Baby Love

This story, written by Sara Levine and published by Necessary Fiction, has been selected for inclusion in Dzanc Books' 2010 Best of the Web:

"I had a baby.

“Why’d you have to have a baby?” Denny wanted to know. “There are so many babies on this block already. You know this neighborhood’s really changing. First the Starbucks and then we got a Gap.”
read the rest at Necessary Fiction.

Last week, fellow blogger and writer Dorraine Darden surprised me with a Sugar Doll award. The way it works is that the recipient has to reveal ten things about herself that readers of her blog may not know. So, with no further ado, here are ten little-known facts about yours truly:

1. I was born in Western Australia.

2. My husband and I met in a canyon in Utah on a climbing trip. At the time, I was living in Tennessee and he was living in Wyoming. For our first "date" we rendezvoused in Denver and went out to climb a mountain in the Wind Rivers. We had a terrible epic and I was so impressed with his calm demeanour throughout that I looked forward to climbing with him again. Roughly 3 years later, we spent our honeymoon ice-climbing in Alaska.

3. If I go too long without a run, I get extremely irritable.

4. I gave up my dream of being a professional writer many years ago and became a software developer instead. I dragged my old manuscripts all over the country with me and one day I read a few of my stories to my husband. With his encouragement, I started writing again and submitted two of those old stories to the 2009 Writer's Digest Writing Competition. They placed 1st and 4th in the Literary/Mainstream Short Story category.

5. I used to be fluent in French, but now can barely string a sentence together. I'm not happy about that!

6. I love Reggae music.

7. My two favorite books of all time are The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, and Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham.

8. I'm crazy about birds, especially penguins. OK, I'm crazy about ALL animals. When I was a kid, I went back and forth between wanting to be a zoologist and a marine biologist.

9. I love to cook dishes from all over the world. A typical week's worth of dinners at my house might include Ethiopian curry, Greek moussaka, South African meat pie and Sri Lankan sates. I make an Afghan sweet bread called rhote to take with me when I travel.

10. I drink home-made redbush chai all day long. Because I cook a lot, I order spices in bulk from The Atlantic Spice Company. To make the chai, I grind 3 tsp black peppercorns, 1.5 tsp whole cloves and 5 3-inch cinnamon sticks in my spice grinder, then mix with 6 tbsp loose-leaf red tea (redbush) leaves. Sometimes I add whole cardamom pods and/or Jamaica all-spice berries to the mix. Good stuff!