Blatantly Stolen Thing

(This quiz thing stolen in turn from malinaldarose. Mine now.)

1. What time did you get up this morning?
The first time, 07:40. The second time at 09:20. Both times because Isambard was barking at magpies. The magpies were taunting him, to be fair.

2. How do you like your steak?
Very, very rare, please, and none of your sauce business.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
I think it was the second new Trek film. Cinema happens about twice a year, because it requires a four-hour chunk of time that is not work, study, gaming, or SCA, and that leaves very few such chunks.

4. What is your favourite TV show?
I think it has to be Fringe. In a world where almost all the TV shows I like are not as good as they could be, Fringe stands out as being better than it really should be.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
I quite like where I am now, to be honest. In years to come, I'd like to move a bit further into the country, and into a bigger house. But I like Maynooth, and I like this house.

6. What did you have for breakfast?
Eggs, bacon, two doughnuts, and an enormous quantity of coffee.

7. What is your favourite cuisine?
Medieval English Noble. Oh, you mean modern? If I had to stick to on, I like Scandinavian food, but mostly I like to pick and mix.

8. What foods do you dislike?
Lettuce and tripe. And I'll eat lettuce. I am the original omniovre.

9. Favourite Place to Eat Out?
The Witchery in Edinburgh is the best restaurant I've eaten in, I think.

10. Favourite dressing?
People have favourite dressings? I don't know, Caesar Salad dressing? Plain wine-vinegar-and-olive-oil-with-herbs?

11. What kind of vehicle do you drive?
Nissan Almera, although I'm not licenced yet.

12. What are your favourite clothes?
My SCA garb, which is vastly more comfortable than any other set of clothes I own.

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
Current top of the list is Iceland, I think. But it's a long list.

14. Where would you want to retire?
I don't understand the question. Retirement is for people who intend to stop doing things.

15. Favourite time of day?
Nighttime, by far.

16. Where were you born?
Holles Street Hospital, Dublin. And an inordinate number of significant events in my life have happened in a square mile around there - went to college, met my wife, had the civil wedding ceremony, got my first job, and so on and on. I work within a short distance of it now, and pass by it frequently.

17. What is your favourite sport to watch?
Ice hockey, or hurling, but watching sport is so low on the entertainment totem pole that it essentially never happens.

18. What's your dream job?
If I knew that, I'd go and do it. I like the current one a lot, but I think some combination of academia, consulting, and writing would suit me a bit better. Something where I can pick and choose the work I'm doing, and not end up doing paid advertising for a plastic surgery clinic, for example, on which I currently spend about 5% of my time.

19. How many siblings?
Two, both younger brothers.

20. Favourite pastime/hobby?
It's a difficult choice between running and planning tabletop RPGs, and the SCA. The SCA is something I can relax into; I don't need to be thinking all the time for it. But thinking nonstop is fun too, so gaming works well.

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this?
What an odd question. I answer these things more as a thought exercise than for anyone's curiousity, including my own.

22. Bird watcher?
Not really. I like birds, and I seem to recognise more of them than most, but I wouldn't generally go out of my way to see them.

23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
Night. I wake up somewhere between two and four hours after I've got up.

24. Do you have any pets?
One dog, Isambard Kingdom Spaniel, and one cat, Shandri.

25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share?
My pre-Christmas assignments are all submitted? I think making a fuss of new and exciting things only encourages them, and a life full of new and exciting is a life that's going off the rails.

26. What did you want to be when you were little?
For quite some time, a woodworker like my father. Then a writer. But every single job I've ever had didn't exist when I was a kid, so it's not a terribly meaningful question. I never really wanted to be an astronaut, mostly because I was firmly convinced that space travel would be ordinary by the time I grew up, and who wants to be a bus driver? Mostly, I think, I wanted to have time and peace to read.

27. What is your best childhood memory?
I don't remember much before seven or so, and I had to do a lot of growing up quite quickly around nine or ten. But I think a summer in my mid-teens, when I sold honey on the side of the road in Ashford in Co. Wicklow, and read my way through every fantasy and SF book in an excellent second-hand bookshop that was there qualifies, as a sort of conglomerate. I would get up in the morning from my bed in the caravan, eat breakfast in a trucker café, go to the bookshop and sell back the previous day's books at half price, pick up some new ones, and read them while people stopped and bought honey from me at the stand. In the later evening, I'd get fish and chips, and finish the books. Repeat the next day. I don't know how long I did it for, but it was fantastic.

28. Are you a cat or dog person?
Both, but slightly more on the feline side.

29. Are you married?
Very much so, and very happily.

30. Always wear your seat belt?
Yes. Quite apart from it being illegal not to here, I think it'd be remarkably stupid not to.

31. Been in a car accident?
A few minor ones when I was a kid, nothing serious.

32. Any pet peeves?
Quite a number, but I'm getting good at selecting the right dialogue choices to avoid them, as it were.

33. Favourite Pizza Toppings?
Meat. Also eggs. Breakfast pizzas FTW.

34. Favourite Flower?
Uh... I don't know. Never given it a moment's thought. Cornflowers, maybe?

35. Favourite ice cream?
Haagen-Dazs Strawberry Cheesecake, I think. Although I've had some very good pistachio ones.

36. Favourite fast food restaurant?
I am a Burger King loyalist.

37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test?
Not taken it yet, but I don't intend to fail it if I can help it.

38. From whom did you get your last email?
Like, top of the inbox? I get a few hundred a day, most of which get filtered off. Top of the inbox is a message from a SCAdian currently living in Paris, who's coming to Dublin and wants to know if there are any practices on while she's here.

39. Which store would you blow all your money in?
A good armour shop, where I could try on stuff and get all the pieces I need would be a Very Good Thing. No such beast exists on this side of the Atlantic, and possibly not at all.

40. Do anything spontaneous lately?
Not really, nor will I for the next while. Work, study, and hobbies occupying most hours mean that spontaneous now usually means some form of pain later. Unless deciding to do a dungeon run in Neverwinter instead of just poking around solo counts, and I don't feel it does.

41. Like your job?
Very much.

42. Broccoli?
Many years ago, a friend mentioned that the only way he could stand to eat broccoli was to pretend he was a brontosaurus biting the tops off trees. I've felt more positive toward broccoli ever since.

43. What was your favourite vacation?
Cruise up the coast of Norway, from Bergen to Kirkenes and back, in late winter, having gone by train from Oslo to Bergen.

44. Last person you went out to dinner with?
Nina. And there's the shire Christmas night out coming up, to which I am looking forward immensely.

45. What are you listening to right now?
Isambard occasionally woofing at the magpies.

46. What is your favourite colour?
Black, realistically. Green, otherwise.

47. How many tattoos do you have?
One, a simple spiral on my left shoulder.

49. What time did you finish this quiz?
It is now 14:30 on 07/12/2012.

50. Coffee Drinker?
Oh gods yes.