fives, from LA

As posted yesterday, the meme is:

Ask me my Top Five Whatevers. Fannish or literary or otherwise. Any top fives – it doesn’t matter what, really! Fandoms, ice cream flavors, cartoons or comics, women/men in my fandoms, ideal holiday destinations, goals for the future, celebrity crushes, books I wish would be made into movies, love songs, etc.

Ready, set… GO!

LA asked a few, so here they are.

Favorite 5 places to row:
Let’s see:

• Our own lake in Oregon, because it’s beautiful and because it’s so great to just go out back and row.
• The Sydney International Regatta Centre (actually in Penrith), because it was very cool to row on an Olympic course
• Lake Natoma, in Sacramento: I don’t know how it would be to row there regularly – I’m not sure if anyone does – but it’s a great race venue
• The Schuylkill river in Philadelphia, because it was exciting to finally row in my hometown. The views are fantastic and so is Boathouse Row
• Towne Lake in Austin – walking distance from Sixth Street, nice long rowing venue

I would list Tempe Town Lake in Arizona, if only they’d put a dome over it. The lake itself is great, but the temperature and cleanliness of the air above it isn’t so good.

Favorite 5 college classes as an undergrad:
I’m not sure if there were five of them! Let’s see:

• Folksong, with the inimitable Kenny Goldstein – so much fun I took a couple other classes with him too
• Advanced mechanics, with Burton Paul: This one was about cogs and gears and four-bar mechanisms Dr. Paul was phenomenally boring when we had him for a class on stresses in materials, but somehow in this class (which touched on his own research) he was fascinating.
• Formal Logic: fun! And it counted as a math class.
• Finite Element Analysis and Heat Transfer: two separate classes, but I took them the same semester and you use the methods of the former to do the latter – finally something in engineering that seemed to come easily to me.
• Linguistics: which was every bit as interesting as I expected it to be. Though actually the graduate class I took just for fun at ASU years later was even better.

Favorite 5 Christmas ornaments from the travel tree:
I’m going to skip this one for now; Ted’s got an archive of photos of them, so I’ll do it later with pictures.

LA requested a couple of easy ones, so here you go:
– top five favorite things about where you live
– top five books (or other works) that inspire your own writing