Honest Scrap

Big day, guys... Brooke honored me with the Honest Scrap award!

These things are always fun, so hopefully you'll bear with me in accepting it.

It appears the rules of the award are to:

1) Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
2) Show the 7 winners' names and links on your blog, and leave a comment informing them that they were prized with "Honest Scrap." And while there's not really a physical prize, you do get to keep and post the nifty icon.
3) Finally, list at least 10 honest things about yourself.

So here are my 10 things:

1) My favorite way to drink soda is from the fountain. Even better when the ice is small and crunchy and the cup is (GASP!) plain white Styrofoam. There's just something about the combination that makes me want to slurp on it all day long, especially when it's half-Coke (or Cherry Coke, if I'm lucky) / half-diet Coke.

2) I don't keep in touch with anyone from the high school, middle schools, or elementary schools I went to when I was younger, not at least in the way that you would if you were actually friends. Sure, we're "friends" on facebook, but that doesn't account for a whole lot. We're not the kind to call each other up, visit when I'm in town, or anything of the sort. Sometimes I feel odd because of that and then other times, it's a mixed-blessing. My family are the only people who have truly known me for the longest...

3) For the longest time, I could not eat Italian sausage without gagging. I was never sure if the horrible episode as a kid with the babysitter was what caused it or brought it to my attention, but it was, to me, the most deplorable and repulsive food in the world. Later in life, I determined it was the seeds that did me in and my first forays into the world of enjoying Italian sausage were thanks to the seedless kind. Now, I can even stand to eat the seeds... occasionally.

4) Speaking of almost vomiting, I have the worst gag reflexes. I need nothing to back this up. Just watch me my brush my teeth in the morning and you'll have your proof.

5) I am of the very, very sentimental collector-sort. If I have ever had a significant experience at any point in my life, I usually have some sort of object that ties into it. Even something as goofy as a gum wrapper Cliff shaped into a boat on the night he first said "I love you" or as sweet as a wildflower pressed into the pages of a particularly life-changing book I may have read in the middle of a giant field on a beautiful summer day.

6) I waited until I was married to share myself completely with another person. I think that may have been, of all the good decisions I've been able to make in the last (almost) twenty-five years and aside from choosing to follow Christ, the one that I am most proud of and thankful for.

7) On the list of people I was once convinced I would one day marry, most are currently starving musicians. Only one is probably not starving, and his name is Mat Kearney. And I don't know why I was particularly convinced we'd get married, except for that one time he brushed my hair behind my ear after a mutual friend of ours' chopped off my locks on her front porch during Monday Night Football. Or maybe it was that time he dropped his pic while playing at church and I was the one to catch it and hand it back? Oh, what a silly little girl I was!

8) I was born a bookworm. Okay, okay, maybe not exactly. In fact, I don't even know at what age I began reading (Mom, can you help with that?); but what I do know is that I have always loved it with a severity unrivaled to many other things in my life. It is the one past time I have been completely committed to my entire readable years. I was the kid reading undetected by the nightlight when it was bedtime and when the nightlight was no longer needed, I was under the covers with a flashlight. To this day, I always have a book on the nightstand (okay, okay, right now it's a nightstool).

9) Strangely enough, the two times in my life when I have felt most beautiful are: when I wore a long, beaded, lace, strapless, empire-waisted wedding gown with silver, strappy heels, my hair in a chiffon with elegant vintagey pearl and silver hair combs and earrings to match, and expertly applied make-up on my wedding-day... and when I wore a pair of pants I'd had on for two days, an old pullover and a jacket, gloves, a skull-cap, no make-up on an unclean face, and hiking boots on the cold morning Cliff and I stood and watched the sunrise over the Teton Range.

10) I am finally okay with misspellings and mispronunciations of my name. When you are a Kristine, your life is destined for trouble. Now don't hear me wrong, I love my name. And I think it was a genius way to spell it and not only that, but a name that suits me very well. However, for whatever reason, the K throws everyone off. It's like Christine makes so much sense to people that Kristine just can't... not even phonetically. I've had a lifetime of Kristin, Kristina, Kristy, but Kristine? Whoever thought it could be that difficult? Throw in a maiden name (Lang) that "usually" has an e at the end of it and you can imagine what my pre-married life was like. Constant correction, taking offense, etc. But here's the thing, once I adopted some other family's (now mine, of course) pronunciation and spelling woes, I learned a sort of sympathy for myself that finally made it all okay. Now I get to help people learn to spell a last name I've only had for a year and a half (that evidently has "too many" e's, when it should only have two) and I just deal with it. So yeah, so what if I'm "Kristine Neeley with a K and three e's"... at least my middle name is only occasionally up for argument (because in this case, z is way more normal than s).

By the way, if you want to know more useless honesty about me, you can always hearken back to this old post.

And who shall my nominations go to for the Honest Scrap award? Well, considering the plethora of blogs I could link to my added qualifications are that the persons selected be fairly frequent bloggers (enough that I'd believe you'd actually do this) and an honest blogger, at that.

So here goes (in alphabetical order):

Amanda @ Amanda's Autoblogography

Erin @ My So-Called Life

Grace @ Grace Notes

Heather @ highly caffeineated

Jennfer @ The Henry Family in Nashvegas!

Jody @ Gray Photography

Karyn @ Johnson's Journal

Marianna @ Peachy Perspective

Sara @ Little is Much

Sarah @ Choosing Life

Valerie @ Our Journey