Liebster Award

alright, dearest Laura, for you! and thank you. because every once in a while it is fun for all of us to satisfy the egoist in us. Except: everyone that I would nominate already has been nominated. our egos don't need *that* much pampering, darlings.

Thank the person who nominated you and link your post to their blog | List 11 facts about yourself then answer the 11 questions given to you. Create 11 more questions for your 9 nominees, all of whom have 200 or less followers. Comment on their blogs informing them of their Liebster Award nomination.

My Eleven Things:

1. I am the only member of my family who has left Michigan, and I cannot see myself ever going back. I really like it, especially "Up North," but Virginia is my home. This is where I learned about the Church, about myself, made most of my "best" friends, where some of my most powerful memories are. I love it here more than anywhere else . . . in the world, I think.

2. The only place I would rather live than Virginia is pretty much anywhere in the British Isles, except London.

3. I am not a big fan of cities, even though I was born in downtown Detroit and raised in suburbs.

4. All of the liberal bullshit lies about Detroit "coming back," all of the corruption and race politics and greed and violence that have destroyed this once-world-class-beautiful city breaks my heart and makes me super angry, which is why I don't often talk about it.

5. I started riding horses when I was 3, at family camp. I started lessons at 7. When I was 10, I started working in exchange for riding. I would bike a mile&half to the barn, feed the horses, clean stalls (including dragging manure buckets), then bike home. i would often bike back again in the afternoons to ride. and i'm not joking, on the way home there was this HUGE hill that i never, ever mastered, even though i biked it for about four years. it was so ridiculously steep.

6. daylight savings time really, really, really boils my blood. my friends laugh at me and my darling husband mocks me, but it makes me so angry. we are meant to live in the earth's rhythm, not change it to conform to our effed-up inhumanly-office-centered world.

7. being as self-sufficient as possible is a dream of mine, but it is so overwhelming to me as to be almost paralyzing.

8. i would rather read a book than do almost anything else.

9. i strongly suspected that if i ever got married and had kids, i would end up with a passel of boys. so far i have two kids, both boys.

10. i know night and shadows have all of these weird bad connotations, but i love the color grey. it is softer than black, more unique than brown, calming without depressing me. maybe it is my celtic blood.

11. speaking of blood, we always thought we were german. when my uncle started researching, though, he found out that my great-great-grandfather (maybe just one "great") was an illegal immigrant from eastern europe. he took a german name because he thought it would assimilate easier (clearly this was pre-WWII). so we are austro-hungarian + slovenian and our "real" last name is not berger at all, but yulevitch or yulepitch. go figure.

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Laura's Questions:

1. Favorite book: i'm going to have to go for favorite authors, and i cannot do just one: tolkien, austen, l.m. montgomery. Lord of the Rings definitely is the most read.

2. Favorite movie: Just One?! hmm . . . one of them is . . . shoot. i don't even know. i can either think of at least half a dozen, or none. the new sense & sensibility, audrey hepburn, the pianist (although i can barely watch it), chariots of fire . . .

3. Finish this sentence: “What I really want to know is . . . ": where we really went wrong. I know that sounds huge, and absurd, and the world has never been "right". but seriously: was it the industrial revolution? the world wars? the cold war? the civil war? that one socialist jerk of a president who jacked up congress and the constitution (hoover, was it?)? how did our country get to be a bunch of selfish, entitlement-minded, baby-killing, nazi-emulating, earth-worshiping, money-worshiping, earth-raping, self-worshiping people?

4. Big influence (person, event, thing, situation, etc.) on you while growing up: family camp. some of my best (and oddest) memories are from the Christian family camp we went to every summer for several years. it's where i got my love for trees, horses, guitar music, hiking, and minimalist living. very thankful for those memories!

5. If money were no object, what kind of house would you live in? MINE! except with working chimneys, a small addition & minor renovation. also i would build a barn. OR that plantation house out on rte 55. just sayin'.

6. Name a book on your shelf that you can’t get around to reading (or finishing): oh dear, *Just One*?! well, one that i really would like to read but cannot seem to get past the first few pages is theology of the body. i tried, i really did. and that was when i was in grad school and my mind was used to thinking at that level.

7. Favorite quote: ACK! i have my MA in literature, for pete's sake! how am i supposed to pick just one?! one of the top, though, is the one at the top of my blog, from Eliot's The Waste Land. we cannot fix the whole world, but we *can* set our own little piece of it in order, restore our little corners to fruitfulness.

8. Something you could do over differently if you could: oh my. the one biggest thing? that is for me to know. if i could do anything? i really, really, really wish my mum had not let me quit ballet or piano.

9. Something you would never do differently: come back to the Church.

10. Blog you’ve recently started following: Laura's, coincidentally {thisfelicitouslife.wordpress.com). also small things (gsheller.com).

11. Blog you’ve been following the longest: ben's (househatke.com)