A Liebster Award, for Me?

A few days ago I gleefully told my husband, “Blogging is fun! There are such creative people out there and I’m having a blast discovering them!” And then the next day I received notice that Jaded Apothecary (someone who embodies creative) nominated me for a Liebster Award.

The Liebster Award is intended to recognize up-and-coming blogs, particularly those with fewer than 200 followers. The rules are as follows: Post 11 facts about yourself. Answer the questions posed by your nominator. Pass the award on to 11 new recipients. Pose 11 new questions to your bloggers.

Liebster Award

Next, post a copy of the badge on your blog (you can find several options by doing a Google image search for “Liebster Award”). Finish it all up by notifying your selected nominees, and be sure to include links to the originating blog, as well as to those of the new recipients.

First off, thanks to http://jadedapothecary.wordpress.com/ for the nomination. This mysterious blogger stays private while questioning the world in a funny and informed fashion. Jaded Apothecary, your own acceptance post for the award is a hard act to follow! Here are my answers to your 11 queries:

1. Do you feel like you were destined to become a writer? And by that I mean, do you kind of feel like that scene in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit when Whoopi Goldberg tells Lauryn Hill that if she wakes up in the morning and can only think about singing, then she’s meant to be a singer? Is Whoopi Goldberg saying to you, “You’re meant to be a writer, girl!”…or guy?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of 6. I took way too long to get serious about it.

2. Since I can’t cook, I’d love to read about your worst cooking disaster. Go on now. Make me feel better about myself.

It was a dessert soufflé. I mastered savory soufflés so easily that I thought, How hard could it be to make one for dessert? I disappeared into the kitchen with 2 baskets of strawberries and good intentions. Pride goeth before a fall… and fall is exactly what my soufflé did. I came back out 3 hours later (really) with something flat that had the color and consistency of a rubber eraser. That is the first and last time I ever tried to make a dessert soufflé as the failure scarred me for life!

3. If you were a tree, what tree would you be? And don’t you roll your eyes at me. They ask this question during corporate “development” sessions for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is, but still. I’d like to know your answer.

Sugar maple.

4. What’s the last television show you gave up on watching because you just couldn’t deal with it anymore?

24 Hours. The word ‘jingoistic’ comes to mind.

5. What’s your favorite holiday?

Thanksgiving, hands down.

6. Did you, like me, have a panic attack (but a good one) when you first realized that people in other countries were reading your work?

No, I had that panic attack when my husband first talked me into becoming a blogger.

7. If you could make a difference in the world (and I’m talking about a genuine, magical difference…not the Miss America crap), what would it be?

Convince people that we really are all connected. There is no “other”.

8. I can’t watch the commercial for the ASPCA without crying uncontrollably for 20 minutes, clutching my own dog and loving on him until he literally forces himself away from me, and, sometimes, placing a quick call to my therapist. Can you? I mean, it’s sad!

I leave the room when reports on animals caught in man-made disasters come on.

9. Do you have any friends in your life who date back to your childhood?

Yes!

10. What’s your favorite color, and what do you think it says about you as a person?

What does it say about me that I actually have several favorite colors?

11. When you travel, do you ever wish you could pull someone aside, open their suitcase, pull out a different outfit, throw it at them, and then send them to the restroom shouting, “You will change into this right now, because as things stand, you look ridiculous. Who let you believe this was okay? You’re in an airport, ma’am! Pajama jeans and an old Body Glove t-shirt are unacceptable!” Explain.

No. But I’ve wanted to strangle fellow travelers more than once for holding up the plane while they try to stuff their obnoxiously oversized carry-on luggage into the overhead bin. Which part of “must fit into space above or below the seat” did they not understand?

And here are 11 factoids about me:

(Photo from Wikipedia)

  1. I’m a southpaw.
  2. My father worked for the Forest Service, so as a kid I spent every summer in the woods.
  3. We had flying squirrels as pets every summer. (See #2)
  4. My siblings and I agree: we had the perfect childhoods. (See #2 & #3)
  5. I’ve probably watched the film Blade Runner 50 times.
  6. I used to speak conversational Spanish and Italian, but right now German takes up most of the brain space reserved for foreign languages.
  7. I can laugh at myself.
  8. I’ve been licensed as a massage therapist for 25 years. It’s the perfect work for me: it combines science (treatments for injuries, anatomy) with intuition (yes, there is a mind-body-spirit connection).
  9. I’m named for a grandfather who was struck by lightening – twice.
  10. I’m sometimes overcome with Happy Feet! (Steve Martin fans will get this reference.)
  11. My husband is German and no one does cake and coffee better than the Germans. For our stateside wedding party we had the bakery make 6 different cakes rather than the traditional white one. We had chocolate, coconut, yellow, spice, carrot cake, and so on… and asked the bakery to misspell our names on all but one of them. Since we’re Jadi & Uwe it was an easy request.

I nominate the following bloggers for the Liebster Award. Thanks to each of you for inspiring me, as well as giving me a good reason to turn on the laptop each morning:

  1. http://lasesana.wordpress.com/
  2. http://thatgirlwhoreadsbooks.com/
  3. http://cvheerden.wordpress.com/ Her wonderful blog Bridging Worlds currently has 120 followers and I’m happy that fact makes it eligible for this nomination.
  4. http://unpackedwriter.com/
  5. http://travel-stained.com/
  6. http://thinktome.wordpress.com/
  7. http://volunteerfringe.com/
  8. http://themodernmanuscript.wordpress.com/
  9. http://wearenotconnected.wordpress.com/
  10. http://alaskamexicoandbeyond.wordpress.com/
  11. http://windhorseblog.wordpress.com/

 Questions for my nominees:

  1. Do you want to live to be 100?
  2. If you dream that you can fly, where are you flying to?
  3. What is ‘your’ song?
  4. If you could climb in a time machine, where would you go?
  5. Do you need a private space to write, or can you write anywhere?
  6. Are there foods you absolutely refuse to eat?
  7. Do you have a book you reread over and over?
  8. What person or past experience makes you sentimental?
  9. What is the best vacation you’ve ever had?
  10. Do you believe in reincarnation?
  11. If yes, what do you hope (or worry) you’ll come back as? If no, what do you think comes next?

18 thoughts on “A Liebster Award, for Me?”

  1. Love your answer number 7. Agree with you 100 % on that. I often feel that I have more in common with people who live thousands of miles away than with my next door neighbours. But please don’t criticise people for taking too much hand luggage. I know it’s annoying that these days the luggage takes up almost more space in the cabin than the passengers, but it’s entirely the airlines who are to blame for the situation as keep limiting the luggage allowance to such a minimum that there is no other way than taking it all into the cabin 😀

    1. Hi Karen, I take the biggest carry-on bag I can WITHIN REASON. That’s the part that makes me crazy as I wait for my more spatially challenged fellow travelers… I agree totally that the luggage allowance makes things difficult. My personal solution is to travel with a very large suitcase and use that as my checked baggage. Glad you stopped by and I wish you happy trails! —Jadi

  2. Hi Jadi, I finally got around to post my acceptance blog for your wonderful award! Here it is : http://cvheerden.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/award-season-liebster-award-1/

    What is interesting is that in the meantime I got awarded a second time for the Liebster award, and the amazing thing is that it was by another lady married to a German husband… So what we all have in common is an intercultural marriage with one partner from Germany… Love your blog, you are one interesting lady!!! Great pics from your amazing travels!

  3. What a lovely introduction Jadi!
    Anyone who is able to laugh at themselves rank pretty high in my book! 😀 So very good to meet you and to get to know you a bit better here. My warmest wishes, Sharon

  4. Thank you for your kind comment, and for the nomination, Jadi! I enjoyed reading your responses, and will try to answer the ones you have posed.

  5. I will check the origins site you found – I too had a hard time figuring out what the heck the Liebster Award is. What’s great is that it’s a way to spread the word on bloggers you’ve discovered, and it’s also a good way to build community and pat one another on the back. And yes it is an award, albeit a modest one: I think your blog and the others I nominated are terrific and want people to know it. —Jadi

    1. We award each other with the assurance that we have, indeed, read and liked each other’s blogs and thus added validation to our existence! A blog, much like a photo, is shared proof that we have walked this sphere, added our own spice to it, and have, indeed, lived.

  6. Well I now understand better …. thanks to my toddlers having taken their game outside into the African sunset. The Liebster Award is something like a blogger-to-blogger chain letter that gets us all talking and chatting and enjoying each others attention which is awesome, and I will try to answer those questions so we can all have some fun, albeit there is no “jury” or “real” award. The award is that Jadi nominated us and we will be forever thankful for that! 🙂 Here you have it, a real life example of “German-ness” even when you live in South Africa.for those who want to go into some more research about the award I recommend Sopphey’s blog http://sopphey.onimpression.com/2012/05/liebster-blog-award-origins.html
    It could send us all on a journey of exploration of one of the bloggersphere’s mysteries! 🙂

  7. I really loved your answers! Being a German in South Africa which is a country greatly impressed with the English High Tea ceremony, I had a big smile on my face when you said Germans do the coffee and cake thing really well. Yip, my South African friends really miss out on an invitation to “Kaffeetrinken” here!Loved your answers and thanks soooo much for the nomination. I am not 100% sure how to proceed … but maybe come Saturday morning I will get a chance to pass it forward!

    1. We released them back into the wild at the end of every summer so we never formally named them. (I think “Rocky” was a nickname that got used a lot.) —Jadi

  8. Well, the rules are way too complicated for me to follow, but the questions were great, and the answers were interesting. And I thought I knew all about you!

    1. Hi Kathryn, I am just home from work and reading up on this award, maybe its the toddler’s toy music doodling in the background but even after two takes I am totally at loss about the rules … maybe tomorrow in the morning!but I, too, sure enjoyed reading Jadi’s answers.

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