One Lovely Blog Award: And the Winner ... Graciously Declines

I wrote this post almost a year ago and promptly forgot to post it!  So I am posting it now, as much to introduce everyone to one of our favorite blogs to visit as well as to explain our philosophy about blog awards.

One Sunday morning early last summer, Steve and I we were surprised and delighted to learn that Kevin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man and one of our fellow bloggers at Blotanical had nominated us for the "One Lovely Blog" award for our blog.

This was the very first (and to date, the only) blog award nomination that we've ever received and we thanked Kevin privately for recognizing us in this most unique and special way. 

Recipients of this award are required to pay it forward by following three Rules of Acceptance. Then one is allowed to post one of the "lovely" blog badges on their blog.

The "Rules" of the game are:

Thank the nominator and link to his/her site.   (Done, thank you again, Kevin.)

Share seven things about yourself.  (This we can do.....)

Nominate 10 other bloggers, let them know, and then link to their sites from your own.  (Yikes!)

The first was easy.  The second, not so much, but we took a stab at it. Here goes:

1.  Steve's Jewish name (Judah, or Yehudah in Hebrew) and mine (Judith, or Yehudit in Hebrew) are the same.

2.  After we started dating, we discovered that we each had sets of vintage cobalt china that were companion sets for each other.  (They aren't identical, in fact they were designed by two different china houses in two different countries.  His was specifically designed and created to be a companion to mine.)

3.  And it wasn't until we started dating that we realized that my rose Murano crystal matches both of our sets of china and his (now our) rose chandelier.

4.  We have four dogs, all Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. The breed features four possible colors and we have one dog of each color (more by luck than by design). Their names are Emily Rose (9 year old ruby), Elizabeth Rebecca (almost 16 year old black and tan), Spencer Tracy (AKA Tough Nut or just plain Toughie,  7 year old tricolor), and Katherine Hepburn (AKA Katie or Cuddles,  4 year old Blenheim).
Toughie and Katie are pictured here at left, and yes, Katie stole Tough's ball from him and gentleman that he is, he is allowing her to play with it.

5.  On our first date, after dinner, while Steve and I were walking to a small Italian bakery for dessert, he broke into song, singing to me as we walked along one of the main streets in the city.  All of the other women walking along smiled and some even stopped to watch as he sang "Moon River" to me in his beautiful baritone voice.

6.  Since we've added roses to some of our perennial beds, we now have about 250 roses in our gardens.

7.  We are members of Soldiers Angels.  We have "adopted" many US servicemen who had little or no family support stateside during deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.  We turned one of our garden beds into a Memorial to nine soldiers who we were supporting and who died in combat.

The third rule proved very problematic for us.  After much thought, gnashing of teeth, and intense consideration, we find that the third rule is next to impossible for us to fulfill.  How do we pick just ten blogs out of all the blogs we each love to read on a regular basis?   And how do we do that without hurting the feelings of some other truly fabulous bloggers -- the ones we didn't pick?

We have fifty-six followers of our blog, most of them bloggers in their own right.  How do we pick only ten?  What do we say to the ones who weren't chosen?  We like you a lot, BUT....??  That doesn't work for us.  In fact, it ranks right up there (just my humble opinion) with how you cut favorite cousins and family friends off the invitation list when you need to keep the number of guests at a wedding below a certain cap.  It's painful for everyone.

We have an answer.  We aren't going to.  We know that not following all of the rules means that we can't post the award on our blog, that we have to decline it, and we're okay with that.  So for several days,  we reveled in the joy of having been nominated in the first place and we decided to leave it at that.  We think our blog is pretty special, but no, you won't see a badge saying so posted in the margin.

When all is said and done, we value all of the bloggers who follow us and all of the blogs we read on a regular basis.  We aren't going to choose some at the expense of others and at the risk of hurting the feelings of any bloggers that we truly admire and care about.  For that same reason, we don't rank our faved blogs on Blotanical either.   You all should know that we handled our wedding the same way.  We couldn't afford a huge sit-down, catered meal with a small orchestra, thousands of dollars of flowers, and a fancy [Translation: Expensive] venue so we rented a huge tent and had a buffet in our back yard with a friend of a friend serving as DJ.  It was a wonderful wedding.

So thank you, Kevin, for the wonderful honor of having been nominated for the One Lovely Blog Award.  You absolutely made our day.  But we'll let it end here, and as the sun sets over our garden, we will go back to reading and appreciating all of our favorite blogs, including yours!