An award, an award--for ME!

Yes, people--two awesome blogger friends have passed on the Kreativ Blogger award to me, and I'm deeply honored. Touched. Moved beyond tears. Thank you, J.W. Alden and Vero Sicoe, for thinking of Quiet Laughter.

And, by the way, both these bloggers are awesome, so if you're not following them, you're totally missing out.



So. Kreativ Blogger award. There are rules, four hoops that I must jump through. The first, most important, is to thank my awarders and link to them (check). Then I must answer these ten questions:

What's your favorite song?
As if there could be just one. I'm eclectic, I like bits of everything. But you have to choose one. All right, fine. Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. It was the first love song anyone ever dedicated to me. In retrospect, that might be a bit creepy, but I don't care--it's an awesome song, and it brings back all sorts of cool memories.

What's your favorite dessert?
Uh... I don't have one. I'm not a dessert person. Sure, I enjoy a good slice of chocolate cake or a well-made creme brulee, but I can just as easily skip it. My cravings are more towards the salty and tangy.

What ticks you off?
Whiners. Complainers. The woe-is-me crowd. The no-one-understands-me people. They make my teeth hurt.

What do you do when you're upset?
Mmmm... Good question. I think I withdraw into myself. I most definitely do not whine and complain that no one understands me.

Which is your favorite pet?
Aw, come one--I can't play favorites here. I've had lots of pets--dogs, cats, fish, even a couple of bunnies long ago--and they've all been super special in their own way. Right now I have three dogs (the fourth one, Frida, died last month), and they're all favorites of mine for different reasons. Panchita is a delight of daintiness and ladylike behavior, Rusty is a huge Rottweiler-Labrador mix and she's the sweetest, most noble dog in the world, and Winter is our latest rescue, just over a year with us now, and she's had a horrible life, so I especially enjoy pampering her and watching her gain confidence, start to play, exhibit personality traits without fear.

Which do you prefer, black or white?
Well... My MacBook's white, and one of my two favorite shirts is white (the other one's pink). But my planner is black, and I'd never ever ever own a white bag.

What's your biggest fear?
Mediocrity

What's your attitude, mostly?
Positive and optimistic. I'm the original spin doctor--everything has a bright side.

What is perfection?
Boredom

What's your guilty pleasure?
Online Mah Jong and Sidney Sheldon novels.

Hoop #3: I need to share 10 random facts about myself. This is beginning to get hard, because I don't want to repeat the ones I've shared for other awards. Lemme see...

1) I'm addicted to TV series. It all began in December of 2008, when my boyfriend rented Season One of Prison Break. We stayed up a couple of nights to finish it, then rushed to the DVD rental place to get Season Two.

2) I've traded tea for coffee. Until last year, when I quit my day job, I drank five or six BIG cappuccinos every day. Since I'm a stay-at-home whatever, it's tea. Not sure why, actually, because I love coffee.

3) I have a hard time letting go of things. Not grudge-wise. I mean things, as in artifacts. Porch sales don't work for me.

4) I don't approve of cosmetic surgery. There, I've said it. Reconstructive is fine, but the "my nose is too big" kind? Yeah--amounts to whining in my book.

5) When I was eight, I won a school contest for a Christmas story. It was something about birds, and it made me cry to write it.

6) I love gardening. I love making things grow.

7) I'm an only child, and I'm not close to my family. I believe "family" is the one you choose, not the one you're born to. That said, the few people I'm close to that I'm also related to are awesome, and yeah--I'd choose them.

8) I write because I love it. But I also write to make sense of myself.

9) I'm not religious. I don't believe there's a white-bearded god sitting on a throne overseeing what we do. I don't believe that, if there was such a god, s/he'd have provided such strict guidelines to commune with his "creation". And yeah, I do believe in evolution.

10) I believe happiness is a choice.

Hoop #4: PASS IT ON! These are my seven nominees for the Kreativ Blogger award, because they're so wonderful:

Guuye, an awesome blog about Mongolia
J.J. Brown, who writes the kind of twisted stories I love
Monica Enderle Pierce at Stalking Fiction, also a writer of dark places with a gift for words
Yana Verbitskaia at Life & Pretty Things, great blog I discovered through the A-Z challenge
E.J. Wesley at The Open Vein, a fantastic writer and all-around nice guy
Robin Cain, one of the best writers I know
Rebeca Schiller, who took it upon herself to educate me on communism and politics during the A-Z challenge

I hope y'all above will accept the award. If you do accept, these are your hoops:

-- thank the awarder, link back to them
-- answer the ten questions above
-- share ten random facts about yourself
-- pass it on to seven other bloggers

It's all right if you don't--no pressure, just a small token of my admiration, and a thank-you for being a part of my blogging community.