The Versatile Blog Award – What a Wonderful Surprise!

Wow.  I woke up this morning to a wonderful surprise!  Daisy and the Fox has nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award!  I am completely thrilled as I haven’t been blogging for that long and this is the first award for which I have been nominated. Daisy and the Fox is definitely a versatile blog.  The focus is cooking but she writes about so much more!  I especially enjoyed making the stained glass cookies she posted.  I am not a baker but they came out beautifully!

Here are the rules for the award.

1.Display the Award Certificate on your website

2. Announce your win with a post and link to whoever presented your award

3. Present 15 awards to deserving bloggers

4. Drop them a comment to tip them off after you’ve linked them in the post

5. Post 7 interesting things about yourself

There are so many wonderful bloggers out there to choose from, this was a very difficult decision to make but after careful consideration and in no particular order, here are my choices.

1. Baroque Sicily
2. The Hook
3. Spoonlighting
4. Straight, Gay, and Gray
5. Our Adventure in Croatia
6. My Sardinian Life
7. Bagni di Lucca and Beyond
8. Deliberately Delicious
9. Change of Underwear
10. Little Things
11. Christine the Gardener
12. An Expatriate in Rapallo
13. Ouch!! My Back Hurts!!
14. Crazy Working Mom
15. The Write Travel Blog

Seven Interesting Things About Me

1. I am creative – I write pretty well, take some fairly decent photographs, and paint quite badly.  Oh, and my singing, as much as I love doing it, turns the listener into a rage filled kraken.
2. Best thing I ever did in my life was to give birth to my daughter and raise her the very best way I knew how.  I made lots of mistakes, most of which I didn’t realize were mistakes at the time, but still I was a mindful parent and tried to do what was best for her.
3. The second best thing I ever did in my life was to pick my wonderful husband Nick.  He is so much better than me in so many ways – there are some real lessons I can learn from him – patience probably being the first one.  He rarely bitches or complains whereas I seem to do it all the time.
4. The third best thing I ever did was buy a house in Sicily with Nick so that we can retire to the sun in the land of Nick’s ancestors (my ancestors came from Ireland and Wales neither of which is known for it’s warm sunny climate).
5. I waaaaaaay over-think things.  My friend Neil uses the metaphor of the diamond to describe what makes a person.  The diamond is multi-facetted as are we.  I am not just one thing – I have so many facets that I don’t know if I can ever know what they all are.
6. I have been a teacher for 30 years – OMG I am so old!  The best parts of my 30 years have been running my school library, doing grad work in Hawaii, teaching in Tokyo, and taking kids to Kyoto.
7. Early in my years in Japan, I attended the fertility festival in Kawasaki.  Part of the festivities included having all the single women straddle a 20 foot log carved into the shape of a giant penis and shuffle our way from one end of it to the other.  This was supposed to give us lots of babies when we married.