One Lovely Blog Award - Its All About Me Today

Mary of Fleur-de-lis Quilts nominated my Quilts and Dogs Blog for the One Lovely Blog Award.  (Hey Mary!)

I ran into Mary (and liked her) in the Louisiana Traveling Quilt Project.  She lives in Middle Louisiana.  Or Upper Louisiana, not sure how that falls. One thing you have to understand about Louisiana is that while we have the same geographic boundaries, the North and the South are not the same state at all!  The South is hard living, hard drinking swamp Cajuns and the North is tee-totaling, land working, Bible carrying plains people.  Not sure that Mary actually falls into that description, but I am definitely from the SOUTH Louisiana people!


I have done something like this before where you nominated three others to carry on, but I really don't know a whole lot of people who have blogs and we did this once before so I am not going to add anyone to it.  (If you want to do it, then I will be more than excited to convey this award to you however!!!)  I actually like reading the things people tell you about themselves.

One of the things Mary said was that since she is an English teacher, she carries a red pen in her head.  Oh, she probably uses it on me a WHOLE lot!  (maybe even on that sentence!)  I have written copy and speeches and even had things published, but I am very loose with my writing style.  I require a lot of editing!  That is my excuse and I am sticking to it!  LOL

Ok, here goes the seven things about me:

1.  I have trained dogs for most of my life.  I started as a very young girl with my grandfather at the Shrine Circus in New Orleans.  He would ask me how I thought they taught the elephants to sit up.  They couldn't just lift their legs like we did with his dog PeeWee.  So that drove me to the library  to read every dog book in the Jefferson Parish Library System!  From there I trained all the neighborhood dogs to do tricks.  After I got married I got me some Irish Setters and trained obedience.  Even though the Irish are not so high on the intelligence graph, Ginger and I earned the Companion Dog (CD) in her first three trials. That is a pretty great accomplishment.   Brandy, on the other hand, took three years to get his!

2.  I have been a voracious reader all my life.  I was reading before I started first grade.  I almost got held back that year because when the teacher called on me to read Dick and Jane out loud in the Reading Group I  would never know my place.  I had  already read to the end of the book because I was so bored!  During Summer Reading Program I would win first place every year by reading over 200 books.  Mostly those books were about horses or dogs so I never considered it a chore to read!

3.  I am a gourmet cook.  I love to cook, evidenced by my waistline!  I  have a ton of cookbooks and am very sorry my daughter does not love cookbooks as well.  She is of the internet generation where they get a recipe from the internet.  I love to see the pictures of the dishes so I am more inclined to cook a recipe that has a photo of it in the book.  Odd how that happens.  Frank eats well, a fact NOT evidenced by his waistline.  He has skinny genes and I am jealous.

4.  I have three basset hounds and didn't want any of them.  Do not read into that that I don't LOVE them.  But I didn't choose any of them.  I got Chloe from the Boyfriend-From-Hell Episode when Carrie just turned 20.  I got the Bad Basset Boyz from CAAWS when they needed to be saved from a pair Cruelty Cases who needed a place to go.  My beloved breed is the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog.  I miss them so badly.  Bassets and Swissys are totally different breeds.  Bassets are cute, sweet, loving dogs who cuddle and then ignore you while they smell something.  Swissys are aloof, protective dogs who want to be by your side about three feet away.  they make sure everything stays in its place and the garbage men don't steal our stuff every week.  They will do anything you want them to do, but they make it look like it is their idea.

5.  I have three college degrees.  For my undergraduate degree, I finished it in 2 1/2 years and was Valedictorian earning the President's Medal at Southeastern Louisiana University.  I loved being in school.  SLU is a smaller university where classes are small and you get to know your professors.  It made such a difference to have someone who really cared about you.  Frank got his degree at LSU and the classes were so big he was just one of impersonal many.

6.  My mother's mother and great aunt were dressmakers in New Orleans.  Mimi brought my grandmother to the US as a young girl from Alsace-Lorraine around the time of WWI.  They worked on the clothes of the rich and famous which included the ball gowns for the Rex and Comus Mardi Gras Krewes.  I have two quilts from Mimi (my great-great Aunt named Wilhelmina).  One is men's suiting and the other is the taffetas and silks and chiffon from the ball gowns.  My mother forced me to sit and do handwork as a young child.  I hated it because I wanted to be outside with the dog.  I would stitch something and she would evaluate it.  Generally it was deemed to be sub-par and she would rip it out in front of me and make me redo it.  I vowed to never do any of that for the rest of my life.  My mother made all our clothing including my father's suits and our underwear.  She made my prom dresses and my wedding dress and Diane's bride's maid dress.  I hated that too.  I did make some of Carrie's clothes and I taught her to sew.   But I never ever forced her to do it.

7.  I have seen a UFO.  It was when we were coming home from New Orleans many years ago.  We lived outside Hammond, LA along some of the backroads in a sparsely populated area.  Coming home late that night, about 2 AM we passed heavily wooded area where no houses or lights existed and saw a very bright, blue white light shining down from ABOVE the trees.  There are virgin pine forests there with 60 foot trees.  Frank stopped the car, which probably was not the best thing to do when you think you are looking at a UFO!  It was just so startling to see that light there where there should be nothing.  We rolled the windows down to see if we heard a helicopter or small plane or something. There was no sound what-so-ever.  Even the Stealth Helicopters the military has make some sound. We didn't see little green men or anything like that.   But we never have found anything that has explained what we both saw.  So we really did see an Unidentified Flying Object that night.





8.  In Louisiana, we always offer you some Lagniappe!  Lagniappe is just something extra.  Like 13 donuts when you buy a dozen.  So I offer you an extra bit of something about me.  We travel extensively.  We have been all across the US, in some of the most beautiful places on earth!  We watched the sunset while scuba diving off Key West, FL and we have seen the light of day at 2 AM on the slopes of Denali in Alaska.  I have walked through the Acropolis in Greece and through the Colosseum in Rome.  I have touched the pyramids in Egypt.  I have driven the Hwy 1 and touched the Pacific Ocean along the coast of California and waded along the shore of the Atlantic in Maine and Nova Scotia.  This year I will take a voyage around the southernmost tip of South America called Cape Horn and see where the penguins really live.  That will put us on all the continents except for one!  It has been an amazing experience!

I hope you have enjoyed learning these things about me.  Some you may have already known, but I know you didn't know all of that!