cellio | interviewed by rani23

1. What's your favorite time of year and why?

Tulips, plus and minus a few weeks. I love all the brightly-colored flowers! And even when the weather is still cold and wet, you know it's getting better -- and it's not yet overly hot and humid.

2. In the past year, what's been your least favorite book that you've read?

Interpreting "book" broadly, I'd have to say The Rabbi's Cat, a French graphic novel. (I read it in translation, of course.) The concept sounded great, but the story felt pretty disconnected -- and ended without a resolution, but nowhere did it say "book 1 of a series" to give fair warning. I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't.

Interpreting "book" more narrowly, I've made many attempts to read Polydoxy by Alvin Reines, which should appeal to all my theology-geeking genes, but it's just not working for me. He's trying to lay out an argument and it seems too cut-and-dried, too simplistic, even while he brings plenty of complexity to it. It's an odd feeling.

3. You catch a friend telling a lie. What do you do?

This depends entirely on the lie, the friend, and the context. I mean, at one end there's "grandma, I love the sweater" and at the other there's "no, your honor, I didn't kill him", but all the interesting cases are in between.

In a case where I think the lie causes harm, my first approach is to talk with the friend about it. Maybe he thought it was harmless and, upon seeing otherwise, will rush to fix it on his own. If I cannot persuade, then I have to decide if the harm is important enough to tell someone else. If I decide I need to do that, I will try to identify the person who has the best chance of making things right with the least amount of further damage.

4. What is your best SCA dish?

I assume you're asking about dishes I've cooked. There's a cheesecake -- think ricotta or the like, not cream cheese -- flavored with ginger that is really yummy; I got the recipe from Cariadoc's collection. And something completely different from that (and not for the same meal), also from Cariadoc, an Islamic dish made with lamb, onions, coriander seeds, other spices, and vinegar, sealed in a pot and cooked for a few hours. It doesn't sound like much, but boy is it tasty and tender.

5. How are you doing, really.

Well, overall. I'm a little worried about my cat Erik, but otherwise home life is fine. Work has some short-term annoyances mostly revolving around a couple people, but I think we'll get it fixed. (Some of it stems from having to learn how internal project funding really works.) Congregational life is going well and I'm getting opportunities to do some things I enjoy. I'm trying to keep up with all the online stuff I care about. I could wish for more hours in the day, of course. :-)

On a completely frivolous note, I am delighted that the beer-buying cooperative was, tonight, on the second try, able to scare up enough interest in the peach lambic to be able to buy a case, so I'll get several bottles of my favorite or second-favorite flavor. :-) (Favorite is a toss-up between peach and plain (gueuze).)

interviewed by rani23

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