Honest Scrap Blogger Award

Rather to my dismay, Jamie Harding (a normally delightful person whose blog, The Life and Times of a Househusband, I love and who is a complete kick on Twitter) "honored" me with the above-titled award.

I don't usually react to honors with dismay, but this one comes with a suspiciously meme-like obligation. Here are the rules:

1. The Honest Scrap Blogger Award must be shared.
2. The recipient has to tell 10 true things about him/herself that no one else knows.
3. The recipient has to pass on the award to 10 more bloggers.
4. Those 10 bloggers should link back to the blog that awarded them.

I don't plan to follow these rules. What a rebel, huh?

I'm not one for chain letters; in fact, I can be counted on to break the chain, no matter the entreaty, the cause or the direness of the promised consequences. (Hmm, I wonder if this bit of explanatory narrative could count as one of my 10 things. So it will if it turns out I can't think of 10 others.) But, hey, I can be a good sport about Rules 1 and 2. We'll see about 3 and 4.

My 10 things (some of these aren't quite known by nobody; it's hard to come up with those when you've been married for over 30 years to someone you met in high school):

1. When we were children, my youngest sister ate French fries slowly. She always had some left by the time my other sister and I finished ours. We would ask her for a few, and she would command us to bark like dogs: Bark! Bark for French fries! Yep, we did. Woof.

2. I have never owned or come into contact with a toaster that worked properly.

3. No, I did not get married in high school. Or in college. I'm just older than you think.

4. If I had to choose one favorite song, just one, it would be "Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (as recorded for "The Distance" album way back when). If naming it meant listening only to it and nothing else, then I would choose the first movement of Schubert's Ninth instead because I'd hate having to get sick of "Roll Me Away" and I appear to have an infinite capacity for listening to the best first movement ever. (Just ask my husband or kids.)

5. I routinely slather my feet with Bag Balm, a lanolin salve meant for cows' udders, before I put on socks.

6. After knee surgery in 1989, I spent an entire week on the couch, determined to conquer Super Mario Brothers 1, 2 and 3. By the end of the week, my knee was fine, I could rescue the princess in every game, and I was very popular among my kids' friends.

7. I have been in every state in the U.S. except South Carolina and South Dakota. I don't have a problem with states named South something; this is just an odd coincidence. Oh, and by "been in," I don't mean drove through or changed planes in; I mean actually visited long enough to have to take a shower in.

8. I try to understand it and, failing that, to be tolerant of it (at which I also fail dismally), but I can't shake my sense that Facebook is the dumbest f*%#in' thing on earth.

9. I played Ado Annie in a high school production of Oklahoma! Lots of bizarre things inherent in that experience, but the ones I recall/care to disclose are the thrill of being cast, the surprising raciness of the old-time musical's lyrics, and the appalling smell of the costume (eau de years and years and years of sweating teenagers).

And ta da! Number 10 is that I always break chain letters. Now you know who deserves the blame for the promised riches that never arrive.