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 13^th 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