May 2006 - Fours

Helen Bianchin

4 jobs I've had in my life: 

• serving in a 7-11 after school and weekends
• legal secretary
• accountant's secretary
• writer

4 museums worth visiting:

• Auckland museum
• Melbourne museum
• (sorry, that's it for me!)

4 places I've lived:

• Tauranga, New Zealand
• Auckland, New Zealand
• elbourne, Australia
• Gold Coast, Australia

4 tv shows I love to watch:

• Law & Order criminal intent
• Law & Order SVU
• NYPD Blue
• The Nanny

4 places I've been on vacation:

• Hawaii
• Green Island, Far North Qld, Australia
• Sydney, Australia
• Perth, Australia

4 websites I visit daily:

• Jenny Cruisie
• Anne Gracie
• Jane Porter

4 of my favourite foods:

• eggs benedict
• open smoked salmon salad sandwich
• roast chicken, Italian style
• chocolate

4 places I'd rather be right now:
where to choose?!

• Hawaii
• Venice
• Paris
• Gold Coast, Australia, home 

Kate Walker

4 jobs i've had in my life:

• Children's librarian – this was my other 'proper' job – the one I trained for and had qualifications in and did for more than a few months. 
• Toffee factory worker – A vacation job when I was a student. You could eat as much toffee/chocolate as you liked – after the first week I'd had more than enough.
• Bookshop assistant. Here's where I learned to read books without ever bending or cracking the spine – then they could go back on the shelves! 
• Civil servant – interviewing claimants for benefits at the Dept of Health and Social Security . I hated it.

4 museums worth visiting:

• Bronte Parsonage Museum – for anyone like me who loves Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre etc – this is where Charlotte, Emily and Anne actually lived and died. 
• National Portrait Gallery – all those faces of real people.
• Jorvik Viking Centre – in York. Not exactly a 'museum' – more an experience. You can hear, see, and actually smell what Viking life was like.
• Trinity College Dublin where the fabulous illuminated manuscript Book of Kells (dating from approx 800 AD) is on display 

4 places i've lived:

• Newark Nottinghamshires where I was born
• Halifax West Yorkhire where I grew up
• Aberystwyth, Wales where I went to University and met my husband
• Lincolnshire where I live now 

4 tv shows i love to watch:

• Coronation Street – the original and best UK 'soap'
• Most Haunted - because I just hope that one day the investigations will prove that there are ghosts
• 2 Pints Of Lager and A Packet of Crisps – very rude and very very funny 
• Coupling – brilliant comedy and brilliant observation of male/female relationships

4 places i've been on vacation:

• Malta
• Tasmania
• Madeira (I have a thing about islands)
• Iowa

4 websites i visit daily:

Well, the only ones I visit daily are

• eHarlequin

And various Blogs of friends:

• Anne McAllister
• Kate Hardy
• Liz Fielding

4 of my favorite foods

• Salad
• Pasta
• Vegetables –any - (honest!)
• Fish and chips –( they taste best, eaten with your fingers from the paper when you're very hungry on a cold dark night)

4 places i'd rather be right now

• In bed – asleep (well I've just finished a book on deadline) 
• Ireland
• By the sea – anywhere
• On the settee – reading a good book

Catherine George

4 places I've lived:

Shortly after our marriage my husband took a job as Deputy Chief Engineer of a gold-mining company in Brazil. Our white, red-roofed house there was high up on a hillside with purple bougainvillea twining round a veranda with
a view of the mountains of Minas Gerais, and the huge illuminated cross on the nearest peak.

After three years the husband's career took him to British American Tobacco, so our next move was to an apartment in the hills behind Rio de Janeiro, and there our veranda had a view of the city, white and simmering in the heat below.

Two years later the husband was asked back to the gold-mine as Chief Engineer, so we returned to Minas Gerais with our baby son, and this time the house, veranda and garden were bigger, but with the same bougainvillea and ravishing
view.

Four year later we returned to the UK to educate our son, gained a daughter, and eventually found the house of our dreams on a cliff with a view of the River Wye six hundred feet below at the back of the house, and a view of the River Severn from the wisteria-wreathed veranda in front. This house played a starring role in the series of five novels I wrote about the Dysart family.

Now we're back in full circle in our native Wales, no veranda this time, but we live near the foot of the Black Mountains, so we still have a great view.

Trish Morey:

4 jobs I've had in my life:

• Babysitting
• Gherkin picking
• Financial Management Consultant (aka counting gherkins) 
  Writer

4 museums worth visiting:

• The South Australian Museum - a classic museum!
• Heraklion Museum in Crete - wonderful treasure from the Minoans to the Romans.
• Norton Summit museum - small, jampacked with treasures and fascinating. 
• Te Papa - the Museum of NZ in Wellington. Beautiful, modern and bursting with good stuff.

4 places I've lived:

• Adelaide Hills, South Australia
• Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
• Wellington, New Zealand 
• Harpenden, Hertfordshire England

4 tv shows i love to watch:

• The Office (the UK version, it's a classic)
• Kath and Kim
• Fawlty Towers
• Aussie Rules footy - especially when Carlton are playing (preferably winning!) 

4 places i've been on vacation:

• Crete
• Peschiera, Lake Garda
• New Zealand
• Cornwall

4 websites I visit daily:

• http://wetnoodleposse.blogspot.com/ - my Golden Heart 2003 fellow noodlers' joint blog
• http://www.bronwynjameson.com/blog/ - the simply sensational downunder blog of a Triple RITA finalist and thoroughly nice person, Bronwyn Jameson 
• http://www.eharlequin.com - the Passion: Presents Style message board
• http://www.google.com Usually several times a day.

4 of my favorite foods:

• Chocolate
• Chili Squid (in fact, anything Thai)
• Crunchy apples
• Fresh cherries

4 places i'd rather be right now:

• Nowhere - the Adelaide Hills is the most beautiful place in the world. 

Sandra Marton

4 jobs I've had in my life:

• Salesclerk in a women's clothing shop in NYC my first summer at college
• Elementary school teacher
• Upaid, elected, full time member of Board of Ed (Trust me. It was a job!) 
• That's it, until I became a writer

4 museums worth visiting:

• Museum of Natural History, NYC
• Louvre, Paris
• Musee Rodin, Paris
• The British Museum, London

4 places I've lived:

• NYC 
• Long Island, a NYC suburb
• Connecticut
• Do childhood summers on my uncle's farm count?

4 tv shows i love to watch:

• The Sopranos
• Lost
• Grey's Anatomy 
• Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood

4 places I've been on vacation:

• Europe
• The Caribbean
• South America
• Alaska and Hawaii (and a lot of other US states)

4 websites I visit daily:

• Actually, I don't visit any on a daily basis 

4 of my favorite foods:

• dark chocolate
• lobster
• homemade rice pudding
• meat loaf (my own recipe)

4 places I'd rather be right now:

• Hiking a trail rich with recent signs of wolves in Denali
• National Park 
• Watching the sun set over the ocean at Big Sur
  Sipping Campari and soda a sidewalk cafe in Paris
• Having dinner at a little restaurant not far from the Coliseum in Rome

Karen Van Der Zee

4 jobs I've had in my life:

• Picking greenhouse tomatoes at 4 in the morning (as a teenager in Holland)
• Temping at Bols, liqueur factory, and getting to sample at times (in Holland) 
• Selling socks in department store (in Holland, while waiting for adventure)
• Nursery school teacher in Kenya, East Africa. Very interesting!

4 place I've lived in my life (just a few out of many others):

• Walk-up one-room apartment in Amsterdam. Ah, the romance of those days!
• Old colonial settler's house in a mud hut village in Kenya, East Africa. No water, no electricity, but a wonderful new Peace Corps husband. 
• Ramallah, Palestine, in a lovely apartment with a panoramic view of the Judean and Samarian deserts.
• Semarang, a town on Java, Indonesia, where we had: a house cleaner, a cook, a nanny, a gardener. Those were the days! Lots of fun and a very interesting place to live. 

4 of my favorite foods:

• Dark, crusty bread with sharp or flavorful cheese of any kind. (You can take the girl out of Holland, but you can't take Holland out of the girl.)
• Home-made hummus with warm, fresh pita bread 
• Ripe Mangoes straight off the trees
• Shell fish – shrimp, lobster, crab

4 place I've been on vacation:

• Canada: Prince Edward Island – visiting Ann of Green Gables sites with the young daughters. 
• Australia, visiting friends and camping north of Sydney, breaking a long drought and nearly drowning in our tents.
• Bali, Indonesia – if only it wasn't so far away from Europe and the East Coast of the US, we'd go live there! 
• Italy – maybe we'll buy a house there.

4 places I'd rather be now, if my husband can come too:

• Bali
• Amsterdam
• Italy (Southern Campania region)
• Some fun exotic island in the Caribbean 

Lucy Monroe

4 jobs I've had in my life:

• Management Consultant
• Professor's Assistant
• Waitress
• Sales Clerk

4 museums worth visiting:

• National Art Gallery in D.C.
• Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
• Olympia Children's Museum
• Boeing Air and Space Museum

4 places I've lived:

• Tillamook, OR
• Oregon City, OR
• Portland, OR
• Olympia, WA

4 tv shows I love to watch:

• Design on a Dime
• Stargate SG1
• reruns of Nero Wolf
• Junky to Funky

4 places I've been on vacation:

• Spain
• England
• France
• Germany

4 websites I visit daily:

• eHarlequin
• Amazon
• Writers Space
• WNBC's Romance B(u)y the Book

4 of my favorite foods:

• chocolate
• more chocolate
• carrot cake
• and more chocolate

4 places I'd rather be right now:

• Writing my current book in the sun in the back yard
• on a cruise ship
• at the beach
• or on a lanai in Palm Springs

Anne McAllister

4 jobs I've had in my life:

• Teaching Spanish
• Capping deodorant bottles
• Ghost-writing sermons
• Copyediting textbooks 

4 museums worth visiting:

• Millom Folk Museum, Millom, Cumbria
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
• Yuma Territorial Prison Museum, Yuma Arizona
• TePapa, Museum of New Zealand in Wellington

4 tv shows I love to watch:

• Dodgers baseball
• I used to watch Alias but I'm getting fed up
• I loved to watch Sports Night, but it's gone
• Coupling when Kate sends me the dvds

4 places I've been on vacation:

• Harbour Island, Bahamas
• Invercargill, New Zealand
• Kerikeri, New Zealand,
• Blue Mountains, Australia

4 websites I visit daily:

• Ken Aitken's Genealogy Education blog
• Kate Walker's blog
• Anne Frasier's blog 
• He Wrote/She Wrote (Bob Mayer and Jenny Crusie's blog)

4 places I'd rather be right now :

• asleep in bed – it's 1 a.m. and I forgot to send this to the webmistress for posting
• in Texas visiting my daughter 
• in Cornwall 
• in Lincolnshire visiting Sid, Kate Walker's cat – and incidentally, of course, visiting Kate.

Melanie Milburne

4 Jobs I've had in the past:

• I have had quite a checkered past! As I was lived on a farm as a child, I grew up around horses and ended up breaking them in for other people. (For those not familiar with the term "breaking in" means schooling them or getting them used to being ridden.) It was fun but it was also at times extremely dangerous and I had several nasty spills when certain horses proved a little more difficult than others. 
• Another job I had so as to pay my way through College was working at a Geriatric Home. It was a sad place, I thought. I saw my first dead body and was shocked that the poor woman had been stored in a broom cupboard until the undertakers came to take her away. I was so innocent at nineteen! 
• I worked as a nanny for one of my College lecturers which was great fun. I had an absolute ball with her two gorgeous kids who are now married with kids of their own. 
• The fourth job amongst many others was as a wedding singer. I used to take my guitar and backing guys and do weddings parties, anything. It was great fun and I felt privileged to be a part of each couple's special day.

4 of my favourite foods are: 

• raspberries
• mangoes
• most types of seafood
• chicken

4 places I've lived: 

• Sydney,(both on the outskirts and inner city) Australia
• Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland
• and of course Hobart

4 museums I've visited are: 

• The Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London
• The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C
• The Holocaust Museum also in Washington: I had to leave the Holocaust Museum after just one display as I ended up in floods of tears. It was the saddest place I've ever been. I prefer to visit museums on my own. If I go with my husband he reads every single document and looks at every single display where I am the type of person to wander through looking at what takes my interest and walking past things that don't hold appeal. I used to really hate it when our boys were young as they were rushing off with me in hot pursuit while my husband would be oblivious. Of course at the end of the visit he would ask: Did you see such and such?' and I would just seethe. Of course I hadn't seen it! I was too busy getting son number one down off the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton!!!!