Another Friday Five.

1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails?

   During one of my stints as a traveling database code monkey one of my code monkey friends gave me the niftiest little program that would attach a random sig line to each email that I composed. I adored that program and spent far more time than I really want to admit to, searching out witty sayings to add to the queue from which it could choose.

   Alas, during one of the laptop conversions or upgrades the program was lost, and I have never found something to replace it. This means that my sig line is now stuck to only one thing at a time, and only changes when I find something amusing enough that it overrides my natural laziness and forces me to go into the account settings and make all the manual changes. This is why all email originating from my home computer contains the following quote from J.R.R. Tolkien - "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - and has contained that quote for probably far too long.

   Of course, I couldn't remember what the actual quote was when setting up the nifty web-based email Richard configured for me to use when I'm at work, so instead of a quote from a well-known fantasy author, emails originating from this system contain quotes from my immediate friends and family, which may or may not make much sense to anyone who wasn't involved in the conversation from whence they came. For example, right now, depending on the email account I'm using, the sig line is either "What good is decaf to a worm?" (originating from, I kid you not, a conversation I had with my in-laws about compost heaps), or "I wish I were an imaginary lemur, so that I could have time to expand my horizons in all the directions they could go", which I am not even going to try to explain because it would take far too long and by the end you'd all be backing away from both Richard and I, sidling quickly to the door in the hopes that the men with their little white coats would be coming soon to take us away, ha ha.

2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it?

   High school has been long enough away that I actually could not remember if I had a quote. Thankfully it only took a few moments to remember just where the heck we've stashed the yearbooks, so I tracked down my picture and what do you know, I did, indeed, have one: "Morning is not a time, it is a state of mind."

   I am sure that there was nothing deep or meaningful about that quote, even when I filled out the little form for the yearbook at the time. I have a feeling that it was meant to be a commentary on the fact that, as a band geek, I had to be at school an hour early every morning for practice. Every morning! For four years straight! The reasons changed with the seasons, since in the fall there was field show practice and in the winter and spring there was jazz band, and if having to get to school an *hour early* every day wasn't geeky and insane enough, I also ended up staying after school for band things (wind ensemble practice) as well. And yet somehow I successfully avoided any sort of serious addiction to caffeine until graduate school, when working the graveyard shift as a waitress forced the issue.

3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read? If you already have them, what do they say?

   I wanted JENIPUR, but of course it was already taken, which was so surprising because Jennifer is such an uncommon name, especially for women in my age group, and Jennifers who like cats are even more rare. Sarcasm? Never. Anyway, I got a variation on that, which, combined with the license plate frame that says "Owned by Cats" and the 'Cat' fish (much like the Darwin fish but with cat ears and tail and it says Cat in the middle instead of Darwin), my car sort of screams "Cat Lover". At one point in my life I might have entertained the notion of attaching whiskers to the front grille. Luckily I have since grown past that idea. Really I have. No, really.

4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?

   I cannot think of anything I've ever received that is engraved. I guess my friends and family are not much into engraving (that was not a request for engraved things, family members who are reading, so don't get any ideas about pizza cutters or cheese slicers into your heads!). Although now that I think of it, an engraved pizza cutter *is* a good idea for my dad…

5. What would you like your epitaph to be?
   If we're going to be highly technical here, I would actually prefer to not have a tombstone at all because I'd much rather be cremated and then sprinkled somewhere pretty, with lots of purple and blue flowers. And besides, if we're going to be honest here, I'm a little miffed that cemeteries do not allow the really cool kinds of tombstones any more and make you stick with some stupid flat plate in the ground so they can mow around/over it more easily. Because lets face it, what's the point of having a tombstone if you can't have a TOMBSTONE, with gargoyles and curlicues and maybe some really sappy stone cherub weeping gracefully on the top. However, just for the sake of argument, if I really must have a tombstone, I think I would prefer something vaguely cryptic, much like the worm comment in my sig. In fact, I like that. Engrave it on my tombstone. "What good is decaf to a worm?" We could just forgo the weeping cherub and carve it in big letters in some vaguely old world font. Right underneath the gargoyles.