Five questions meme

naomikritzer kindly sent me five questions.

1. What is something you are much pickier about than the typical person seems to be?

Ordering food in restaurants. To quote the line from When Harry Met Sally, I just want what I want how I want it. But that does mean giving very specific instructions at times. (Also grammar, but that I generally keep to myself.)

2. What herb or spice do you grab the most often when preparing meals?

Most often? Garlic. (Not counting salt and pepper, that is.) There are so many things that garlic just adds a bit of zing for. I'm also very fond of ginger, but that's more for baking than cooking.

But cumin should also perhaps get a mention, because I've discovered the joys of that over the past couple of years.

3. You're about to be packed off to a cabin with no Internet for a week, and you can take five books along to read. They must be books you already own in some form but have not read. What do you grab off your TBR stack to entertain yourself?

I have an ebook TBR stack, and these are the literal next five items on it:

Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire
Women's Work by Tanya Huff
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
Almost Complete Short Fiction by F.M. Busby
The Pearl Thief by Elizabeth Wein

I've also been rereading the Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell, but I would only take books I hadn't read previously for this hypothetical trip.

4. You get a free trip to any city in the world you haven't previously visited -- however, you cannot bring a guidebook or your phone, nor can you make contact with anyone you know there, you have to just explore it on your own. Where do you go?

If I can't take my phone or guidebooks or rely on friends, I'd want to go somewhere that English is the most common language. And since it's a free trip, I'll pick somewhere that expensive to get to. That comes down to Australia or New Zealand. And if it has to be one city, that's Sydney. But I'd hope that I could get to where there are sheep, fleece, and spinners as well.

5. Your fairy godmother appears and offers you a boon of significant improvement to any skill. The power is limited such that you'll get more benefit the more narrow you go. What do you choose?

Would it be cheating to ask for an improvement in tidiness? I'd like my ability to housekeep to match my aesthetic, because right now I don't have that. Mostly I'm thinking in terms of "stuff management" -- finding places for things and putting them there on a regular basis.

If that's too open-ended, I'd ask for an improvement in my fiction-writing skills. I'm good at explaining things (thus my career as a technical writer), but not so good at coming up with ideas for fiction and getting them down. The closest I've come there is a handful of fan fiction works.