, moderate, severe? I’ve only had the one patch of reactions, and it was probably moderate. All I know is that I just wanted to breathe without coughing and see without having watery eyes, and I couldn’t do either.
3. How do you manage your allergies? I wound up taking Claritin for about a month. I tried switching to Target’s up & up generic, but my body knew and was not having it. I took one earlier in the spring when my eyes got watery again, and it dried them right up.
4. Do you have (or know someone with) an unusual or rare allergy? I call mine “regional allergies,” since I’m only allergic in certain regions of the country. I might have had a milder, coughing reaction one summer in South Bend, but I haven’t been back long enough to be sure.
5. If you are allergic to pet dander, yet choose to keep a furry pet, what influenced your choice? I am not, as far as I know, and I don’t have pets.

Fun fact: Even though I don’t have pets, the F5 about pets is my #1 most visited post. It’s because of the post image, but you never know what people might stumble across after they wander in from Google.

Yesterday’s Friday Five selection fun has definitely made me realize that I need to submit some good question sets. One of the other players says this set has been used, but that might have been for the second attempt. My archives say these are golden.

1. What means success to you? This is an interesting way of phrasing the question. Success means the opposite of failure, I suppose: accomplishing the task you set out to do or reaching a goal.
2. When did you feel most successful in your life thus far? Finishing ACE took so much out of me. I put literal blood, sweat, and tears into that job. Walking across the stage and receiving that diploma was one of the best days of my life so far. It was also nice to have my actual diploma handed to me instead of getting it in the mail.
3. What was your biggest success others helped you to achieve? A ton of people helped me make it through ACE! I’ve also managed to meet my fundraising goal for the mission trip these last two years thanks to the generosity of a few hundred people, most of whom I’ll never meet.
4. What was your biggest self-made success? I moved into my apartment all by myself. I’m not great at heavy lifting, so that felt pretty epic.
5. What can you learn about success from failing? At the very least, you know exactly one way not to be successful, so you know not to do it that way again. You don’t necessarily know how to do it, but you know how not to.

Hooray, it’s still Friday!

1. What is your favourite flower? I really like purple irises. I have a bouquet of silk ones on my dining room table right now. After I had beautiful flowers for several weeks in a row in the early spring, I realized that I wanted to have them more often. Fresh ones would get expensive, though, so I settled for Hobby Lobby.
2. Do you buy or send other people flowers for special occasions? Not usually. I make corsages and boutonnieres for work for Easter, and I participated in a bouquet exchange
3. Have you ever picked flowers from your own garden (or wild flowers, if you don’t have a garden) to give to someone else? I’ve definitely never had a garden. My grandmother used to grow flowers and squash, but she gave up on the flowers and just stuck with squash. My mom and I did not inherit her green thumb. Also, I’ve always lived in the suburbs, so the only place wildflowers grow is on highway medians. That’s not a good place to go picking.
4. If flowers could talk (think Alice In Wonderland), which flower would you most like to converse with? I don’t know. I don’t think I know enough about flowers to give them personalities. I did like that the dogwoods barked and the tiger lilies purred for Alice, though. That might be the closest I’d ever get to a pet!
5. Have you ever used edible flowers in cooking, or eaten one? I think I’ve eaten one on a fancy cake, but I’ve never tried to use them myself. I tend to stick with cookies when I bake. Cookies are hard to mess up. Hard, but not impossible.

Okay, Friday Five, what’s with the relationship questions lately? Are you trying to tell me something?

1. Do you consider yourself romantic? Why? No. I like being romanced, but one of the many problems I had in previous relationships was trying to figure out how to reciprocate. It’s something to work in for the future, I hope.
2. Has your partner or any person in your past informed you that you were romantic? How did you take it? No, but that’s probably because I’m not. See #1.
3. If your partner has told you that the romance has left the relationship, would you do anything to bring it back? What would you do to re-ignite the romantic spark? Well, it seems like romance is easiest to find at the times when the status of the relationship changes: it’s just beginning, it’s just become exclusive or official, it’s heading toward marriage. To get the spark back, I would probably try to recreate the actions and emotions around those turning points. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a new level of the relationship on the horizon, but a reminder of how it got to its current state could help. It’s like writing love letters at the beginning of a marriage to be read if divorce seems inevitable. You need a reminder of how you got to where you are.
4. Do you think you can have romantic feelings for more than one person, either at the same time or in a lifetime? Yes. Feelings are tricky, because they can be powerful and we usually can’t control them. We must control how we act on them, though. If you’re committed to someone (in dating, but especially in marriage), then you have to honor that commitment regardless of your feelings. No one made you commit, so you have to live with your decision for better or for worse.
5. Is there anyone in your past (or present) that you feel romantic toward that is not your partner? I’m not dating anyone, so anyone I feel romantic toward would be “not my partner.” That is all I have to say about that.