I'm Blushing!

Another award?  For me?  Are you sure?

I want to thank Lynn from Upcountryolio for awarding me with The Kreativ Blogger Award.  It's very flattering (and somewhat ironic) that someone as creative as Lynn is giving me an award for being creative.  (We have SO got this backwards.)  But since she hasn't yet sent me an email saying that it's all a big mistake, I'm going to run with it.

As is typical with awards, there are some rules:

1) Give a big shout out & thank you to the blogger who passed on the award to you and link

to their homepage.

2) List seven interesting things about yourself that readers may enjoy learning about you.

3) Nominate seven other amazing bloggers by linking to their homepages & let them know that you have done so.

Now, as some of you may know, I'm not much of a rule-follower so I'm going to tweak things a bit.  Rather than designating seven new bloggers, I thought I would put the word out to all of my readers:  Would you like to participate?  Are there seven blogs you'd like to recognize?  Are there seven things that the world really needs to know about you?  If you answered yes to any of these questions, then take the award and run with it.  I bestow it upon you :)

Now here are my seven facts:

• My mom looks exactly like Sophia Loren--maybe even a little prettier.  Here is a picture of us from back in the day.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

• 

  Don't pin my mama!

• I can name my fingers in Italian.  I would do it here but I'd butcher the spelling.  The English translation is (starting with the pinkie): the littlest of them all, the one the ring goes on, the tallest of them all, the one that licks/wipes the plate & the one that kills the bugs.  To this day I don't know if this a a real Italian "thing" or if my Italian grandpa just made it up.  
• As a child I was the queen of stitches.  In a couple-year-period I had them on my forehead, chin and skull.  Thankfully our next door neighbor was a doctor.  
• I once had a dog named "Laundry."
• I can recite the first fourteen lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English.  
• The finger-naming and Canterbury-Tale-reciting are the extent of my "foreign language" skills.  (Have you ever heard Middle English?  It totally counts as a foreign language.)
• I was a vegetarian from age 12 to age 24.  My husband convinced me to add poultry and fish back into my diet but I still don't eat red meat.  

Okay, that was a whole bunch of random, wasn't it?  (And no, you can't get those three minutes back.)

But seriously--thanks for thinking of me Lynn!  I really appreciate the recognition.

Getting My Kumbaya on

Okay, so here's the deal: this is going to be kind of a sappy post.  All kinds of sentimental.  If that isn't your thing you might want to stop reading now.  (Don't say you weren't warned.)

So I've talked a number of times about blogging, both why I started and what I'd like to get out of it.  As it turns out, my favorite thing about blogging is something that wasn't even on my radar until I'd been doing it for a few weeks: the friendships and connections that keep springing up as a result.  


Not that I didn't want connections, I simply wasn't looking to make them via the blog.  (In my mind that was what Facebook was for ;)  I'm not sure why, I just hadn't envisioned blogging as such a give and take type of thing.  But of course, this is the internet and nothing is done in isolation.  Nope, if I write something in the morning I'm often getting feedback before lunch.

And so far, the feedback has been so... nice.  No, not just nice.  Nice doesn't cover it.  It's also been interesting and... somehow fulfilling.  I've gotten feedback from people all over the world.  Like New Zealand (I'm looking at you Simoney).  Or Italy (okay, I suspect this woman stopped by because my blog has an Italian title, but she stayed long enough to leave a comment: "Sono fantastiche. Bravissima. Ciao," and I now follow her blog which I faithfully translate from Italian to English).


And of course there are all the friends that I've made here in the US.  One in particular, Linda from It All Started With Paint, stopped my my blog in its infancy (which admittedly was only a few weeks ago ;).  Her encouragement really inspired me to take things up a notch and I am oh so grateful.  She also sent some really nice blog-friends my way (seriously, she told a bunch of people to come read my blog--and they did!) and now some of them are also dear blog friends (ahem, cough, Karianne). 


Believe it or not, I'm going somewhere with this.  


You see, yesterday I was awarded The Liebster Award.  


Twice.  


In one day.  




For those of you who aren't familiar, Liebster is a German word which means "dearest" or "beloved". It can also mean "favorite". The idea behind the Liebster Award is that it's given to up-and-coming bloggers (with fewer than 200 followers) in order to create new connections and bring attention to some wonderful, growing blogs.


And now I get to pass the Liebster Award along to someone else!  Here are the rules:  



1. Link back to the person or people who bestowed the honor on you.
2. Pick 5* blogs with less than 200 followers to pass the award forward.
3. Leave the awardees a comment informing them about their designation.
4. Post the award on your blog!


The two bloggers who bestowed the award on me were Lisa from Budget Design Girl and Emily from Sweet Bliss Bakery.  

Lisa is clearly a kindred spirit.  We're both Midwestern transplants (living in Southern California) who are doing our best to feather our nests without breaking the bank.  Her home tour is beautiful and she's done some amazing projects (like this vintage desk redo).  

And Emily, well, just go to her blog and click on the cupcakes tab.  Trust me, you won't regret it!

Thanks ladies!!

Now accepting an award is easy but the bestowing part is always a challenge for me.  The last time someone gave me one I was so paralyzed by indecision that I simply never followed through.   (I still feel ashamed about this.)  Truth be told, at that early stage in my blog, I just didn't feel qualified to give anyone an award.  (I kind of envisioned the recipients going, "Who are you to be giving me an award?" which is silly when you consider all the nice things I've just said about the blogging community.)  

Now that I've been at it a bit longer I feel a slightly more qualified to give out the Liebster (*though I've only picked three recipients as opposed to the usual five).  

Here they are:

• Sara from Everyday Sadie.  Sara is funny and I love funny.  (Here is an excerpt from her "About Me":  I'm a coffee-connoisseur (read: addict)... and I've been married so long I'm practically a sitcom.  See?  Funny.  (Plus this recipe looks awesome!)  So please, go and check her out.  (Tell her I sent you ;)
• Next up is Courtney from Thoughts From the Birdhouse.  At some point Courtney quietly came by my blog and became a follower.  When I stopped by to return the favor I was delighted.  Courtney is smart and articulate and I love her blog.  In short, I totally want to be Courtney when I grow up.  The problem with that?  I'm also totally old enough to be her mother.   Yup, Courtney is in high school.  (And I am sooo glad that she'll be running the country when I'm old and in need of care.)
• My final pick is a person I know in real life.  Her name is Sabine and our daughters do children's theater together.  Sabine is a true Renaissance woman.  Her "real life" job is something technical (that I don't understand).  At home she's a mom to three beautiful (tri-lingual) children.  She's also an amazing cook (did I mention she's French?) and an avid crafter.  In her copious amounts of free time ;) she started The Tech Foodie a blog that chronicles all of this.  The blog is new, but she's already posted some amazing recipes and I'm sure there's lots of great stuff to come!  Please be sure to check her out!

So that's it!  The Liebster award is just the latest warm and fuzzy thing that's happened to me since I've begun blogging.  Can't wait to see what's next ;)

I'd Like to Thank the Academy..

My warm welcome to the blogosphere continued today with an unexpected (and much appreciated!) surprise.  The lovely Mary Sullivan Frasier of Go Ahead...Take a Bite! has bestowed upon me The Versatile Blogger Award.  

How cool is that?  

(If you haven't read Mary's blog, go on over and check it out.  I'll wait.  You might want to start with the post about the chocolate chip cookie/brownie bars.)  (You're welcome.)

So once you receive the award, you need to do the following:

1. Add the award to your blog.  
2. Thank the blogger who gave it to you.
3. Mention seven random things about yourself. (see below)
4. List the rules.
5. Award to 15 bloggers.
6. Inform each of those 15 by leaving a comment on their blog.

Since I've already added the award and thanked Miss Mary (what the heck, Mary deserves to be thanked twice: Thanks, Mary!)  now I need to list my seven random things:

1. I'm almost ten years younger than my sister but only eleven months older than my brother.  That reminds me that I should do something nice for my mom...  like every day.  
2. My great-grandparents were swept away by a tsunami after a Mediterranean earthquake in 1908.  My great-grandmother survived because her floor-length hair got caught in a tree.  My great-great aunt was taken in by the Pope after that same earthquake.  She lived in Vatican City for six years.
3. I didn't drive on the freeway for several years after getting my license.  Merging seemed unnatural and wrong.  (Plus mighty dangerous.)  My brother finally got fed up and made me do it.  Thanks, Bro.
4. When my parents were married, they owned, collectively, something like 10,000 books.  They covered virtually every wall in the common living space. 
5. When I was young I hated my name.  Spencer Gifts never had stickers or tiny license plates or lunch bags with the name "Elena" on them.  I'm over that now.
6. Hot peppers give me the hiccups.  The reaction is immediate and makes an excellent party trick.  (This will not, however, stop me from making--and eating--the rockin' Guacamole recipe that Mary has on her site.)
7. I was Really Rosie in our fourth grade performance of "Really Rosie."  My life has all been downhill since then.

Okay, so that should about do it for my seven random facts.  Now for the fun (but difficult) part: bestowing the award on other bloggers.  Is it lame if I wait until my next post to do that?  It's the perfect excuse to spend my evening curled up with a bunch of good blogs...