My first blog award!

Many thanks to Oscar Blogger, who passed on the Versatile Blogger award to me! I was surprised and very pleased!  Blog awards are such a nifty, community building and networking thing, and I'm always happy to see a blog has gotten one.

According to the rules, I must list seven things about myself, and then pass it on to fifteen new or newly discovered bloggers.  So, let's see.

1. My degree is in Psychology, but I probably should have been an English major. I typically read around 200 books in a year, mostly fiction, though with the inception of dogginess, I read quite a bit of non fiction nowadays.  Non-fiction that is non dog related, I prefer to be narrative rather than tood ry with facts.

2. I didn't used to know how to cook.  A combination of blog browsing, magazine flipping, and cookbook/cooking memoir reading has turned that around pretty well.  I also used to be a very picky eater, and though I still don't like things like onions and black olive and tomato sauce, I can pick "grown up" foods from restaurant menus nowadays.

3. I have a habit of seizing upon a topic to research.  Dogs have been a long-lasting theme, from before I had Elka and coming through stronger now.  Other topics have been Chernobyl, American nuclear testing, nuclear accidents, yoga, cooking, and Africa.

4. I have a deep and abiding love for the Steampunk genre.  I'm writing a couple of different novels in Victorian-era, Steampunk (and therefore alternate history) England and Africa (mostly South Africa). Clockworks and gears and keys and corsets are neat things to me. 

5. I write fiction, though I'm unpublished.  I haven't truly settled into one genre, and have written literary short stories, sci fi, fantasy, and horror.  I've participated in National Novel Writing Month every year since 2007 (and perhaps this year's first Camp NaNoWriMo!), and last year is the only year I didn't "win".

6. I wear Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume.  They are hand made, from essential oils, and are of a literary or gothic bent.  There is a new scent every full moon, and special ones at other times, like for Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Lupercalia.  My favorite scent is Shub-Niggurath (from the H.P. Lovecraft mythos), but I also like Goblin, Wrath, Cheshire Cat, and Mort de Cesar.

7. I kept my hair very long for a number of years, but I've also cut it all off (as in, Locks of Love donations lengths) either three or four times.  This last time I decided to return to bangs as well, for the first time since I was 9 or 10.  Elka was slightly confused when I came home with my hair shoulder length instead of waist length, and with bangs, and licked my face for awhile to confirm it was me and I was okay.

15 blogs that are new or new to me (this feels like cheating, I've only been in this game for a couple months)

1. Bad Dog Laszlo

2.Dobermans by the sea

3. Bailey be Good

4. Freedom to Bark

5. Gone to the Dogs

6.Dogs dirt and disability

7. Fearful dogs

8. From the house of the fox dogs

9.Moody Mudi

10. Doggy Dessert Chef

11. Human Paw

12. 3 pups in a pop up

13.All Things Dogs

14. Kenzo the Hovawart

15. Doggone Safe

But, anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy my blog, and these others listed.