It seems that whenever I take a little time off of writing, usually because, you know, Life, but it seems next to impossible to start back up again. I was so very glad when Nilsa posted these ten questions, I immediately copy-pasted and answered them for all of you. Aren’t you lucky? (Yes. Yes you are.)

1. Twitter or Facebook? 

Facebook. I want to love Twitter, I really do, but I just…I feel like if I am not “on” all the time I am suddenly completely lost in conversations and miss all the important things and I just don’t really have time for the stream of consciousness from 100+ people…maybe I’m doing Twitter wrong? I dunno.

2. Morning person or night owl? 

Absolutely a night owl. I can stay up until 2 or 3 without batting an eye, but ask me to wake up at 6:30 or 7:00 (even with a sensible 10pm bedtime) and you shall get ALL SORTS of side eye.

3. How do you drink coffee? 

I don’t. My caffeinated beverage of choice is Diet Dr. Pepper with a very generous squeeze of fresh lime (like, at least half of a lime. I feel so very much like Amy March every single time I do this.).

4. It’s 9pm and you’ve got the house to yourself, what do you do? 

One of two things: turn on my audio book and pull out my oil paints, or curl up in bed with whatever book I’m currently obsessed with; my go-to is almost always reading.

5. What’s on your nightstand right now? 

Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography (not started yet), a lovely candle, a few hair elastics, and an original oil seascape that I look at every morning when I wake up. (There is a basket underneath my night stand with no less than 25 more books to read…always.)

6. What smell do you love? 

Fresh cut grass, freshly laundered boy, clean sheets, citrus smells.

7. What smell do you hate? 

Lake stink, this sulphuric cloud that sometimes comes off the large salty lake next to my home; it seriously fills the whole valley with the smell of rotten eggs and oil refinery pollution.

8. Other than your current home, where would you most like to live? 

I’d love to eventually live somewhere with tall granite-topped mountains that I can view from my main living area; they really are home to me. Now, I live in that type of place now that is surrounded by such mountains, but I don’t have the view. Someday, I’ll have the view.

9. If you could eat only one nationality of food for the rest of your life, which one would it be? 

Mexican food: chips and salsa and burritos and tacos and stuffed peppers and enchiladas and tres leches cake. All day. Erry day.

10. When you were six years old, what did you want to be when you grew up? 

A circus performer, one that was part acrobat and part equestrian. This morphed into my dream of being a stunt woman in the movies, and then a fighter pilot, and then an international attorney, and now I manage a program that helps low income and under-served students figure out the steps required to prepare for and succeed in college….and not the kind of college where you study to become an acrobatic equestrian. Sigh. Dreams deferred, man.

What about you? What is on your nightstand and what were your career goals when you were in kindergarten?