The illustrious ENS Wifey over at Wife of a Sailor has magnanimously bestowed upon me a pair of awards for my blog.  Many thanks!  My dereliction of the duty to pay the shinies forward should in no way be interpreted as a lack of appreciation, but I will feel better once I fulfill my bloggerly obligations (well, possibly; I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I don’t play precisely by the rules) with an appropriately thoughtful post.  Well, here goes:

Award the First: “Best Blog Award”

The main thrust of this award is to pass it along to the authors of blogs one has recently discovered.  This was a timely task, because these days I feel like I’m adding delightful new-to-me blogs to Google Reader hand over fist.  If you haven’t browsed through these authors’ musings, you are missing out.

• And You Never Did Think
• Lady Evelyn
• My Army Wife Life
• Never Apart In Heart
• Riding the Roller Coaster
• Trying Our Best

Award the Second: “Beautiful Blogger Award”

The rules:

• Thank the person who gave you the award.
• Paste the award on your blog.
• Link the person who nominated you for the award.
• Tell seven interesting things about yourself.
• Nominate seven bloggers or fewer.

It is up to you, dear Reader, to determine whether my seven Nth factoids are interesting or not, but here they are, submitted for your consideration:

1. It really bugs me when I see clocks set to the wrong time, especially when someone has set a clock ahead purposely to “trick” themselves into being on time. I mean, you’re the one who set the clock, so you know it’s fast — how could that have any real effect on your ability to get someplace on time? If it were up to me, all timepieces would be synchronized with the atomic clock.
2. As publicly disdainful of “girly” alcoholic beverages as I am (apparently I am hardcore because I like my martinis so dry that I am essentially drinking gin with an olive or three), I have a sneaking fondness for the layered frozen pina colada/strawberry daquiri at Cheeseburger in Paradise. I especially like the strawberry/pineapple parrot-with-sunglasses garnish, and I don’t even care that I’m paying for a lot of sugar water and very little actual booze.
3. When I was a little girl, I envisioned my dream wedding as taking place underwater. My groom and I would be in scuba gear, a dolphin would be the ringbearer, and the guests would watch from glass-bottomed boats. Luckily for all involved, my revised dream wedding took place in this reality on land.
4. I semi-regularly have dreams where I am in the military instead of or alongside my husband.  One recurring dream motif is that I am looking at the daily flight schedule as usual, but find that my name is listed next to a sim event.  This tells me three things: one, the Navy takes up too much space in my head; two, my subconscious thinks I would look pretty good in uniform; and three, I’m a strange kid because I rather enjoy having such dreams pop up now and again.
5. I cannot remember ever not being able to read.  My parents had to tell my elementary school that, yes, I should be allowed to go to the “chapter book” section when my kindergarten and first grade classes went to pick out books from the school library.
6. I got to know my future husband when we were both acting in our high school production of Romeo and Juliet.  He was a Capulet, I was a Montague, and we got to fight each other on stage.
7. I loved studying Russian in high school, and I would have continued in college had my school not done away with its Russian department between the time I was accepted and the time I started up there in the fall.  D’oh!  I wound up taking two years of German after a brief, shining hope that my school would actually manage to get its new Arabic program going before I graduated.

I am a nosy brat, so if you’re reading this, I am probably brimming with curiosity about what you might come up with for a seven-item trivia list.  If you’d like to play along, leave a comment here and consider yourself tagged.