My no-longer-non-award-winning blog

As I near the six-month anniversary of my first blog post, I have received my first blog award nominations. These come to me thanks to HoaiPhai, who has his own blog. (If you go check it out, you’ll find some cool photography and thoughtful posts. Plus, he spells ‘checks’ as ‘cheques’!)

Since I am easily confused, I’m not entirely sure what I am supposed to do to earn these awards. As far as I can tell, the combined requirements for these two awards look something like this:

1. Thank the person nominating my blog.
2. Link back to that person’s blog.
3. Nominate five other blogs for the award. (I’ve also seen fifteen blogs for this number.)
4. Notify the nominees.
5. Tell the person nominating my blog seven things about myself.

I happily took care of the first two of these in the first paragraph. I’ll get to the fifth shortly. It’s the third and fourth steps I have an issue with. It’s not that I wouldn’t be willing to acknowledge five (or fifteen) blogs. It’s that I don’t want to “obligate” them to do the required steps. (For an eloquent discussion on this very subject, check out this post by Hippie Cahier.)

Call me a rebel if you will, but I’m going to skip the passing along of nominations. If that disqualifies me for the Liebster Blog and The Versatile Blogger awards, so be it. Instead, I’m going to (re)point you to my “blogroll” on the right for a list of some of my favorite blogs. Any and all of those would be on my award nomination list. I encourage you to go check them out.

I’m still going to list seven things about myself just for fun:

1. At this moment I have 3 guitars, a piano, a keyboard and a conga drum in my house. Six musical instruments and I’m playing none of them.
2. When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I drank two pints of blackberry brandy and got so sick that I have not been able to drink hard alcohol ever since.
3. I was so shy as a little kid that any time someone rang the doorbell, I’d run and hide.
4. I often torment my wife by singing the theme songs from “The Brady Bunch”, “Beverly Hillbillies” or “Gilligan’s Island.” (She complains that the songs get stuck in her head, though I don’t understand why that’s a problem.)
5. In nearly every improv class I go to, I will at some point pull out a gun. (Fortunately, it rarely gets used.)
6. Once (and only once) in my life I woke from a nightmare so intense I understood why a person might wake up screaming. (I didn’t actually scream, though.)
7. I have an extensive collection of beach glass, as well as bottles of sand from beaches along the coast from Cannon Beach, OR to Carmel, CA.

I foresee a time when I create my own blog award to give out, but if I do, it will be something I award outright without any action required of the recipient.

What do you think? Am I just being a fuddy-duddy?