Meredith Mansfield, Author

Rebekah Loper passed these awards on to me, so now I have to fulfill the requirements and pass them on. Kind of like a chain letter.

The Blog on Fire Award requires me to tell you 7 new things about myself.

1. I live in an old house. The original house was built as a sort of Mother-In-Law unit in the 1930’s. It’s been added on to at least three times and it’s still only about 1500 square feet, so you can imagine the original house must have been tiny. Old houses have quirks. For example: both the front and back doors open onto the front patio. There is no door directly to the back yard. You have to walk around. Old houses also require maintenance. Living in an old house without either the skills or the money to take care of it is no walk in the park.
2. For a small house, it has a huge yard. In fact, the yard is too big. I love to garden, but I’ve had to reconcile myself to the idea that I will never have all of the yard looking nice at the same time. It’s like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Concentrate on cleaning up one area and three others get weedy and overgrown. A yard this size is very close to a full time job in itself. Right now, I’m concentrating on getting the vegetable garden cleaned up and planted for the winter.
3. The garage is huge and I need to put that space to better use. The detached garage is probably larger than the original house. It has three rooms! The first is an oversized one car garage. The other two rooms are a workshop and a storage room. The workshop is currently full of Dad’s old wood-working tools. Dad’s been dead for twelve years last week and I’m definitely not going to use the table saw or the jig saw or that monster drill press that’ll take two men and a boy to move. I think it’s time I got rid of some of that and put the space to better use. Maybe this winter.
4. I come from a long line of pack rats. I’m the fourth generation of my family to live on this property, so we’ve had plenty of time (and space) to accumulate stuff. Example: Among the things I know are in the storage room, there is a set of cast iron cobblers lasts. Heaven only knows where those came from. I’m gradually trying to weed some of that out and not just in the garage. Not nearly fast enough. Alas, I also come from a long line of procrastinators.
5. Although I live very much in the suburbs–in many ways more urban than sub–there’s plenty of wildlife around here. Sometimes too much. I’m not talking just about the birds and the bees and the butterflies. Not sure about now, but I have found salamanders in a couple of places. You wouldn’t expect that in a fairly dry climate, but there they were. There are a few ground squirrels who do a high-wire act on the telephone lines and drive the dogs and cats nuts. In addition to those, we have semi-resident opossums. Raccoons, too. Usually, they’re just passing through, but before I had dogs, we had at least two litters of raccoon kits born on the property. One was under the house. I know because we opened up one wall to find out what was making the scratching noise. Imagine our surprise when a raccoon kit climbed up to check us out. Lately, we’ve also had a couple of skunks move into the neighborhood. Those aren’t so welcome. For a couple of days, the skunks tried to move in under the house, which forced me to take steps.
6. I’m a lousy housekeeper, but a good cook. I hate to vacuum. I’d rather go to the dentist. I can always find something better to do, like writing. Which means that my dust bunnies have time to grow into dust dinos. My fondest wish is to rip up the carpets and do something with the pine floors underneath. I don’t mind sweeping. I like cooking, though–most of the time. I make a vegetable beef soup that’ll stick to your ribs. It’s almost cold enough to make that. And I can bake. My traditional contribution to the family Thanksgiving dinner is the pies.
7. Writing is my third “career”, if you can call something a career when you haven’t made any money at it, yet. I was trained as a financial analyst and currently live on a small pension from that job. Then I became a Visual Basic programmer. Now I write stories instead of code. Writing was almost my fourth career, because I’m also trained as a paralegal. But I’ve never worked in that field–yet. 

The 7 x 7 Link Award requires me to choose some of my posts in certain categories. This was hard.

Posts:

1.  Most Beautiful: I don’t generally use a lot of graphics. I’m going to go with the story for this one.  Check it out.
2. Most Helpful: Two related posts Harsh Critiques and The Sandwich Method
3. Most Popular: According to WordPress, this is Powering Through with 79 views. No idea why.
4. Most Controversial: E-Publishing How much has changed in less than a year. Probably wouldn’t be even remotely controversial now.
5. Most Sccessful: Since I have no way of gauging this, I’m going to go with Agents Day
6. Most Underrated:  This one is a pure stab in the dark. Procrastination
7. Most Prideworthy: A sentimental favorite, here. Something Exciting 

Pass it on:

1. Robin Weeks
2. Michael McDuffee
3. Karen T. Smith She hasn’t posted recently, but there’s some interesting stuff about her e-publishing experience.