Thanks SlackieO; or, I'm a Prize-Winning Hog!

Slackie O gave me a prize! Thank you, Slackie! In the muck of feeling pretty depressed about AF's most recent visit (and trying very hard to be optimistic about it), I neglected to pass the award on to others. But since I'm looking for distractions from my depressing reproductive track record here, I thought now the perfect time to comply with this award's stipulations.

The rules are:
1. Thank the person who gave you the award. (Thanks Slackie!)
2. Tell 7 things about yourself that readers may not know.
3. Pay it forward by nominating 8 bloggers you’ve recently discovered.

And here are some surprising (or maybe not so surprising) details about me:

1. My dream is to become a published novelist. I finished one complete novel before I went back to grad school four years ago and have several other incomplete starts and stops on my computer (as well as countless scenes and plot ideas in my head). It's hard to write fiction regularly while also working toward the PhD, but I haven't abandoned my first love.

2. I'm the oldest of four sisters, and I've always loved how many 4-girl families there are in literature. The Little House on the Prairie series and Little Women were some of my favorites as a child, partially because I loved to imagine my own family as the characters. But I was annoyed that the second daughter was always the writer while the eldest either got married really young and wound up a widow or was way too perfect and then went blind (umm, spoiler alert?).

3. I can't parallel park. I fortunately did not have to attempt it to get my license, because Pennsylvania didn't require it for a few years (I barely passed the exam as it was, so that was lucky). My husband tried to teach me when we moved to Brooklyn and started street parking, but gave it up as a hopeless cause. And now we park in a garage, so I have once again evaded having to learn.

4. One of the things I love most to do in Manhattan is take long walks by myself in nice weather. Years ago, I used to walk walk home from my first job on 34th street to my apartment on East 89th almost every day (that's roughly two miles). I'll walk from Midtown East to the Upper West Side, from SoHo to the LES. I love to walk through Irving Place and Grammercy on late summer evenings. I feel like I have time to think and be truly alone and to notice how the city changes around me.

5. I like to cook, but I'm not very good at it. Most of my fights with Lawyer Guy happen when I'm in the kitchen, because I invariably screw something up and get really mad about it and start yelling (which I almost never do any other time). We routinely eat at 10 or 10:30 pm because I'm too ambitious for my own good and insist on trying a new recipe and don't start it until 7 and then take a really long time to do everything. But I love it when something turns out well!

6. My favorite museum is the Frick, which contains my favorite painting, Whistler's Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Leyland Howard. (You can see the painting--and hear a brief curator's lecture on it--here). I love 19th-century painting generally and Whistler most of all. The Fragonard Room at the Frick is also amazing.



7. I love to sing. My whole family sings all the time, my dad especially. When I was a kid, I was so embarrassed that he would sing country songs in line at the bank or the grocery store, but now I walk around singing to myself, too (and always bust out a descant during "Happy Birthday"). I've sung in choirs nearly all my life. I've got special songs picked out for our babies: lullabies for boys and lullabies for girls. I sang to the m&m everyday that I was pregnant, and after the miscarriage, I couldn't get through the song I had picked out for him or her without choking on my tears. I really, really want a baby to sing to (I know that's not something new or surprising, but that's just how this blog is sometimes, I guess).

Most blogs I read and list in my Blogroll are ones I've been following for a while, so I'm going to have to define "recently" rather loosely. That said, here are the prizes I'm passing on to some wonderful bloggers who deserve every happiness in life:

1. Overcoming Obstickles
2. Katie at From If to When
3. Kelly at The Rabbit Test
4. Rebecca at Trying Not To Scream
5. Adele at Delinquent Eggs
6. Sienna at It's Baby Time~!!
7. The Port of Indecision
8. Only Time Will Tell