Kreativ Blogger Award

Carla, over at Carla Nayland Historical Fiction bludgeoned me with this colorful award. As with all bling, it comes with strings, namely some play along questions. So here they are, in no particularly coherent order . . .





List 7 of your favourite things.

• paper - forms:art papers with all their wondrous weights and textures, books, and Post-it® notes – savior of the absentminded.

• dogs - The only beings that worship me as their god. Please don't tell them I'm not omnipotent.

• the Internet - Instant gratification for the terminally curious. I want to bake the inventor of Google Earth a cake for allowing me to see what's parked in my British friend's driveway. (Hi Oonah!)

• Wool and wooly things - From alpaca fleece to Rambouillet roving to yak yarn and everything in between.

• National Forests and Parks - Legal trespassing on spectacular scenery, and source of inspiration for poetic and theological treatises.

• Poetry - Saving my sanity stanza by stanza, line by line, rhyme by rhyme.

• Mythology, sociology, theology, and physics – The cause of inner dichotomy since the dawn of time.

List 7 of your favourite activities.

• hiking/walking meditations - AKA wandering aimlessly/purposefully through vast uncharted (by me) areas of wilderness in a never ending quest for inspiration/spiritual enlightenment, and a nagging obsession with Man vs. Wild – note to self, bring plenty of power bars, since eating bugs/snakes/yak eyeballs is out of the question.
  

• Spinning/knitting/dyeing wool - OR 101 things to do with a sheep fleece. What? Everyone doesn't like making their clothes from the animal up? Yes, I have a loom too. Don't come whining to me for a loincloth when the zombie apocalypse hits. Plan ahead.

• Printmaking/drawing/graphic design – See zombie apocalypse. Your only news and cartoons will come from me. Reduced to bare essentials and printed with the finest ink and papers harvested from the undead.

• Reading/writing poetry and other fiction – I want to create an earworm so insidious schoolchildren 200 years from now will be belting out my verses instead of "The Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere" or "Casey At The Bat". A really annoying rap song would be quicker, but I do have standards.

• Mad Scientist – otherwise known as cooking. I almost never make a recipe the same way twice. Usually because I've lost the recipe, or forgot to write it down while creating a new dish. ADHD Rule of Cooking: If it has more than 7 ingredients, it probably didn't need those extra ones anyhow. Better off leaving them out, no one will miss them.

• Philosophical Discourse. Name the topic. AKA Will argue for coffee, with coffee, over coffee, about coffee.

• Home Repair – It's my house - if I want my living room to be burnt orange, I can do that. What's not to like?

List 7 things no-one knows about you.

• I once spent 4 months in the jungles of Honduras learning: The velocity of a fist size beetle determines how badly the windshield will get broken. If you accidentally kill a chicken, villagers will take the equivalent of $2.50 in compensation. Plus the dead chicken. Toenails do grow back from jungle rot. Eventually.

• I can sing the Canadian National Anthem in both English and French. Yes, we had a minor league hockey team in my hometown, why do you ask??

• If I had to do it over again, I'd be a physicist of some sort. Astro or quantum. Oh, and I'd pay more attention in math class.

• I took a train trip from Siena, Italy to Amsterdam by myself one weekend just to go to the Vincent Van Gogh museum. I also went to the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum, back to UNISI just in time to take an art history test. Van Gogh wasn't on it…

• My eldest child and I have the exact same birthmark, in the exact same place.

• There is rap music on my iPod.

• I originally wanted to fly UH-60 Black Hawks in the Army. Instead of going up, in the air, they thought I'd be happier blowing things up, in the air. Go figure.

Pass the award on to 7 others.

• Since, as Anonymous always reminds me, I don't have seven friends, the award is up for grabs. Just follow the loose-goose rules and let the rest of us know you played, so we can go read all about YOU.

Fabulous Blog Award

A few weeks back Carla bestowed this award on me. I'm to name five things I'm obsessed with, and name five other blogs I think are fabulous.

I tinkered with the award a bit to fit the unofficial 'theme' of my blog - and to annoy Anonymous.

Since Carla downgraded 'obsessed' to 'enthusiastic', I'm going to sidestep and do my restrained version of 'quite interested'.



Five things I'm Quite Interested in.


Poetry – That's pretty much a given. Reading, writing, and contemplating poetry occupies a significant portion of my writing brain. I've listed some of my favorites over on the Every Day Poets staff page, so I won't repeat myself here. I'm sure the astute have picked up on the Usual Suspects I write about.


Corgis - Bet you didn't see that one coming. My first love will always be Basenjis, and we were looking for the right Basenji rescue to adopt, but the right one wasn't coming along quick enough. Actually, the Corgis were supposed to be a German Shepherd, but we got bumped down the waiting list, and then Eldest Child was introduced to three day old Max and fell in love with him. A pint sized German Shepherd in convenient pocket form. So we have Corgis. They're pretty special, they think so, and don't let us forget it.


Design - Be it Knitting, Printmaking, Engineering, web pages, or anything involving figuring it out with pencil and paper first. My early training was as a visual artist, and I can't get away from that. I set out for college many moons ago to be an illustrator, before I got seduced by the Dark Side of Fine Arts and Philosophy.


Wyoming Landscapes – which includes hiking over them, driving around in them, taking pictures of, and in general just loving every minute of living in the wide open wild west. Yes, even the snow. Mostly. *grumbles*


Paper - This comes closest to the 'obsession' of which the award speaks. I love paper, in all its various guises. Drawing, watercolor, printmaking, pastel papers, and illustration board. Cardstock. Vellum, parchment, and handmade paper. Newsprint and cardboard. Blank legal tablets. Old fashioned wrapping paper and new baseball cards. As long as there is space to draw or write on, I'm there.


My five nominees go to... any one who is interested in being obsessed. Have at it, and if you ask real nice, I'll even personalize your award a bit.

The Erratic, No Where Near Annual, Just 'Cause I Feel Like It Awards.

Since the year is hurtling to a close, I wanted to get my awards recommendations in before I forgot. Call these the "I Wish I'd Invented That" Awards, or the "Hey, Cool Idea" Awards, or even the, "How Did I Ever Live Without This" Awards. Totally subjective, based on criterion I make up as I go. No monetary prize, in fact, no prize at all, except the glow of satisfaction that comes with knowing someone else's life was touched by your product/invention/idea. And if you're dead, well, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm a bit of a procrastinator. If you're in the afterlife of your choosing and want to comment, please refrain from doing so at 2:00am and scaring the dogs.

So, in no particular order, my favorite inventions of the past few months, or millennia.

The mute button on multi-line phones. I never knew how important that little button was until I got a job that involved conference calls. Lots of them. No longer are you reduced to merely rolling your eyes at idiotic comments. With the all-inclusive mute button, now you can snort, guffaw, choke, roar, and raspberry. All without the party on the other end being the wiser. With the flick of a button a well-planted, “Oh, I agree”, or “What do you think the long term ramifications of this plan will be” ensures another round of discussion that you don’t have to take any part in! Sheer genius, I tell you…

Next is the automatic light sensing rearview mirror in my car. I love this partially because I have bad eyes that have difficulty to adjusting to changing light levels, but mostly to dim those annoying truck lights that are set on “bright enough to illuminate the surface of Mars – from Earth” and successfully blind the general public for moments at a time. Not to mention most of the vehicles behind me are huge pickup trucks with headlights on level with my back window. My nifty rearview mirror automatically adjusts and tones the searchlights down to a tolerable level, thus reducing incidents of temporary blindness and road rage on my part. Believe me, when you drive a car in a mega truck town, you need every advantage you can get.

Food processing machines. I blame this fascination on the Food Network, and programs like Unwrapped. Who thinks up machines that can not only slice and dice, but coat, dip, sort, wrap and package every sort of food stuff under the sun? Rube Goldberg would be proud. Luckily for us, the machines haven’t taken over yet. They still need humans to dump the flour, sugar, butter, eggs, etc. into the hopper and push the start button. But if machines ever figure out a way to take over our candy making, they could bring us to our chocolate covered knees.

The person who figured out that the bean from the plant family Rubiaceae, when dried, roasted, and combined with water made an interesting and stimulating beverage. Elixir of the gods, writers, and procrastinators everywhere. Coffee. Enough said.

Easy Mount stirrups - Stirrups that lengthen for mounting are the greatest invention. I'm short, and the prairie is devoid of convenient tree stumps. If I get off a horse to scope out some particularly interesting rock or plant, Mr. Horse isn’t going to kneel down to make my life easier. Nor is he going to be thrilled when I have to clamber up his side, pulling on the saddle and thunking him in the sides with my elbows and toes. If Mr. Horse is in a bad mood that day, I could be in for a long walk home should I fail to haul my butt back into the saddle. I’m getting older, muscles aren’t as flexible. I’m not a circus trick rider is all I'm saying. Don’t look for me to be making a flying leap into the saddle any time soon. (I may not be able to, but I’ll make darn sure at least one of my fictional characters can leap onto tall horses in a single bound. Call it writer’s revenge.)

So those are things I thought of today on my wander about Wyoming outreach drive. How about you? Any run of the mill invention that you can’t live without?