An award, a pond and some inspiration…finally

Award: Arte Y Pico

Wonderful and lovely (and I’m not just saying that because she gave me an award either) Judith from Thread spiders weblog nominated me for the Arte y Pico award.

The rules of this award are:

You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.
4. The award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of Arte y Pico
5. To show these rules in your blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.

To be honest she gave me this award a couple of days ago, and I’ve been mulling over who to nominate. I was thrilled she nominated me, but I’m fairly easily thrilled, and I’m not really sure I qualify. Trouble is narrowing it down to 5. Everybody I read could be nominated for this - I’m just not sure who to nominate. I’ve seen the award doing the round on a number of blogs I read, but I’m not dedicated to go back and see who was and who wasn’t nominated. Do I nominate my blogging buddies: Jane, Marg, Elizabeth, Emily, Megan………? (I can hear them now…she thinks I’m her friend…. the lunatic!) Do I pull 5 names from Google reader out of a hat? I can cheat I guess and include threadspider as one, as her blog definitely meets the criteria…but does that mean she has to nominate again – we could start out our little chain letter loop that never ends! I can’t even say I nominate everyone on my blog roll, because I haven’t managed to keep that up to date. I don’t want to nominate someone who will eye roll and say ‘not again’, and feel nominating is a burden. Well I guess I have listed 6 blogs here, and I enjoy reading them very much. So consider yourself nominated. If you are rolling your eyes, don’t feel the burden of passing it on. And if you think I’m a lunatic because I think you’re my friend, please let me live with my misconception!

TIF Update:

FINALLY I’ve thought of something for the TIF challenge for April. I might even get it stitched before the end of the month. This month’s challenge was really hard, and I was never more glad I was doing the concept, rather than colour part of the challenge!

How to build a backyard pond in five easy steps:

I decided that we should have a pond in our backyard for the frogs, birds and lizards. We have been talking about it for years but never go around to starting it. Yesterday morning I announced that I was going to do it….today. Matt said he didn’t want to, and I told him not to worry, I was going to do it all by myself, he wouldn’t need to do a thing.

Step one: have coffee while perusing gardening books (i.e. wait until the day really heats up before starting to dig)

Step two: decide on location and clear plants. Have a little break and make morning tea, lunch and lentil soup in slow cooker for dinner

Step three: find shovel and start to dig hole, while fielding endless questions from children (Did daddy say you could borrow his shovel? Why aren’t we allowed to dig holes in the garden? Etc)

Step four: discover root systems and rocks under surface of soil and start looking pathetic.

Step five: make smirking eye rolling husband a cup of tea while he takes over the heavy work.

In my defense I did shovel out and dispose of every second wheelbarrow full of dirt, and I also spent valuable stitching time in the afternoon, shoveling and smoothing cement, while Matt did the mixing. But still it was another blow to my DIY credibility.