Honest Scrap

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Leigh form 5 Acres and a Dream awarded me the Honest  Scrap Award. It’s my first award ever. These are the rules:

  1. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs to give this award to that you feel to be brilliant in content and design. That’s the toughest part.
  2. Show the 7 winner’s links on your blog and leave them a comment informing them that they have been given the “Honest Scrap.” That’s the easiest part.
  3. List 10 honest things about yourself that people may not know.

So here goes:

  1. I was born in Congo (it was called Zaire back then), where my parents were doing missionary work – my dad taught math at a country high school. We left when I was one, so I don’t recall that adventure. I grew up in (Dutch-speaking) Antwerp, Belgium, the oldest of two. I moved to Boston in 1998. The idea was to stay for a year to do my Masters (in Philosophy) but I never, or at least haven’t, left. I haven’t been back to Belgium in over three years! We’re trying to make it work this winter.
  2. I like being alone. DH will call it like it is and say I’m antisocial. True, if you let me I’ll just potter around here on my hill and be totally happy. But I do love the company of good friends and good friends-to-be and am never more thrilled than when they stay over for a meal or a sleep-over. Then I will molly-coddle them to make them come back more often.
  3. If I didn’t have my wonderful family, I’d be a drifter. I’d live out of my car, on a dime, and travel this great continent seeking out nature. I discovered this about myself when I moved here. I traded my beloved medieval Europe for the adventure of America’s wide-open spaces, dense forests and mountain peaks…
  4. I am obsessed with nuclear threat but am careful not to indulge myself too often. It goes back to when I saw The Day After on television as a young teen: it sent me into a tailspin of depression for months. Now I sometimes consciously seek it out, because in some ways it makes me feel more alive. But I’m careful. I know my limits.
  5. I’m addicted to the written word. I must read and I must write, every day, or I go crazy. The most gruesome moment in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was not the nuclear disaster or the cannibals or the dying world or the physical and emotional deterioration, etc. etc., but the scene where the protagonist looks at a sodden book and can’t remember what once attracted him so to reading and learning. Chilling.
  6. I despair a lot, yet I go through life smiling and my smile is sincere. How do I do it? I don’t know, I just don’t see how a gloomy face could help… Same with my blog: it’s mostly chipper and the gloom only comes through once in a while. Whenever I write an entry about how scared and sad I am I over-write it and then it doesn’t feel right, so I nix it.
  7. The stuff we do here (like the Riot and Freeze Yer Buns etc.) gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, as in it’s fun and makes for a healthier lifestyle, both physically and spiritually. But I don’t think any of it will help to make the future better, unless we start something like Transition in our towns.
  8. I’m lousy at most homesteading things – you should see my needlework (cough) – but I don’t care. I’ll get better with practice.
  9. I walk away from arguments. I’m the most non-confrontational person I know. If I stick with an argument I soon get upset to the point of tears and often feel physically sick. I think that’s why I walked away from an academic career: even arguing metaphysics was just not in me.
  10. I’m a procrastinator but I have some ways of overcoming that. I’m big on making TO DO lists and will always include something I’ve already done, then will tick that off and that gets me going. And sometimes I will post something on the blog as having been accomplished, while it hasn’t yet, and then I’ll feel so guilty, I just have to do it!

Well, I wanted to make an upbeat list, but I guess many of these points seem rather negative and gloomy. What can I say: it’s honest scrap.

I nominate, in alphabetical order:

  1. Faith Acre Farm
  2. Handbook of Nature Study
  3. Humble Garden
  4. Living and Learning
  5. Pile of Omelays
  6. Stony Run Farm
  7. Throwback at Trapper Creek

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7 Comments

  1. I am honored. Thank you so much. I read your blog on Google Reader so I don’t always pop over to comment like I should.

    I think I realized after reading your #5 that I am a little attached to reading and writing myself. I have always been a big reader but as an adult I have found a love for writing.

    Thanks again,
    Barb

  2. What an interesting life you have! I have to say that I’m much the same as you, so I can really relate. On #2, I am probably only saying this because I am the same way, but I think the divisions of “social” and “anti-social” to describe folks isn’t correct. It seems to me that some folks are outgoing, and some of us are contemplative by nature. Neither one is better than the other, it just seems to me that most folks fall into one or the other category. I imagine that most writers are contemplatives.

    I’m delighted with all the new links too, looks like some great reading!

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