1. I haven’t been to the dentist in about five years

2. If you see me on the street, I will probably be checking for cavities with my tongue. I’m not grimacing at you, really

3. I have a sister who is going to be the next Rosalind Franklin one day

4. or a recapper for television without pity

5. I cut off all her beautiful red curls under the kitchen table with a pair of scissors one day when she was two and I was four

6. I used to call myself Frances as a child, and insisted that everyone else call me Frances too.

7. They made me stop when I went to a Montessori kindergarden, but Russell Hoban is still one of my favourite authors.

8. On my way to work, sometimes I recite Frances’ Egg Thoughts’ poems to myself in my head : ‘some kids I know, when they get brand new boots, won’t get them wet, they won’t walk through puddles. Some kids I know, when they get jellybeans, don’t care if red or greens are the ones they eat first. Kids like that just simply do not care.’

9. I want an ipod

10. I love playing Mah Jong. I also love Trivial Pursuit. It’s hard to find people to play either.

11. My New Years resolution is to talk less

12. I love mojitos and vanilla soy milk. Not together.

13. I used to be a figure skater. I could do double loops and won a bronze at Nationals.

14. I think The West Wing is someone, somewhere’s idea of utopia.

15. I love Science Fiction, because it allows us to explore the ways we might or might not change things

16. I have protested twice in my life, as part of my Union, and against war in Iraq.

17. I am a dedicated pedestrian.

18. I feel guilty when I don’t recycle.

19. I have a tendancy to leave lights on all over the house, my parents are the same.

20. There are likely to be at least four radios on in my parents house at any given time, all tuned to the National Programme.

21. I am a food and culture snob.

22. I live in New Zealand, but also have a British Passport.

23. My Great Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather illustrated Paradise Lost.

24. I’ve never really gotten over my Aunt dying, even though I had barely seen her for years.

25. My third year at university was the worst ever, but I discovered the two things that drive me today: Yi-Fu Tuan’s writing about place, and ecocriticism.

26. Ecocriticism is the study of people’s relationships to their environments through literature.

27. I have hardly read any canonical ecocritical texts, but feel the principles can be applied to anything.

28. We don’t have a microwave.

29. My left shoulder clicks a lot

30. I try and avoid using a mouse whenever possible, because it hurts my hand

31. I have become a master of macros and key commands

32. Sometimes I feel I can’t walk, or run, and this only leaves skipping

33. I love the sound of cicadas

34. My favourite foods are risotto and salmon don and rye bread

35. I try not to eat meat more than twice a week

36. I am so sick of meat, except for in things, like lasagna, or moussaka.

37. I love my little herb garden that I am growing at my parents house, now that I know all the latin names.

38. I tried to teach myself Russian when I was Fifteen.

39. I love tea

40. I can’t drive

41. I have 9 different types of tea in the kitchen

42. I don’t drink coffee, but I eat way too much chocolate

43. my husband and I met online, 5 years ago

44. I broke his ribs last Christmas, when I knocked into his bike with my own, coming up behind him.

45. He is the most romantic person I have ever met, in that he is cynical and cuts through bullshit, but knows exactly what I need to make me feel special.

46. I love his laugh so much.

47. When I am in supermarkets, I get The Clash’s ‘I’m All Lost in the Supermarket’ stuck in my head.

48. One of my favourite places in the world is the summit of Mt Kirwins in Victoria Forest Park on the West Coast of New Zealand

49. Last summer, I read the Lovely Bones up there in about 8 hours straight.

50. My favourite word is watershed.

51. I am allergic to Crayfish.

52. Someone threw a plate at me once and it hit the wall and shattered, I have a nice scar on my leg. No one talks about it.

53. I talk in my sleep.

54. I used to play the violin, until I got a bleeding nose right before a concert and broke my bow dragging it along the ground as I tried not to get blood everywhere. My Mother and I were so embarrassed, we decided we wouldn’t get me lessons anymore.

55. I used to hate the feel of velvet on my skin. I still hate the feel of fabric between my teeth.

56. Sometimes I forget that my cat Gloria is dead. She was the sleekest grey shadow, the most velvety smooth siamese veloci raptor in the world.

57. I want to go to California but am afraid that it will not be at all like what I imagine it will be.

58. I love the smell of rain on the street when it starts raining just after the sun has been out.

59. I love singing the song ‘Mud, Mud, glorious Mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So follow me follow, right down to the hollow, and there we will wallow in Glo-o-o-rious Mud’ when we are tramping and it is muddy.

60. My family loves to tramp (hike, bushwalk). It’s what we do together.

61. My father goes cycling every weekend. He just goes and rides, like he did as a kid in Yorkshire. I love that about him.

62. I’m terrified of my parents dying.

63. My mother has the softest skin in the world and when she is thinking she closes her eyes and opens her mouth. She has done it on national television.

64. I’m afraid Handel and Roy Orbison are going to make me cry everytime I hear them, after my Father has died.

65. I would dearly like to name a daughter Theodora, but I don’t think Dan will go for it.

66. I wish I was an architect.

67. I went to a single sex school.

68. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life.

69. I haven’t smoked pot since university.

70. I have never taken any other recreational drugs.

71. Sometimes I fear I am boring.

72. Other times I get annoyed because everyone else is so boring.

73. When I am on holiday, or just away for some reason. I like to eat something that is authentically from that place, not just something I can get at home.

74. I sleep on my stomach.

75. Before I go to sleep I have to rub the bridge of my right foot over the arch of my left foot four times, and then the bridge of my left foot over the arch of my right foot twice.

76. I think my mother was stalked online once, but she doesn’t really talk about it.

77. I joke that my Mum wants Howard Dean to be her boyfriend. When my Father said he wasn’t Presidential, she stomped her foot and harangued him for five minutes about the insidious and influencial force the media has on people's perceptions.

78. I have a pair of purple last footwear company scuffs that are falling apart, but I can’t bear to stop wearing them.

79. Sometimes I think about being vegan, or vegetarian, but don’t know if I could stop using leather.

80. Sometimes my heart has a little palpitation that is like my ribcage is full of butterflies flapping their wings, then it beats normally again.

81. If I ever move away from New Zealand, I know I will miss its landscapes so badly. Mountains and wetlands alike.

82. I would recommend to anyone visiting New Zealand that they go to Stewart Island. It is so remote, but you will never find a better wilderness. Halfmoon Bay is bleak and closed minded, but also so hopeful, just because the fact that it is isolated means that lots of horrible things may never make it there. The houses and the bay and the taste of the fish and the dramatic weather will never leave you.

83. My favourite hymn is Jerusalem, written by William Blake, because it is utopian.

84. I love baking bread. I love the way it rises.

85. I don’t wear a watch.

86. I love the way my friend Eleanor talks. I love her spontaneous outbursts.

87. One day when we were having lunch together, she was telling me about a friend she saw on the street who was incredibly pregnant... and all Eleanor could think to say was ‘So... you’re in the ‘family way’ I see’.

88. When she told me this, I threw my head back so hard when I laughed that I hit it on the concrete wall of the Hocken Building.

89. I want to tell all my good friends and my parents how much I love them and why. But think that maybe it would be dumb and sound insincere.

90. Dan and I both hate Bananas with a passion.

91. I am obsessed with pushing down my cuticles.

92. My wedding ring is titanium with a pressed band of gold in the centre. I wanted it to be West Coast gold from our valley, but that would have been too expensive, because the jeweller would have had to make a custom mold.

93. Eleanor read ee cummings ‘someplace i have never travelled’ at our wedding. It made everyone cry.

94. Dan’s brother played ‘Here Comes the Sun’ on the guitar as I walked up the aisle (lawn) but I was nervous and basically ran and he had to finish before the song was over.

95. I work in a library, but am constantly bitter, because it is so hierarchical.

96. When I was a kid, I used to pretend that I lived in the public library.

97. I really want a PhD.

98. I am an aural learner, I learn best listening and talking.

99. My best friend Amy is in Tokyo at the moment, we have known each other since we were four. Her birthday is three days before mine.

100. I love mittens, and want to knit myself a pair of Turkish mittens. Then I want to knit YOU a pair.