Saturday, June 5, 2010

Sugar Doll Saturday!

Robin over at Your Daily Dose has given me my second blog award!  I can't help it, but I get ridiculously giddy when I get one of these awards.  Maybe it will wear off in time, but I seriously doubt it.  : )

This award comes with the following rules:
1.  Thank the person who gave you the award.
2.  Share ten things about yourself
3.  Pass the award along to 10 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic!
4.  Contact the bloggers and let them know you've picked them for the award.

So, first off, let me say a resounding THANK-YOU to Robin, not only for giving me this award, but being such an encouragement with her comments on my posts.  I really appreciate the effort you take to stay in touch with your followers and the sense of community you are developing on your blog.  I love reading all of your blog entries, but I especially love your Here's To You Thursdays.  If you haven't checked out Robin's blog, scoot over there right now and check it out!  Every Thursday, she picks a few of her followers and finds a special youtube clip that she thinks will be meaningful to them.  But really, the clips she finds are meaningful to all of us, so we all benefit from her taking that extra time to make her blog extra special!

Now for 10 Things About Me:


1.  I am really the most ridiculously unsophisticated wine drinker in the world.  Yup, I admit it.  I love the sweet pink stuff (aka Rosé) and although I do like an occasional glass of Merlot with a nice steak dinner or a glass of Riesling or Gerwurtraminer, I really, REALLY dislike Chardonnay.  So sorry to all of you wine connoisseurs and Chardonnay drinkers out there.  I’m a plebeian - very, very much a wine plebeian.  J

2.  I change my words before I speak.  I do it automatically.  I was exposed to a lot of literature at a young age that was classic and old-fashioned in nature and had big words.  Unfortunately, I seldom knew how to pronounce the words even though I knew how to use them in context.  So either I mispronounced them and people who knew what the words were laughed at me, or I mispronounced them and people who were not familiar with the words thought I was speaking a foreign language.  Either way, it was disastrous. 

3.  Which brings me to #3 - the first time I spoke the name “Penelope” out loud.  I was in Grade 3 and the teacher asked me to take a turn reading.  There was a little girl in the story named “Penelope.”  I pronounced her name to rhyme with the word “envelope.”  I had been pronouncing it that way for many years in my head and had no idea it wasn’t correct.  My teacher laughed hysterically.  I was mortified.

4.  I read The Complete Works of Shakespeare through for the first time the summer after I was in Grade Three.  I didn’t understand it was a play so I thought you had to read the names of each actor and all the stage directions out loud along with what they said.  It made for slow reading.

5.   I read The Complete Works of Charles Dickens the same summer.  Dickens was much easier to understand than Shakespeare.  And actually, I think his writing was very much on the level of a Grade Three student – so much caricature and all those lovely mysterious settings that intrigued my childish mind.  And so many of his characters were children.  Now when I read one of his books, I’m not sure why I was so enamoured of him, but I think it was partially because he appealed to my understanding of justice and injustice and how badly I wanted to set things right in the world so that there was fairness for everyone.

6.  My Italian grandmother lived with us until she died when I was 9 years old.  She and I did not always see eye-to-eye (I did not like dusting her house plants) but I have lovely memories of lying in bed with her while she prayed through her rosary.  She had a beautiful rose-coloured reading lamp beside her bed with which I was absolutely fascinated.  I really wish I knew where it was now because it would make a lovely vintage lamp if it was rewired. 

7.  I had a British accent when I was a small child.  My Mum is English and of course my siblings and I all learned to speak from her, so we all had English accents until we started school.

8.  The house I grew up in is the same house where my father was born.  My grandparents bought our farm in 1919, moving out from Toronto once they had saved enough to buy a farm.  My dad was born in 1926 (the 13th of 14 children) and back then women didn’t go to the hospital to have their babies unless they were wealthy.  My parents live in a new house on the same property but the old house is still standing.  My dad has never lived anywhere else other than that farm.  I think it would kill him if he ever had to move.  Knock on wood, he won’t ever have to!

9.  I am completely enthralled with the beauty of fresh fruit.   I can get positively rapturous about the beauty of a perfect ripe peach.   And don’t even get me going about shiny black sweet cherries and bright red strawberries and lovely clusters of grapes … and I could go on and on, but I’ll try to restrain myself.

10.  Wherever we travel, we always try to find:  good music, good food, beautiful gardens, and a good farmers market.  We have found this is the perfect combination for a perfect holiday in which both my husband and I will be content.


And now for 10 Blogs Recently Discovered that are Fantastic!  This time I won't go into detail about why I love each one of these blogs, but I encourage you to visit them and discover them for yourselves.  Each unique, and each fantastic!  Thank-you to each one of you bloggers who is enriching my life with your writing.



Fearless Nesting

Bringing Pretty Back
The Single Nester
Sisters of Season
Like a Wink and a Smile
Middle Passages

Hiccup in Time
Haup Light
This is Katie
Adventures in Paradise

13 comments:

  1. Excuse the weird spacing in today's blog. Blogger is not being kind to me this morning. :S

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  2. Thank you Ro for the award. I LOVE your picture heading. My father used to grow beautiful roses, and in his honor, my siblings and I try to also. I live on a shady lot though, so it's mostly and exercise in futility for me...but I do have blooms right now on my english roses and my climber (which is sadly already covered in black spot!) I'm glad you have enjoyed reading my blog and thank you again for thinking of me.

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  3. Thanks Liza, I've been waiting for the roses to open up so I could get a perfect shot. :) I love growing things in honour and in memory of loved ones. I have shamrocks that are "hand-me-downs" from my maternal grandmother's plants (she passed away 3 years ago) and poppies that are from my paternal grandmother's garden and she passed away in '76! I think of them whenever I see those plants. It's a great way to remember them.

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  4. Congrats!!! You deserve all these great awards! I loved reading those things about yourself!
    No I feel like I know a little more about your wonderful self!

    Have a great Saturday!
    I have a new post up!

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  5. Hi Ro. Thanks for the follow, and I'm thrilled to do the same. I LOVE the blind date story you shared about the 4 hour sea trip. Thanks for sharing in the nightmares.
    Have a great weekend.
    Robyn

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  6. Congratulations on your award! I really enjoyed learning more about you and the only reason I would have known how to pronounce Penelope is because that's my sister's name and I actually like the way YOU pronounced it better! I too used to have a different accent when I was younger, but lost it within 6 months after moving to the midwest and I can't get it back even after being back in Maine for 7 years now. But there's nothing quite as beautiful as an English accent! I also wanted to thank you for passing on an award to me, that is very, very sweet of you! You made my day Ro! ~Lili

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  7. WHAT?! An award?! Oh my goodness, well, I'd like to thank the academy of course (The CT School of Bartending, that is) and of course my family for all of that great blog fodder, and I want to thank my precious Ro Magnolia, a total stranger who has totally hung in there and been pretty much the only commenter and makes it all worthwhile. *Mwah* And Now that I know 10 things about you, I better go figur out how to work this damn button so I can post it on my blog ! You be a wine plebian (God knows I have that topic covered from A-Z) and rest assured that I have got the role of "blog plebian" all locked up over here.

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  8. Thank you so much for your kind mention! It has been a really sad few weeks and I didn't know how my readers would feel with all my venting. But people have been so kind and wonderful. I so appreciate your taking the time to include me!!

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  9. I loved your 10 things. You were quite the reader in the third grade. In truth, I find that many people who read mispronounce things. They read the word but don't hear it, so they don't know how to say it. Therefore, it is actually a sign of being well-read. How's that for spin?

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  10. Congratulations on your award! I enjoyed getting to know you better. This post reminds me a little of that 25 things about you fad that was popular on FB a couple of years ago!

    Grade 3...you mean when you were 9 years old? You read Shakespeare and Dickens? I read all of Dickens in year 6, but Shakespeare came much later. What an avid reader you were!

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  11. Well, honestly I have to say the only reason I stuck it out with Shakespeare was that I was desperate for something to read! I am pretty much addicted to reading and have been since my Mum taught me how when I was 3.

    When I was 9, that was the year we lost my grandmother and my Mum was terribly busy so she couldn't take us in to the local library for our weekly visits that we normally had. As a result I had to find something to read that was already in the house.

    I can't say that I understood much of Shakespeare at that age, but I did develop a real love for oration. My usual reading spot back then was upstairs in the barn in our hayloft. I would stand on top of a bale of hay and act out the best speeches from the various plays, practicing exaggerated dramatic pauses and crescendos in volume like only a crazy 9 year old can!

    I fell in love with the sound of the words and how the speeches swelled to a climax and learned to appreciate Shakespeare's writing even though I didn't really understand all the themes. I still have some of those speeches memorized to this day.

    I'm not sure what our pigeons thought of all that oration in the hay loft - they would look at me with the most puzzled looks on their faces sometimes if I happened to notice them mid-speech. But my kittens were extremely willing participants and I would take them out of their nest in the hay and line them up in a row like an audience before I would begin my speech of the day. :D

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  12. It was so nice of you to leave a comment on my blog! I loved my visit with you and to learn a little about you. The story of your Penelope and the teacher laughing hysterically sounds all too familiar. Funny how they - teachers - can really impact your life - in a good and not so good way.

    Your parents house is so sweet. Such a cozy place that I would love to visit as well.

    Have a sweet day,
    Becky

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  13. Thanks so much for the award! I am so happily surprised! I love your blog and your ten things are great! You always have the most beautiful pictures on your blog! I am so excited that you picked me and I am working on my post for tomorrow!

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