The latest challenge from Z & Cinder is a list of questions to answer out-of-character if you’re comfortable enough to talk about your real life, or in-character if you’d rather not talk about your real life. It’s a long-ish list (26 questions), so they’ve said that you don’t have to answer them all if you don’t feel so inclined — so I’m going to cherry-pick the ones that have easy answers 😉
1. How do you drink your tea?
I’m a Latter-day Saint. I don’t drink tea.
Well, I don’t drink black tea or green tea. Herbal teas, though, I like when I’m not feeling well in the winter. I drink more hot cocoa than herbal tea, though; from about October to March, I go through great volumes of hot cocoa. I make my own hot cocoa mix using a recipe developed by my mother.
I tend to drink hot cocoa and herbal tea tepid — not much warmer than room temperature — because I set the mug on a corner of my desk where I won’t accidentally knock it over and then get absorbed in work (or blogging) and forget about it for awhile. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually prefer my cocoa tepid because I can taste the chocolate flavors better that way. When it’s hot, I mostly just taste the sugar.
3. Favorite season
Spring or autumn, especially those lovely few weeks on the cusp each way when I can regulate the temperature of my house without needing either the furnace or the air conditioner simply by opening and closing the windows. I love all kinds of spring flowers — crocuses, daffodils, tulips, lilacs, irises — but I am also rather fond of my roses and California poppies that bloom and bloom and bloom all summer long.
5. Dogs or cats?
7. How many kids do you want?
I used to say “no less than four, no more than six, in other words, five” — but now that I’ve spent the first ten years of my marriage wrestling with infertility, I’ll be happy just to get to three by adoption.
12. What is your family ancestry?
English, Scots, Swedish, and Norwegian
13. What scares you?
Student evaluations. I always put off reading them for as long as I possibly can on the excuse that I can’t ever afford to lose a day of productivity to being in a state of emotional turbulence over the negative things my students have said about me.
14. What are you most grateful for?
My family. I have awesome parents. I have good relationships with my siblings. I have a wonderful husband and a darling child.
15. Dream job?
I’ve got it! I teach at a small two-year college where teaching is my only responsibility — no expectation whatsoever that I will do research. It is exactly the kind of job that I imagined and told my mentors and peers was my career goal to get myself through the long difficult years of graduate school.
16. Do you believe in aliens?
There’s a bit in one of the Narnia books where Aslan tells Lucy that there are many people’s stories in the world, but he can only tell her about her own. There’s a bit in Latter-day Saint scripture where God tells Moses, “And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose… But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.”
17. Favorite sport?
Quidditch? Nah… even if I were a Wizard instead of a Muggle, I’d probably not pay any more attention to Quidditch than I do to Muggle sports.
20. If you could be a teacher, what subject would you teach?
I am a teacher, and I teach CHEMISTRY!
24. What superpower would you choose?
teleportation and telekinesis
25. Favorite animal?
I am quite fond of horses, but realistically, I will never be a “horse person”.
I adore guinea pigs, and I look forward to when my son will be old enough that we can get guinea pigs “for the kid(s)” as an excuse to get them for me.
26. Biggest accomplishment?
Getting my PhD, I guess. I still marvel sometimes that I didn’t get kicked out of my program for being an underperforming student and that my thesis committee let me get away with a doctorate even though my research project only produced one paper that wasn’t published until some months after I finished my dissertation.
27. Do you dare to show a real-life picture of yourself?
I suppose I dare. This is cropped from a picture of BTH and myself taken a few years ago — that’s his shoulder in the bottom left corner — and is rather more glamorous than I usually look.
~*~*~
As long as I’m answering survey questions about myself IRL, I ought to answer these questions that Alunaria gave me for the latest round of the Liebsters couple months ago…
1. Which World of Warcraft quote is your favorite?
I like to use this on my students after an especially bad exam:
2. If you could bring back one NPC in World of Warcraft, which one would it be, and why?
I can’t think of anyone in particular that I’d like to bring back from the dead. I guess I’d like to find out where Wrathion disappeared off to during Legion and what will happen when he meets Spiritwalker Ebonhorn, aka Ebyssian.
3. What is your favorite thing about the blog of the person who nominated you for the Liebster Award?
Alunaria always takes such beautifully framed screenshots with such wonderful character expressions!
4. What is the biggest challenge you have had to overcome in World of Warcraft?
I think I might be in the middle of it right now… This semester is being utterly exhausting, and while I want to finish my Legion solo-play goals, I’m also feeling more and more behind the Battle for Azeroth curve. I’m wishing now that I’d gotten all my alts to level 110 and through their Order Hall Campaigns much earlier, instead of waiting until the 11th hour to do those things, so that now they’d be further progressed on their Legion rep grinds.
In-game, the Lightning Forge and Chi-Ji’s Challenge scenarios for getting the Legendary cape during Mists.
5. If you could give someone 5 million gold in the game, who would it be, and why?
You mean, if I could ask the Devs to give someone 5M gold? Because I sure don’t have that much moolah myself. Uhm… probably BTH, because maybe I could convince him to re-sub to WoW and come run dungeons and old raids with me occasionally if he could perpetually fund it with the WoW Token instead of with our bank account.
6. Which one of your own blog posts is your favorite, and why?
Oh, gosh, I can’t possibly choose. Everything on my Stories page, and everything on my Drawings page, and everything on my Transmogrification page….
7. If you could bring one World of Warcraft creature into the real world, which creature would you pick?
Kodos! Or maybe faerie dragons.
8. If your World of Warcraft-friends had to describe you with 3 words, which words, do you think, would they choose?
Altoholic Tauren Transmogrification
9. What is the best advice someone has ever given you in World of Warcraft?
Play what pleases you.
10. What is your ideal way for World of Warcraft to end?
A lasting peace between the factions is finally achieved, removing the “War” from “Warcraft”.
11. If you could change one thing in the game, what would you choose – and why?
More hairstyle sharing between races — and more new hairstyles for everybody!
On the one hand, I get that a unique set of hairstyles is part of the appeal of playing a character of a different race.
On the other hand, there are so many hairstyles that are unique to one race, or only shared by a few races, that I would love to be able to use on characters of the races I play the most.
Right now, I really really want to use the long-braid-pulled-over-the-shoulder style that Night Elves, Dwarves, and Blood Elves have on my Human because of how Jaina is wearing her hair that way in Battle for Azeroth.
Kamalia et alia 
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I love that you have your dream job 🙂
And yes I totally agree – more WoW hairstyles!!!
I love that I have my dream job, too! XD
Awww, that picture made me smile so much! 😀 You are wonderful ♥
Thank you so much for answering the award questions I gave you too, great idea to put them in this post. Thank you for the sweet words as well.
I had to google the Latter-day Saint and tea. I had no idea.
Lol, your cats 😀
What a treat, great to get to know you better, Kam 🙂
Here, adoption can take a toll on parents, so much. And can take many years, and costs a lot of money. I understand why it has not been easy.
Thanks for sharing!
I had to show you that we are kindred spirits as fellow curly-haired redheads! ❤
I wondered if maybe I ought to put a link — it would have been this one: https://www.lds.org/topics/word-of-wisdom?lang=eng — in my answer to the tea question. I guess I should have, so that you wouldn't have had to go searching on your own.
It's just one cat — but he's so cute that I had a hard time choosing just one picture to share! He is a very good cat, too — he doesn't make messes in the house, he is quite affectionate and cuddly, and he is very patient and tolerant with our son.
We could continue to live at our current standard of living with just BTH's income, so with two incomes, the financial part of adopting hasn't been so bad. The hardest part was getting psychologically used to the idea that I would need to adopt most, if not all, of my children rather than birth them. It wasn't until I'd gotten to that point — BTH got there a lot sooner than I did — that we could really make progress on the rest of it. Now that our son is a year and a half old, we are getting started on the paperwork for a second adoption.
😀 Woot! A rare kind, right 🙂
Ooh, thank you for the link there. Aha, okay, the one on the printer looked different 🙂 That sounds like a great cat to have. It’s not always easy to have cats and small children together, right?
Ah okay, that’s good then 🙂 I can relate to that. It must have been a difficult journey to accept and get used to that. I’m glad you made it. Thank you for sharing that 🙂 Oh, how exciting, is the paperwork very time consuming, or might it go easier when it’s the second one?
I guess the paperwork is a bit easier in that we’ve done it before so we know more what we’re supposed to be doing — but it’s still time consuming and tedious.
Ah, right. Experience helps not getting so overwhelmed.
I’m a Latter-day Saint. I don’t drink tea.
???
I know about the alcohol restriction, but my LDS friends never mentioned the tea restriction before.
Nice photo! Another redhead! We should adopt you!
And yes, you’re a young pup still. (Trust me, my beard is turning gray.)
Another part of the Word of Wisdom is a prohibition on “hot drinks”. The “hot drinks” was later clarified to specifically refer to the caffeine-laden beverages tea and coffee. If one is keeping the Word of Wisdom, one should not drink tea or coffee.
This is kind of a murky area in LDS policy and culture, however.
Other drinks that are hot in temperature, such as tisanes for sore throats and headaches and sleepytime chamomile, or hot cocoa or ovaltine or postum, etc, are not prohibited.
So if it’s not the hot temperature, but the caffeine, that’s really the problem with tea and coffee, what about cold caffeinated beverages, such as Coke and Pepsi and certain brands of rootbeer, etc?
Well… those aren’t specifically prohibited, either. The decision to drink or not drink caffeinated soft drinks has been left to the family/individual, and there are LDS families who do drink Coke/Pepsi and those who don’t; my family, growing up, was one of the ones that didn’t. But BYU didn’t sell Coke or Pepsi on campus… until sometime within the past year, when, without any preliminary fanfare, they suddenly did — and, from what I’ve heard, there was a tremendous hullaballoo about it on social media.
I have enjoyed the aroma of the coffee aisle in the supermarket since my teens and have harbored a secret fondness for coffee-flavored ice cream since my early twenties. I’ve often thought — and maybe even said, a time or two — that if I wasn’t a Mormon, I’d be right there with all those other people who just have to have their coffee. When BYU started selling Coke, I stopped feeling guilty about liking coffee-flavored ice cream 😛 I’m still not going to cross the line into drinking actual coffee, though, because keeping the Word of Wisdom is still a requirement for obtaining a Temple Recommend…