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Well - time to tackle the Scott-O-Rama who's-your-most-influential-person question.

Once again I can't just answer it with a nice simple one-person answer. And once again I have to be a complete and utter nerd...the answer is "my parents". Gotta be both of them 'cause they're a team, and there is no possible way that I can separate their combined influences and say that one was moreso thatn the other.

That may sound dorky but first of all - I'm a navy brat, so there were some continuity issues with anyone else who might otherwise have won the honor, and second of all - well, I just got really lucky in the parental department. Not that I always realized that when I was a kid, but as always, hindsight's 20/20 and a lot of the things I saw at the time as them being mean and awful and uncaring, I look back on and see as them being good parents & teaching their kid about responsibility, self-discipline, and respecting boundaries, because that was their job and important to do well, even if it meant putting up with an emotional, hypersensitive kid's temper tantrums, door slamming, tears and "I hate you"s (I think I was particularly awful in the early teens). None of which can be much fun for a parent. My dad was very strong on teaching me some things (especially about responsibility & self-control), either directly or indirectly, my mom was better on other things (especially taking other people's feelings into consideration, and being considerate) - and what was great was what I got from each of them was balanced by what I got from the other.

They were the ones who taught me fun things like how to love books, and the outdoors, and that recipes are guidelines, not rules, and less fun things, like "life is unfair", and "it's wherever you left it" (2 of my mom's favorite phrases) and "work isn't always fun, that's why it's called work" - that was dad's. They gave me a solid set of values that has served me pretty well in life, but instead of just trying to load me up with their own morals and ideas, they raised me to look at things like that, think them through, and make my own decisions. We don't always see eye to eye now - but that's because they brought me up to think for myself, and darn it, I do. I grew up to be my own person - but they gave the person that I am an awfully secure foundation.

That's about as in depth as I can get here without going autobiographical.

Let's see - what's next - how about Sardonic Bomb Scott's

Do you believe in ghosts?

Um...honest answer...I don't know!

I've never had a paranormal experience myself. But I grew up in Hawaii, and there's just such a ghost-story tradition out there that somewhere in some corner of myself it's hard not to believe... There are also some old friends of my folks' who had a very old house in Connecticutt at one point. They said they had ghosts there. The one I most clearly remember them talking about went something like this - There was a gravel walkway that ran alongside the house, and a separate garage that had a room above it with a set of wooden stairs going up on the outside of the garage. I remember Mrs. F saying that when they were living there, they would occasionally hear someone running up the gravel walk and up the stairs - but nobody would ever be there.

This was a nice, normal, down-to=earth family - Mr. F was a submariner like my dad. Mrs. F wasn't particularly trying to tell a ghost story, or be scary, it wasn't Halloween, I think we were just sitting in her kitchen having tea one afternoon, and she was talking in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice.

Difficult to say there's no such thing after that. I haven't seen one. But if seeing something were a prerequisite for me believing in it, there would be an awful lot of things that I didn't believe in!

OK - I'll close tonight with one of Karen's -

What makes Bonnie tick?

I don't know yet! But obviously an ability to get an immoderate amount of glee out of tagging innocent bystanders with memes is one small gear in the tick mechanism...heh heh heh.

This leaves me with 3 more of Tuna Girls's questions and 1 more of Ignacio's questions. As Tuna Girl (Karen) pointed out in a comment tonight, I'm still short 5. She's offered to send me some of hers...I'm not sure I could do them justice so if anybody else wants to ask anything (preferably non-x-rated as I mentioned yesterday...oh, and now you may better understand why I am so tempted to tell my folks about this little blog effort of mine...), ask away!