She who inspires!

Malisa of Moonlight Hollow and The Renaissance Chick honored me with the Renee Award. 

This award is presented in honor of Renee, not the JunkQueen but a woman fighting stage 4 breast cancer. It was created by Renee's friends Bella and Ces, to be given to people who inspire us, who help us grow into who we are today and will be tomorrow. 

Here's what they have to say about their friend:

"Renee is one human being who has made such a difference in the lives of many just by being. Her honesty, wit, intelligence, and grit are a tremendous source of inspiration. She can elicit raucous laughter and guffaws in her banter, and then turn right around and offer the most heartfelt, gentle words of wisdom and emotional support. She is a spreader of love, simple and true. And her love is infectious."

Now I'm suppose to turn around and present this award to eight blogging friends who have inspired me. Instead, I'm awarding eight of these awards to my own sister!

Or fifty of them. Or maybe a hundred of them. She deserves them all! 

Sis has stage 4 ovarian cancer. She's had it off and on (mostly on) for TWELVE YEARS. This Friday she will once again stick her hands and feet into ice for three hours as a potent poison drips into her body. 

If I haven't lost count, this is the seventh type of chemo Sis has received, plus radiation and multiple surgeries. Yet I've never talked to her when she was down. Throwing up, yes. In bed so weak she couldn't lift a book, yes. But feeling sorry for herself? Never. In a bad mood? Never.

Sis is a loving wife, mother, and grandmother who is battling a disease that scientists are slowly conquering. In ten years, she feels woman will have more options against all types of cancers.

But that's in ten years. Sis, though, is determined to be around to see that happen, to watch her grandchildren graduate and marry and become mothers themselves. 

I told her once that I admired her. She replied "Why? It's not like I have a choice."

But she does have a choice. In her circumstances, she could be a grumpy, bitchy, and demoralized human being. Instead, she's a joy and an inspiration to be around.

I love ya, Sis!

Me on the left and Sis on the right,

when my hair had color

and...well...when she still had hair!

Overlickers, oversmellers, and overbloggers = overachievers!

Oh, they start out small enough, a mere spot, perhaps, on a paw or leg, but they quickly overlap onto the human sitting next to them. In turn, they extend beyond both the spot and the human, overrunning the sofa both dog and person sit upon.

I'm talking about my dogs and their licking, or, more accurately, overlicking.

Both my dogs are overlickers. If they were people, we'd call them overachievers, but they're just dogs. Like their human counterpart, overlickers cannot be distracted from their focus. They must cover completely the area their inner being has assigned to them. They simply must lick!

Similar to overlickers and overachievers are overbloggers. Overbloggers self-assign themselves to cover completely an area picked by their inner being. They simply must blog!

Truth be told, all three of these terms denote success in one’s field. All three are good things to be. Ask your dog if you don’t believe me. I bet he can name three overlickers he admires who live right in your neighborhood. And that doesn’t include any oversmellers. We’re not even going there.

No one pays an overblogger to start a blog. Few encourage them with comments. Many visit but few confess to it. Something inside a blogger drives them to cover their beat, as they used to say in the newspaper business, and cover it well.

Here’s a short list of overbloggers who I admire and think cover their beats extremely well. I advise you to check them out during these cold evenings. Ignore the little children wanting food. Ignore husbands demanding attention. Ignore the new flat screen TV you got for Christmas. You won’t regret it.

Oh, and leave them a comment.

Sher, Rebecca and Robin, David, Jenny, Meb!

If their back posts don't keep you busy, try examining their blog rolls. The year will be 2010 before you're done.

Thank you Malisa and Karen for the award!
[The "Proximity Award" is given to blogs that believe and invest in PROXIMITY - nearness in space, time and relationships! These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! I am to pass this award on to eight bloggers, who must choose eight more and include this cleverly written text into the body of their awards.]

The Honest Crap Award!

To keep this award I have to tell you ten things about me that you don’t even want to know.

FringeGirl is forcing me do this so jump over there and tell her hi and thanks for me. You'll enjoy her humor and freshness and truthfully it won't matter a bit if you skip the rest of this post.

I also have to present Honest Scrap, the rightful name of this award, to seven blogs I think you'll like. That will be tomorrow's post. Come back for that. UPDATE: SHUFLE, Chapter Thirteen, is tomorrow. Come back Saturday for good blog links.

Number one: I was pooped on by birds twice in one day last year. I can’t remember which day it was but I remember I got pooped on in Austin and pooped on near Caldwell. If it was the same pooper, he was flying 70-miles an hour and had taken the same GPS route we had. If he hit me twice, just think of how many times he missed.

Speaking of flying, (the second thing) I once rode on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle all the way from Denver, down to Houston, and back again in only five days. I even napped while riding, although I don’t recommend that. The fillings in my back teeth, among other things, vibrated for months!

At the time, and this is number three, I owned my own motorcycle, a green Yamaha. We didn’t have a garage so at night we parked both bikes in our narrow kitchen. That Yamaha looked like a poor country cousin next to the Harley but if both bikes were parked just right, I could sit on the Yamaha and scramble eggs, the extent of my cooking abilities back then.

I dumped that Yamaha twice and both times I had to stop a couple of strangers and ask them to help me upright it. I was pretty skinny at the time and that bike was way too heavy for me to lift on my own. It was sturdy, though, and after getting it set on its wheels again, I just climbed back on and rode away. That was Number four.

I didn’t weight 100 pounds until I got pregnant with my daughter, a fact that’s number five on the list. I got up to 103 pounds during that pregnancy, had my baby two months early, and immediately dropped under a hundred pounds again. Those are called the good ol’ days at Weight Watcher meetings.

I’m not that thin anymore, although I keep in shape and work out at least eight hours a week most weeks, and sometimes twelve hours a week, making this the sixth thing. I get paid for working out since I teach exercise classes at a couple of places. My theory is that more of us would work out if we were paid to do so.

Which leads me to number seven: I’m 63-years old and wear a swim suit to work. If someone had told me years ago that I’d be doing this, I would have laughed my hinny off, especially since I was scared to death of water until I was in my fifties. Of course, years ago I didn’t have a hinny.

I liked the motorcycle just fine but it wasn’t my favorite form of transportation. That would have been my horse (number eight). A customer at my photo shop GAVE me a thoroughbred racing horse. I named him Bubba.

Bubba hadn’t been a good race horse. He liked to run with the pack, not in front of it. He’d try to double back, I’m sure, just to be with his friends. Very confusing on a race track.

Bubba liked his back rubbed with my bare feet. IT Guy and I would sit on the back porch, which was elevated, and Bubba would nibble my bare toes until I’d give him his rub. I still have Bubba’s saddle in my living room. Among all the dead things on display in my house, I wish one of them was Bubba, all 16 hands of him (that’s horse talk).

Number nine (and these things are really getting harder to tie together here) is another animal I wish I had on display. Only this animal I made myself. When I worked for a theatrical costume house in Denver as a seamstress, I contrived a gorilla suit out of old furs.

The first time it was rented out to an individual, the suit was left on our doorstep the following Monday morning with a shotgun-blasted butt and no explanation. To this day I wonder what mischief that gorilla had gotten into. Looking AT love in all the wrong places, I imagine.

Another favorite dead thing, and thank goodness this is number ten, is a basket made from an armadillo. I'll show it to you if you insist.

Charles Apelt, a German basketmaker, made them for souvenirs. He displayed his first one in 1902 at the World’s Fair. The Apelt Armadillo Farm was probably the only commercial attempt at raising armadillos. They went out of business in the 1970s. Gee, I wonder why.

If you've read all this honest crap, I appreciate it. You now know more about me than most of my ex-husbands.

Have a nice day.

Sex things...I mean SIX things about me! part two

OK, I need to award this Kreativ Blogger thingy to four more people, then tell you six things about me. I'm in a hurry because my beer is getting warm! You have to click on the names to see who and what they are.

Suzanne - If you like good photography, go see this site. Just looking at it will improve your own pictures.

PJ - If you like folk art, go see this site. It will give you a new appreciation for America and her artists.

WhisperWood - If you like junk (and who among us doesn't), go see this site. I can't decide if I like it for the good junk she finds or the good pictures she takes of the good junk.

Karen - If you like a good crisp, go to this site and then go back several posts to get the recipe. Yummy! Plus her life is more interesting than mine.

For all you people I didn't award anything, I want you to know I wanted to but they wouldn't let me do more than six. They are mean bloggers.

Now the SIX things. You're not going to like them but I'm going to tell you anyway!

1. I'm on my fourth marriage. The first two I killed off but the third one is still living. He's in constant pain, though.

2. Two of my children are aliens. Not the illegal type. The from-outer-space type. I'm not telling you which two because as yet I haven't told them. Somehow, with the state the world is in, I don't think they'll mind too much.

3. I hate junk. Oh, I say I love it, just like I say I love garage sales, but really I hate it all. If I'd told you earlier that I hate it all, you wouldn't have let me hang out with ya' all.

4. I drink margaritas for breakfast. Orange juice upsets my stomach but this way I still get my morning citrus.

5. When I eat hot dogs, I use real dogs.

And finally:

6. Renee writes all my blogs!

Awarding Good Writing...part one

I feel like a voyeur! I'm suppose to be deciding who will receive my Kreativ Blogger award but instead I got tangled up in the past posts of a couple of really good writers.

I feel like I'm outside their homes, peeking through foggy windowpanes. I watch them go room to room, pick up this topic and that, explore them, and gently place them down again, knowing them all the better and sharing that knowledge with me. I recommend you trek into their archives too.

The first writer to get my award is FringeGirl from The Domestic Fringe. She's already got this once but as far as I'm concerned, she needs to get it every post! She makes me laugh (out loud, like I'm watching Funniest Home Videos). She makes me think. She hasn't made me cry yet, but she's tried. I'm tough. (I'm thinking of the 401K sign here!)

FringeGirl hasn't been blogging long. My question is: If she's this good as a two-month old blogger, just think of the treat we'll be reading next year at this time!

The second writer for my award is Deb of DidDebDoIt. I'm SO jealous of her. Deb has Mondays. We all have Mondays, you might be thinking, but Deb has art Mondays with a group of like-minded artists. Yep, Deb makes me want to do my art again.

Deb's photography alone is worth the price of admission to her blog. OK, there's no admission price but there should be. Her written word is much deeper than mine. More introspective. More rewarding to the reader. I'm fluff; she's a thinker!

All this has nothing to do with the picture above, but I knew you wouldn't read this post without a photo! Renee gave me the sign this weekend. I placed it on the table and liked it so well that I think I'll keep it there, except for when I dust.

Like I ever dust!