Welcome to the award winning blog...

Woohoo! G. P. Ching awarded me this – my first ever blog award! Hahaha I have to admit I was pretty excited. Particularly as I regularly read the other authors to whom she awarded it and am flattered to be held in that company :) Apparently I earned it for my A Sticky Note Life story since, as she says, "anyone who can tell a story in sticky notes must have an interesting history." hahaha I hope I can live up to that :) That being said, this award is a perfect example of a gold star with fine print... The award, once offered, must be earned. But the task amused me so I'm in :) The rules of the game are: Provide seven outrageous facts about you. Readers choose whether six are lies and one is true or six are true and one is a lie. Then you pass on the award to the next unsuspecting victim. Alright here goes... Is one of these true or six? Do you know which one(s)? I learned to walk before I learned to crawl. I've been doing things in less-than-traditional ways ever since :) When I was in NZ I went on a volcano hike. Met a guy on said hike. My hostel in that particular town was in a not-so-great location and he was all concerned. He walked me home and then went and moved his stuff to my hostel; I felt like I was living in a warped version of a 50s sitcom. We travelled together for two weeks, then went to the airport and got on planes to different lives. It was the most amazing, fun, powerful and too-short relationship of my life. I still think of him from time to time, and wonder if he ever thinks of me. The night my grandmother died, she called me to say goodbye. My unlisted phone rang and I answered it to be greeted by silence. Not a dial tone. Not a machine call. Not an “oops sorry, click.” It was the sound of a connected phone with nobody speaking. It gave me pause, but I hung up and dismissed it shortly after... Until the next day when my father told me she had passed, and I couldn’t help but realize the timing. Coincidence? Possibly. But I’ve now had that number more than 15 years, and that’s the *only* time that’s ever happened. I nearly didn't graduate from university because I got caught in a weird technicality due to having too many courses from other universities on my transcript. Seriously -- too many courses?!?! One would think the logical solution would be to just discount a few of them, but no... Instead I had to take summer courses to balance out the load. But I'm not the least bit bitter about that. I often finish people's sentences in my head before they actually finish speaking them (with remarkable accuracy). It's incredibly frustrating to wait for them to catch up. I have one friend who has the same ability. It turns out that when we're together we unconsciously speak in half sentences; I never realized that till somebody eavesdropping got frustrated enough to comment on it. Streetlights have a disturbing tendency to flicker out if I stand under them too long and I never wear a watch because when I do they rarely tell the correct time for long. Apparently this has something to do with the electromagnetic field of the body. In all those extra courses I took, I never found one that would teach me how to wear a watch successfully. Every time I buy a lottery ticket I genuinely believe I'm going to win and start planning my new life. One Christmas I got a scratch lottery ticket from Santa. I scratched it and it won me a free ticket. I traded it in and happily scratched the freebie. It too won me a free ticket. Rinse and repeat. Trading them in once or twice a week I played for a year and a half on free tickets. Never won anything else, but it was quite the chain. That Christmas gift was so much more than a throw-away scratch card; it was a year and a half of dreams. So... Is truth stranger than fiction? What do you think? Let the guessing begin!!! And as for passing on the award I’m granting it to: Dana Larose – because without him I may never have discovered Flash and because he’s a talented writer. and to Maria Protopapadaki-Smith (aka Mazz in Leeds) because she writes a wide variety of stories and they’re always incredibly well told.