Friday Five:

1. What is your most prized material possession?
I’d have to say my iBook. It’s the most expensive (I don’t have a car or anything) and it’s definitely the thing I’d grab if the house was on fire. Next is probably my copy of “The Gremlins”, Roald Dahl’s extremely rare first book.

2. What item, that you currently own, have you had the longest?
It’s hard to say, since all of my really old stuff is still in various family members’ basements in the U.S. Most of the stuff I have here is fairly recent. The oldest thing here is probably my copy of “The Twenty-One Balloons” by William Pene du Bois. I bought it at a book fair in the third grade and I think I’ve read it about 100 times. It’s dog eared and battered, but I love it. And I always smile when I see my third grade signature inside the cover.

3. Are you a packrat?
Nope, I’m the opposite. I’m always throwing stuff away and then realizing later that I should’ve kept it. The Snook, however, is a HUGE packrat. Like, to the point of stockpiling cardboard boxes and styrofoam “just in case” we ever need them. We drive each other crazy, but he keeps me in envelopes and cardboard and I keep him from being a crazy old man in a house full of garbage.

4. Do you prefer a spic-and-span clean house? Or is some clutter necessary to avoid the appearance of a museum?
I dream of a spic-and-span house. In the immortal words of Edina Monsoon, “Surfaces, darling! Surfaces!” Unfortunately the only time I ever even came close to this dream was the few short weeks in London when we had a cleaning woman come in twice a week. That was the best.

5. Do the rooms in your house have a theme? Or is it a mixture of knick-knacks here and there?
The individual rooms don’t have a theme, but believe it or not, the Snook and I had a “theme” when buying furniture. We decided we liked A) light wood and B) primary colors. Hence our unvarnished IKEA, blue couch, and red TV stand. But in terms of, like, decorations, we don’t have much. We’ve got a shelf dedicated to our various Star Wars toys. We’ve also got a couple nice antique maps on the wall that were given to us as a going away present in London. But other than that, it’s pretty bare around here.