If it were my stomach roll, this would all be fine.
If it were my ham and salad roll that Son stole from me after I stole it from him, this would all be fine.
It’s my blogroll! I spent hours copy/pasting urls to this and somehow, yesterday, when I tried to link the love story blog to this blog, everyone just rolled away.
Very sorry – I will begin again – grrrr!
How interesting! I just sussed out the recent statistics for this blog (something I don’t usually do – really!) and found that pain is much more popular than pleasure. I don’t have these two pps as categories in this blog, but it is obvious that more people want to read about sad stuff than happy stuff.
Why?
I do understand this because, when I was teaching Creative Writing at the local university, I used to talk to the students about this writing conundrum (this was before my husband got so sick), and this is what they came up with at the time:
I miss those students and their wisdoms.
And I would like to know why pain is so pleasurable – over to you…..
Why?
Photo courtesy of Shaam Burley
I didn’t want to cram any more winners into the previous Hot Potato Award post and I would really like to give these two amazing bloggers (who also happen to be people!) the HPA. Once again, this is not an award that has any obligations attached to it – you just take it and copy/paste it to your blog, or not.
The first blogger is a daughter who cares for her mother who has Parkinson’s Disease. She does this with a mixture of glee, energy and humour, but she is also very honest about how hard this can be.
http://camsgranny.wordpress.com/
The second blogger is a sister who cares for, and lives with, her brother who has Parkinson’s Disease. Her daily blog of the ups and downs of this journey is both heart-breaking and inspiring.
http://terry1954.wordpress.com/
Jo and Terry are both wonderful examples of selfless heroism. I take my hat off to them and hope they will accept this award!
Here are the first Hot Potato Award winners in alphabetical order. Each of these bloggers nominated me for a blog award but, as I am reluctant about awards, I have created the Hot Potato Award which is free of complicated criteria. Again, the only rule for the HPA is that you either accept it and copy/paste it to your blog, or you don’t. You cannot pass it on – it’s yours.
The first ‘winner’ is a cheeky cherub. Her blog is delightfully unpredictable and inspiring.
The second winner is one of the kindest, most generous-hearted people I have ever come across. She is a prolific blogger and a poetic photographer.
The third winner is the first person who ever nominated me. Her blog is a brilliant example of creative writing at its best.
The fourth winner is a nature-loving adventurer who combines photographs and anecdotes expertly.
http://wordsfromanneli.wordpress.com/
To all winners: Please simply take this award with my heartfelt gratitude for your support and encouragement and for your wonderful blogs! Many thanks again to Lisa and to the potato for the graphic!
PS. As an award-shy person, I have decided to respond to any nominations I receive by rewarding the nominators with the HPA. If you have received nominations for awards you already have, or if you are like me and don’t want awards, please feel free to use the HPA!
PPS. If you happened to nominate me and you are not on this list, please let me know, and you will be next – hehe!
A few days ago I was stricken with guilt at not yet having fulfilled the criteria for various blog awards I’d been nominated for by some extremely kind nominators. And then I was stricken with anxiety that I had forgotten who nominated me for what. And then I was stricken with exhaustion, searching back through past comments to try and find out. And then I was stricken with confusion about what I was supposed to actually do.
And then I went out and fed the birds.
The result is that I have invented a new award called ‘The Hot Potato Award.’ For recipients of this award, you don’t have to do anything except accept it and copy/past it to your blog’s main page. I thank Lisa Boice for helping me get the words into the picture! Lisa can be found at:
www.accidentalbirder.wordpress.com
and
www.babyaspirinyears.wordpress.com
My own resistance to awards is borne of a reluctance to accept accolades. I realize this seems ungracious and I apologize. I do, however, recognize the value in these awards in the sense that it is a wonderful way of acknowledging other blogs/bloggers, but I think this is possible without the complications of award nomination criteria.
The Hot Potato Award has very few rules:
Now, I am quite sure I have forgotten something important here but I don’t know what. Tomorrow, I will send some Hot Potato Awards to those who have been kind enough to nominate me for other awards.
Any suggestions appreciated, before the hot potato turns into a chip!
Okay, so I get this idea of the ‘Hot Potato Award’ (see a previous post) which I want to give to anyone who has nominated me for other awards. I thought it was quite a good idea, so I googled “hot potato” to get a free picture (because I had run out of potatoes of my own). So I found an appropriate picture but now I don’t know how to turn it into an award – to do the graphics thing with it – so, so far, I just have this picture of a potato.
But what I didn’t expect (when I googled “hot potato”) was to be led to a couple of porn sites. I found this rather startling because I didn’t know “hot potato” had connotations. I mean, how does an innocent, innocuous thing like a potato become a pornographic metaphor?
I will have to put my thinking cap on again. I thought maybe ‘Warm Potato Award’ or ‘Cold Potato Award’ but somehow these don’t have the same resonance.
Mmmmmm……..
I think I have been nominated for a few blog awards now and, to begin with, I didn’t know what this even meant. Then, when I realized, I felt a bit overwhelmed and underserving and grateful and reluctant. Eventually, I got consumed with guilt at not having fulfilled the various criteria, especially when I realized it was a lovely way of acknowledging fellow bloggers. Alas, except for a couple of recent nominations, I am not sure who or what or how I do this thing so I have decided to invent what I think is a rather brilliant strategy for award ‘reluctantees’ like me and that is to re-package whatever award anyone nominates me for (which is unlikely as I have so far been unwittingly ungracious) as The Hot Potato Award. Here are the rules:
I am sure I haven’t thought of a few things here so any ideas appreciated!
Now I just have to go back and find who nominated me and hot potato them – hehe!
In Western Australia we have big signs wherever roadworks are being done in case people go the wrong way. This can be useful, but it can also be a bit confusing.
It’s a little bit like that with blogging because you get really curious to go down a certain blog path, you like what you are reading/seeing, but you are also uncertain of where exactly you are and sometimes the historical context of where you are, in that person’s blog, takes quite a bit of time, quite a bit of deciphering.
With my own blog, Wings and things, it’s obviously the same experience for new readers or followers because, of course, the latest post is always the most recent and, unless people have time to go back, they might not ‘get it’ that there are two different-but-same stories running parallel. The Love story is about the past but everything else is about the present.
As many of you already know, my husband has chronic Parkinson’s disease and terminal prostate cancer and is now in a nursing lodge close by. Our 18-year-old son recently had major spinal surgery. And me – I love birds!
I can’t keep up with the many blogs I am interested in, no matter how hard I try, but one thing I like to do is to go back and read the very beginnings of those blogs which is what I hope people will do with mine. It’s not that there is a wrong or a right way necessarily, but going back can be fantastic!
Oh yeah, and if you go back, you will find that I don’t usually do 4 posts in the day. I cheated today with the pics – hehe!
I miss you because you are one of the bloggers I mislaid when I unsubscribed from everybody’s and created a blogroll. I am still relatively new at this blogthing so please remind me if I have unwittingly forgotten you.
I miss you because you are my now impossible-to-care-for Husband.
I miss you because you are my now growing-up Son.
I miss you because you were my father and you died.
I miss you because you were the mother who loved music, and now you can’t hear it.
I miss you because you used to think I was okay until I became so unreliable, unpredictable, unsociable, but I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
I miss all of the visits from friends and family because now home feels quiet and dead without Husband.
I miss myself.
Unsubscribing from so many blogs
Was more than just a little slog
But it got me out of a substantial bog
Thank God
And now I look at an empty inbox
That flickers with the eyes of a fox
That mocks me like a jack-in-the-box
Odd socks
What to do with all this time?
I had no idea I was in such a bind
I must have been completely blind
In kind
Caring has its penalties
It sometimes obscures the beautiful trees
And all those blogs – they spoke to me
To me
So now I start all over again
Subscribing to a chosen ten
And visiting all the rest of them
There’s always a when
It got too hard, this bloggingdom
It started to be a large kingdom
But a place where I always found wingdom
And wisdom
So I decided to taper it off
Begin again and save the cost
Of too many minutes of my time lost
Become my own boss
I will visit my blogroll friends when I can
Instead of losing who I am
Instead of being this little lamb
Who doesn’t know he can’t
Do everything
jmgoyder 