Awards!

I have to admit that I'm so surprised and please that anyone even reads this blog, let alone likes it! I started it several years ago so that I would have a way to participate in several other writing blogs. Sadly, I think both of those blogs are now gone (One Deep Breath - a weekly haiku blog and Poetry Thursday. Does anyone remember these?)

I let this blog sit idle for quite a while before deciding to revive it a few months ago. I'm so glad I started writing here again. I've really enjoyed getting to know all of you and I love reading what you write.

Now I've been honored with two awards. The first is from ElfTea. She is living in Japan with her husband who is a Marine, raising their little ones. She also was one of the first participants of my haiku prompts, which means a lot to me.



The rules for this award are to nominate 7 or so other blogs and to share 10 honest things about yourself. I've also been given this award on my other blog, Eat at Home, so I'm going to split it up a bit and nominate 3 blogs here and 3 blogs over there and share 5 things about myself on each blog.

1. My best writing ideas come when I'm in the shower or vacuuming. You would think this would inspire me to spend more time vacuuming, but no. I do however like to take long showers.

2. I took a creative writing class in high school. I was so bad at writing short stories, I stuck to poetry. Most of my ideas for poems came from reading the submissions in Seventeen Magazine and then trying to write them from memory. I never actually copied them and always put my own spin on them, but it was borderline plagerism. However, the teacher liked "my" work and I got good grades. I also think it did help me learn to write poetry. I've loved it ever since and have not stolen anyone's work since high school.

3. My first car was a Honda Civic. I don't even know what year the car was made, probably 70 something (I bought it in 1985). It had a manual choke that I learned to tweak so that the car sputtered a bit less while I was driving it. What I didn't learn was that the oil needed to be changed, or at least added to, on a regular basis. I drove the car to Purdue to visit a friend and on the way back it just quit. Stopped right there on the interstate. My friend and I accepted a ride from two men who stopped to help. They did get us back to where we needed to be - but, what were we thinking??!! It's this kind of judgement that makes me nervous about having a teenage daughter.

4. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, I looked in the mirror and realized that I look exactly like my sister. This isn't really a revelation - we've always looked alike - but, you know that weird feeling when you look at yourself, but you see your sister or mom? It's nothing like when we were younger and used to be mistaken for each other. Once, we even swapped class schedules in high school. I went to her classes and she went to mine. I don't think we fooled anybody, but it was fun.

5. I was pretty insecure when I was younger. I went to a dance in 9th grade and one of the popular guys asked me to dance. The entire time I danced with Alex, I wondered if he had been put up to asking me to dance. Maybe he'd taken a dare from his friends to dance with the quiet, nerdy girl. I still wonder.

At the same dance, Andy asked me to dance with him. I thought he was the geekiest boy ever. I'm pretty sure I turned him down, or maybe I did dance with him and blocked it from my mind. Turns out that the geeky boy grew up and now lives in Paris, France working for an important company, making big money. He speaks a bunch of European languages fluently. I guess he paid a lot more attention in French class than I did.

Okay, now for the blogs I'm nominating for the Honest Scrap Award:

Jewel at Pink Ink

Cate at Show My Face

Denene at My Brown Baby



Katie Lane of Sunshine and Bubblegum gave me this award. Thanks, Katie! I'm passing this award onto Melissa at The Scholastic Scribe