Average Jane: Average Jane, Interviewed

I decided to give the Citizen of the Month Great Interview Experiment another shot. The last time around, I never received any interview questions and the ones I provided to my interviewee were only up on her blog for a day or so before they vanished.

These are the questions I received from Mandy of The Gratton Grapevine:

1. When did you know that music was a way you had to express yourself?
I've been singing in bands since I was a teenager, but I think I really started understanding the self-expression aspect of music when I started writing lyrics. I found that lyric writing brought out parts of my personality that I'd generally kept to myself until then.

2. What has been the best musical experience (either performance or audience) you've had?
No particular experience stands out for me as a performer. I've seen so many great concerts that it's hard to choose one, but I think the last time I saw Yes was particularly memorable. They played a lot of their classic material that was probably completely unfamiliar to a good percentage of the concert-goers, but was a rare treat for me.

3. You have three cats. What, in your mind, are the fundamental differences between cat people and dog people?
Cat people like their freedom. When you have a dog, there's always some sort of interaction going on and there's no way you can go somewhere after work or leave for a vacation without making dog plans. With a cat, you can leave for a few days and as long as you've left big bowls of food and water (and the toilet lid up for good measure), the cat will hardly notice you're gone. Yes, cats can be needy and want attention, but they're not as insistent about it as dogs.

4. Obviously, you love to cook. If you had only one day left, describe your last three meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and/or libations that would accompany them.
Assuming I'm cooking these meals for myself, here's what I'd make:

Breakfast - Bacon, scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese and multi-grain toast with butter. Drinks: Coffee (if I'm going to croak, never mind the acid reflux!) and pineapple-orange juice.
Lunch - Minestrone soup, homemade Italian bread with butter, salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing and cheesecake with cherries for dessert. Drink: Gnarly Head Old Vine Zinfandel
Dinner - Grilled steak, green beans with Greek dressing, baked potato with butter, sour cream, cheese, onion and bacon bits. Drink: Guinness Stout

5. Aside from adding to your ugly 70s decor collection, what other bargains do you love to shop for?
My online shopping addiction consists almost entirely of t-shirts and books. The $10 sales at Threadless are nearly irresistible for me and I sometimes get a little embarrassed by the frequency with which Amazon packages appear on my doorstep.

6. What would be the perfect outing with your niece and nephew?
We'd go out to lunch somewhere mutually agreeable (Red Robin, perhaps) and then head to the zoo to see as many animals as possible before we all got tired. We'd take the zoo train back to the front gate rather than walk, and on the way home we'd stop for frozen custard. If it weren't so hot and humid out right now, I'd make that happen this weekend!

7. What question do you wish I'd asked?
"So what are you going to do with the $1 million prize that accompanies this interview?"

I'll be interviewing Mama Ginger Tree from Adventures in the Candycane Forest after I've had a chance to become more familiar with her blog. So far, I know that she was at BlogHer, yet I didn't meet her there. By weird coincidence, I just ran across her on Twitter today in the course of my social media monitoring at work. That's the small world of the blogosphere for you.