Blog Awards

Trish, over at Another Piece of the Puzzle, has given me the "honest scrap award", whose rules are:
A) List 10 honest things about yourself—and make them interesting, even if you have to dig deep!
B) Pass the award on to 7 bloggers who you feel embody the spirit of the Honest Scrap and whose blogs you find brilliant in design or content.
"A" is easier. "B" I will do partly. I feel that seven is a large number of blogs. If you give a n award to everyone you read, it loses value. Not that I read only seven, mind you. But I have less than seven blogs that I feel I can't miss.

Our Sages say "answer question "A" first, so here goes:
1. I am in my late fifties. I was not a young twenty-thirty year old when I gave birth to Ricki. But please don't think that I have forgotten what those early years of marriage and family are about!
2. I have two very distinct aspects to my life that I have managed to fuse. I grew up in small-town America, the daughter of two wonderful intellectual parents, and have somehow fused that with living in Israel today, mother (and grandmother) to a rather large brood of offspring, in a society that is very traditional.
3. I like all types of music, except “rap” (if you can call that music….) Music should be pouring out of my kids, by all rights. I used to play guitar, and my husband still does. My brother plays violin and piano VERY well. Maybe that’s where Ricki gets her excellent sense of rhythm from….
4. I am what you would call an ultra-orthodox, chareidi Jew. Yep, with scarf-covered hair, long sleeves, skirts below the knees.
5. I like purple food: beets, purple cabbage. Maybe this is a holdover from my childhood, when my older brother made blue tapioca…..
6. I spent a year in college, between high school and nursing school. I hung out with a rather freaky type of crowd, all who used marihuana other than me. Once someone asked the group’s leader, a girl called “Buryn” what I was “high” on, as I looked so content. “Oh,” Buryn replied, “she gets high on LIFE!”. I think know I inherited this positive and upbeat attitude to life from my mother. (Thanks Mom!)
7. I used to take ballet lessons.
I once (as an adult) read a child’s book (in Hebrew) about a baby elephant that was sent to study dance. I laughed all the way through the short piece, because that was what I was…..
8. I used to pretend to like Rosé wine as a child. It LOOKED so good. My Dad approved. THAT was important to me. Secretly, it was too dry for me. I wonder if my father ever guessed……
9. I do not know how to type. (I use what my older brother called the “Columbus method”: find a key and land on it…) Typing was taught senior year of high school, and I finished high school in three years.
10. I am very persuadable. It is easy to convince me that you are right. I can envision my opponent’s view. Yet I am confident in my own views. It sounds like an contradiction, but it isn’t. So in high school I avoided “debate” club, but excelled in public speaking.

B. I pass the award on to:
Nadned
a soldier's Mother (non Israelis will find this very different, but quite interesting)[Israeli]
Mothering by the Seat of my Pants [special needs]
Barriers, Bridges, and Books [special needs]
Welcome to Illinois [Special needs]
Ruti at Ki YacholNuchal [Israeli]