Kreativ Blogger Award

I'm very overdue in recognizing the two very creative bloggers who awarded me the Kreativ Blogger Award recently. Luckie Daniels of Our Georgia Roots and Polly Fitzgerald Kimmet of Pollyblog. On this Thanksgiving Day, I send them my gratitude and appreciation!

As part of this award, I'm supposed to tell seven as-yet-unrevealed things about myself and then pass it on to seven other bloggers. Both parts are difficult, since I've participated in so many memes on this blog, and many bloggers have already been given this award. But I am willing to give it a go!

Seven things about myself:

1. I am hard of hearing, especially in my right ear. My hearing loss is probably not enough to warrant hearing aids, and definitely not enough to qualify me for any disability benefits. It is not a volume issue, it is a loss in the range that allows you to hear consonants. Some of it is due to the many ear infections I had as a child, and the other is probably genetic (my son's hearing is bad enough that he does qualify to wear hearing aids; plus I had an ancestor who had three deaf children out of twelve). I rely a lot on reading lips to clarify meaning ("when" and "where" can sound an awful lot alike and can confuse meaning of a question), and am constantly irritated by people who hide their faces or talk "through their teeth" (don't enunciate).

2. I met my children's father while we were both working for The Salvation Army Family Services Department in Spokane. His brother was our supervisor, and I remember when I first met his brother, I thought "Midkiff" was an extremely weird last name. Thanksgiving always brings back lots of memories of people lined up for blocks around our office building to receive either a free boxed turkey dinner or vouchers for one from the local supermarket.

3. I have lived without running water and electricity for four or five years during my childhood in Alaska (very rainy climate), and without running water for five years during my teen years in Eastern Washington (very dry climate!).

4. I have also lived without television for years: first, because of living without either electricity or television service in Alaska; and secondly, when I was first married, we chose to live without a television for the first couple years of our marriage.

5. Unlike most women, I dislike shopping. When we first looked at this house we bought, our real estate agent tried to sell us on all its good points including, "It's close to the mall." Umm...yeah. This time of year makes me cringe, and I am appalled at the concept of Black Friday.

6. I homeschooled my children for three years. I enjoyed it immensely and when it was no longer fun for any of us, they ended up at public school. So did I...first as a volunteer, then eventually as a special education instructional assistant, because I had a background of working with the disabled.

7. For five years my children's father and I lived at a former Nike missile base, which had been converted to a private microfilm processing and records storage facility. There are many colorful stories from that time period of my life that I will have to someday share...in fictional form, so as to protect the not-so-innocent characters that we worked with.

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Now here are seven very creative and deserving genealogy blogs that combine genealogy with other crafting hobbies:

1. Crafts and Genealogy

2. Creative Genealogy

3. Ethnic Scrapbooking

4. Geneascraps

5. Preserving Heritage

6. Saturday's Child

7. Scrap Your Roots