Luck O' The Hodge Podge

1. Do you play games of luck/chance for money? Have you ever played bingo for money? Visited a casino? Placed a bet on a horse? Bought a lottery ticket?

Not for big money, but I’ve bought a lottery ticket, usually scratch-offs, but I’ve bought or David and I have bought a Lotto ticket once or twice. I used to go to the harness races with my parents for a nice dinner and to watch the races. My Dad would place a $2 show bet for me and one for Mom for each race on the horses of our choice. I always picked the horse with my favorite name in the race. He let me keep anything I won. One night John and I were going to Canada the next day and I won enough to buy us a nice dinner. But that wasn’t my money doing the betting and I didn’t have to pay for the actual bets. I won decent sums in a few races, but nothing in a few too.

I’ve been to a casino a few times, including a few in Vegas. I brought the money I planned to lose, my entertainment budget for the trip, and brought home $100 of it, a net loss but I considered it winning because I didn’t lose as much as I planned. I did actually have a winning night in a casino once. John took me to the Motor City Casino with him for dinner; he was a regular player and got a huge coupon to a restaurant that he could only afford with a coupon and took lil' sis for a spoil evening. I brought $20 to lose after dinner and took $75 home. I love video poker!


2. Will you be preparing and/or dining on the traditional Corned Beef and Cabbage meal this St. Patrick's Day? Mashed-baked-hash browned-french fried...your favorite way to have potatoes?

I used to love corned beef but now I’ll likely never eat it again. Vertigo and subsequent porcelain hugging pretty much killed the taste of corned beef for me. It happened twice after eating corned beef when I had an inner ear infection in early 2004. I thought I’d become allergic to corned beef, but it was just coincidence that had the same effect.


3. What's the last thing you felt 'green with envy' over?

Envy is something I really never have, not real envy. I will say “I envy you,” but it really means “I’m happy for you.” I really don’t have a feeling of wanting something someone else has or a situation someone else has that bad. Maybe sometimes I grumble because someone “doesn’t deserve” a situation or good fortune because they didn’t earn it, or hurt too many people on the way. But I certainly don’t envy the karma they did earn to go with it!


4. What's at the end of your rainbow?

A big cup of good coffee! :)

My Ginger Scraps signature this month

Credits: It Happened This Year by Connie Prince, 

coffee cur (slightly recolored) from Where’s My Coffee by Aprilisa Designs

5. March 12th marks the anniversary of the death of Anne Frank (June 12, 1929-March, 1945). Anne's diary detailing her time spent hiding from the Nazi's during the war ranks as one of the best selling books of all time. Besides your blog, do you keep any sort of diary or journal? Was this a habit you developed as a child or is journaling something new for you?

I kept a personal journal as well as a couple for classes in high school. Stupid me, I threw out all of my high school journals in my 20s because I thought they were silly “kid stuff.” I’d love to be able to go back and read that kid stuff now if just for the laugh. I started keeping a journal again in 1994, trying to be more formal about it, but I found that I had lots of personal notes in with my papers. Today, the Chronicles of NanI file on my computer and extended hard drive contains yearly documents that include my blog posts, papers, some message board and Facebook posts and my personal entries. Remember that I write when I’m angry, depressed or worried because if I just write, the actual cause of my negative emotions comes out and I can resolve them. Sometimes that takes a few days and 30 pages, but it works for me.


6. What's an item in your home or closet that contains every color of the rainbow?

Jelly bean jar

7. Write a limerick with you as the subject. You can do it!! Just remember this is a family friendly blog...don't make me get out my wooden spoon.

Nani likes coffee from Nantucket… hehehe

I suffer from creative blocks
For writing a limerick that rocks
The meter and rhyme
Though often sublime
Is messed up from changing the clocks


8. Insert your own random thought here.

I admit that I struggled with the fourth line of my limerick and I have to credit David for it. Sublime isn’t a word in my regular usage vocabulary, I just know it when I read it in context. That means all on its own, I had to get the definition before I used it because it’s not a normal Nani-word. The definition tells me David has a much higher opinion of my poetry than modesty allows me to have.


I haven’t been blogging as often as usual because I really have had blogger’s block, even for witty or informative answers for some of the memes. That may be in part to just time and the amount of writing I do for my Project 52 this year! What I think I’ll do is post the main journaling part of each week as a blog post. Hopefully that will kick my blogger’s block in the butt. I’m going to start posting some of the layouts and journaling I’ve already done, since I’m working on the week 10 layout right now and haven’t posted all of the layouts for the first 9. Also, Week 10’s topic is Smash Books and the main journaling is pretty much things I already said in the Smashing Defined…Sorta post from October. So I may start with posting the journaling as I go with next week. But look for a 52 topix post this afternoon.