gratitude interlude: the awards show edition

You guys are too kind. No, really, all of you (especially you there, LONE READER IN MONGOLIA). A little while back the wonderful JustMe at Bits and Pieces nominated me for this little jam called a Liebster Award. I still don’t totally understand the internet and I was shy and got distracted and I’m a jerk so I never did what I was supposed to do let it slip through the cracks. Then the lovely Sadie over at Invincible Spring sent some more love my way and I caved. I can no longer avoid your surely-misdirected-praise. 

So, here’s the deal: the idea of the Liebster Award is to attract more readership to small blogs that we think are super rad (that’s the technical language). It’s part chain letter, part paying it forward. You answer some questions, you pose some questions, you nominate some new blogs, and then you start counting page views from Firefox users in the Ukraine. You’re supposed to do eleven of each (11 questions, 11 nominees, 11 things about yourself), but because I’m a jerk a non-conformist and 11 is a bridge too far into double-digit-land, I may not have followed each of these rules exactly…

So. Here are my nominees:[1]

1. Schrodinger's Catbox

2. The Quest for the Golden Egg

3. Overworked Ovaries

4. Invincible Spring (I can return the favor, right?)
5. Bits and Pieces (ditto)

6. Lamenting the Lentil

And here are some questions for these witty ladies (no pressure to play along here):

1. What’s one thing you wish you had known before starting this, ahem, adventure?

2. What’s your vice/guilty pleasure?

3. What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?

4. Chocolate or peanut butter?

5. Complete this sentence: When I grow up I want to be _______.

6. What non fertility-trying-to-conceive website should the rest of us be wasting time on right now?

7. What was your favorite childhood television show?

8. You are down to your last $20 - what do you buy?

9. And finally, because I have a tendency to succumb to peer pressure, please share a recipe?

And here are my (sort of complete) answers to the burning questions posed by Sadie:

1. Did you have an imaginary friend growing up?

Oh dear. Yes, I did. His name was Ned. He was kind of intermittently a human friend and on non-consecutive Tuesdays he was a monkey. We went on adventures together. (I just realized that I sort of just described the plot to Dora the Explorer. What can I say, I was way ahead of my time.)

2. If you had to pick: Museum/Gallery, or Great Outdoors?

Can’t I have it all? (Note: we tried. In the fall, C and I took a lovely bike ride to an outdoor museum and sculpture garden where arriving on your bike got you free admission. So I’ll just go ahead and get greedy here: I will have both, pleaseandthankyou.)

3. City or countryside?

 Man, these “or” questions are killing me. Serenity of the country with the diversity of the city?

4. Is there a particular artist whose work really speaks to you? 

I am an uncouth philistine; an uncultured reality-TV watching dolt.

5. What place have you traveled that you wanted to return to again and again?

Yikes. This is hard. Paris; Cape Town; a few different small towns in Central America; Seville, Spain; Asheville, North Carolina; Kauai; Bariloche, Argentina; Big Sur. Should I keep going?

6. If you could invite anyone, living or dead, who would be on the guest list for your dream dinner party?

(This is hard. On one hand, I could try to sound smart: Emma Goldman, Gayatri Spivak, Cesar Chavez, Saul Alinksy, Bayard Rustin. On the other hand, I could just be shallow: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Because they are smart and also happen to be very funny.)

7. What made you decide to start blogging?

Narcissism. A vain desire to subject others to my sarcastic musings. Seriously though. My work as an attorney doesn’t exactly provide a creative outlet – because that would be malpractice! – and my clients are of the indigent-marginalized-don’t-always-look-the-best-on-paper kind and are facing pretty high stakes stuff. So while I really do love the work I do , it’s nice to have some balance – of the sarcastic-blogging kind.

8. Halloween/fancy dress costume of choice? 

C and I did a somewhat convincing Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon thing back in the heyday of Weekend Update.  

9. And I'm totally stealing Amanda's idea, because I want more recipes for my collection. So pretty please, share one if you can?

Well, as I’ve previously demonstrated here and here, I am basically eating my feelings all of the time (and my feelings usually taste like chocolate). But recently C got me Ottolenghi’s (vegetarian) bible, Plenty, and we’ve been pretty steadily cooking our way through that garden of Eden for the last couple weeks. More to come on that…

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[1] Although I only nominated folks in infertility land, there are some super badass blogs I follow about all kinds of other stuff like stay-at-home-dads-who-live-with-two-kids-in-tiny-spaces and super-tough-inspiring-women-who-hike-the-entire-PCT (Cheryl Strayed's got nothing on this one....).