Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

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This question is a little subjective since foods that are common in one culture may be unheard of in another, but it’s still a fun topic to discuss!

If you also grew up in a family of fishers and hunters or in a rural area, some of the meat on list might seem pretty ordinary.

The rest of them I’ve tried on vacations or by picking up random pieces of produce at the grocery store and wondering if I’d like them!

The strangest foods I’ve eaten include:

• Turtle
• Venison
• Elk
• Oxtail
• Chicken hearts and livers
• Frog
• Gooseberries
• Lychee
• Dragon fruit
• Pomegranate

I was not a big fan of the lychee, frog, or pomegranates, but I enjoyed the rest of them.

But by far the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten is grass. When I was a child, I couldn’t figure out why cows ate grass but humans didn’t eat it. It seemed to me that a calorie was a calorie no matter where it came from. I loved lettuce, so I assumed grass would taste just as good.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t tasty. There was very little flavour to it at all, but the stringy texture of it convinced me that while cows might like grass, this human does not. 😉

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What I wanted to do:

It changed every year, and sometimes I had no idea what I wanted at all.

Generally, my dreams revolved around being a librarian, college professor, or bestselling author.

I love books, knowledge, and teaching things to adults. If the occupational outlooks for librarians or professors were better, I probably would have gone in one of those directions!

What I actually do: I’m currently a writer who is looking for ways to pivot back into the traditional workforce. Those plans were interrupted by Covid-19, so I’m still evaluating my options as far as job training, online courses, or additional volunteering goes to strengthen my resume as the economy (hopefully) improves. We’ll see what happens!

I’ve previously worked in all sorts of places, from retail to tutoring to office work. I enjoyed my office job the most because of how personable my bosses were there. Having wonderful bosses makes all the difference in the world.

Once I worked in a movie theatre that my coworkers swore was haunted because of weird sounds they heard and how certain objects like mop buckets tended to move around when certain people were cleaning. I preferred rational explanations for those phenomena, but I also didn’t look too closely into the shadowy regions of the employee-only zones late at night. Ha!

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Raise your hand if you read the fantasy genre!

There are countless things I love about these sorts of stories, but I have to admit that some of the names in them are pretty hard to get rolling off of my tongue.

There are often massive linguistic differences between names from real-life cultures I may not be well-acquainted with and names that were made up by the authors themselves.

The former have pronunciations that make sense once you understand a little bit about the language they came from and how vowels and consonants can and can’t be joined up together in it.

This isn’t always the case for the latter unless you have an author like J.R.R. Tolkien who creates entire languages for his worlds. While I definitely don’t judge anyone who skips that step when creating a fantasy world, it can make pronouncing the names of the characters in it trickier.

So I tried to keep this list pared down to names that trip me up due to them not being formed by strict rules of pronunciation.

• Daenerys
• Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander
• Tekilashan
• Numuhukumakiaki’aialunamor
• Kylarral-ten
• Tvlakv
• Drizzt Daermon N’a’shezbaernon.
• Zoenen Hoogstandjes

I found most of these names in this Reddit thread if anyone is interested in reading more.

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This week’s topic was tricky for me because I’m a minimalist. I don’t own a lot of physical stuff, and almost everything I do own is used regularly and heavily.

When I go on a trip somewhere or want to treat myself, I don’t buy knick-knacks to commemorate it. Instead, I do things like:

• Take lots of photos.
• Try new experiences.
• Order delicious dairy-free meals and snacks that are either unavailable at home or a bit too expensive to indulge in regularly.
• Create vivid memories by soaking in every moment of the experience.
• Buy a rare t-shirt, hat, socks, or some other article of clothing I happen to need that will also remind me of the good time I had there since all clothing wears out eventually.

Case in point, a few months ago I splurged on a box of vegan Boston cream donuts.

The bakery that makes them goes out of their way to source ethically produced ingredients and pay their staff fairly (which is wonderful!)

When you add all of those increased costs together, this place has to charge more than a typical bakery in order to make ends meet. So I view getting treats from them as a delightful detour from my typical diet.

The cool thing about that is how much more I appreciate them than I would if ate sugary donuts every single day of the week. And it makes my dentist happy, too.

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You all might laugh and shake your heads when you read this response. I don’t like to assume that everyone is familiar with the same stories or genres, so I’ll explain my answer a bit for anyone who needs it.

In an early scene of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, one of the main characters is a young girl who has just been sent to a strange, old house far away from home to protect her and her siblings from the bombing of England that occurred during World War II.

While playing hide-and-go seek in that house, she ends up in a closet that doesn’t have a back wall to it. Instead, she pushes through the many winter coats stored in it to discover there’s a mysterious  snowy forest behind them. That scene was pure magic to me when I first read it in elementary school.

I may be a rational adult now, but I still reach out and touch the back of every unfamiliar closet I use just in case there’s something back there other than the usual particle board.

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Last summer I went on an Alaskan cruise with my spouse, parents, brothers, sister-in-law, and nephews.

I was fascinated by the flora and fauna of Alaska. It’s nothing like Ontario.

My parents had been curious about taking a cruise for years thanks to the stories they’d heard about other cruises my spouse and I had been on. Mom had also been wanting to see Alaska for herself for quite some time, too. We were thrilled to find a cruise that fit everyone’s schedule by picking it out about eighteen months before we actually sailed.

My mom hugging me. I believe this was a day we were in Glacier Bay.

It was a week that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. We saw whales swimming in Glacier Bay and seals resting on small pieces of ice that floated by our cruise ship. Visiting various towns in Alaska on port days was fascinating, too. We skipped over the touristy stuff to explore the history of that state and look at the gigantic crows and beautiful flowers that don’t exist or are quite different where we all live.

It was so much fun to watch our nephews, then age five and twelve, react to all of the new experiences they had during that trip, from the formal dinners in the fancy dining room to Alaskan wildlife and more.

Our older nephew was old enough to be pretty independent as far as setting his own social schedule goes while we were on board but still young enough to think it was cool to spend time with family. Twelve is such a great age.

They even had fancy, dairy-free desserts for me in the main dining room!

The younger nephew loved the magic show we saw one night of the cruise. He also loved telling us all sorts of interesting facts about the Titanic and how we were not going to sink like it did because we have computers to navigate a ship and plenty of lifeboats to save everyone now in case of emergency.

Photo credit: Jim Schoch

Alaska is such a picturesque part of the world. I highly recommend visiting it if or when you’re able to. These pictures are such a small slice of something that everyone should experience for themselves.

My brothers and oldest nephew. Other relatives are more camera shy, and I respect that.

It’s so much fun to look back at the photos everyone took of this trip and think about the good times we had. May there be another extended family adventure in our futures at some point in the years to come.

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Something tells me I may not be the only Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge participant to pick this answer, but I have to go with The Princess Bride as my “go to” movie for a pick-me-up.

It’s a whimsical fairy tale  that has aged pretty well over the past thirty-three years and doesn’t require the audience to do any heavy thinking.

There are so many quotable pieces of dialogue from it. I will admit to occasionally using them in conversations that are in no way related to fairy tales, magic, finding your one true love, or fighting off Rodents of Unusual Size.

I mean, where else would a character like Inigo Montoya apologize for trying to kill someone in the middle of a sword fight but still go back to their murderous ways immediately?

This isn’t something I’ve seen repeated quite the same in any other fantasy film. There’s something truly magical about these characters and their quests, noble and otherwise.

And, yes, the book version is just as much fun if any of you haven’t read it yet and were curious.