Before I say anything else, this is obviously not part two of my stream of consciousness as a rough draft post from earlier this week.  OK.  That being settled, let me move on.

Thank You and General Comments

Several weeks ago, Ivabranek kindly nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award.  I had completely forgotten about it until I got a “pingback” (I still don’t understand what a pingback is) from her today.  So, first I’d like to apologize to her for taking so long to respond to the terms of the award.  Secondly, I want to thank her for feeling that I am deserving of an award of any sort, much less one for versatility.  So, Ivabranek, THANK YOU!!

Below (a few paragraphs below) are the terms of the award, copied from the nomination post.  We were both taking part in a Word Press Bloggers U class called Writing 101.  Altogether, there were over 130 bloggers/writers registered for this class, meaning that it became very difficult to engage in a great deal of discussion related to critique, as it was impossible to read all the posts that were generated each day.  Yet there were a few posts that were written by people who consistently turned out very interesting or very progressive or very good reading in general.  I tried to follow all the writers that I really admired, but that list became large enough that WP’s automatic warning related to the number of new posts I was subscribing to started cropping up pretty often.  The truth is, I am “following” more bloggers than I have time to read.  And the original people I followed from a post-a-day challenge that took place several years ago has to be reviewed, mainly because of how those blogs have morphed into something else, but also because some of the bloggers seem to have disappeared.

But here’s my real point that has nothing to do with this nomination: there are a lot of great bloggers out there (Ivabranek among them) who deserve exposure because their work is really good and constantly improving.

Terms of the Versatile Blogger Award

The Versatile Award Nomination is passed on from a blogger to another blogger. If you are nominated it also means you got the award; the blogger who nominated you gave you the award. …  As in any game, these awards have rules. And the rules are:

1. Provide the link and name of the blogger who nominated you – and thank them.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself.
3. Nominate any number of fellow bloggers, adding a link to their blog.
4. Share these rules with them.
5. Go and make yourself some coffee and/or write a nice letter to someone.

The Thanks (1)

I already thanked my nominator and provided a link to her blog site.

Share 7 facts about yourself (2)

There’s not much to say about myself, but I’ll do my best.

• I’m a former teacher and university instructor and dean. I taught special education classes, mostly for students with behavioral/emotional problems, but also with learning disabilities, as well as regular education classes in social studies and (my favorite) reading.  At the postsecondary level, I taught graduate education classes.  Because of the structure of the department of my full-time postsecondary position, I also taught introductory courses in the business department (Introduction to Business Ethics, Intro to Human Resources Management); and then there were the research and statistics classes in both education and business… Boring stuff, but I do enjoy teaching!
• Currently, I’m biding my way toward retirement in January, living on an island where I am unemployable and from which I can do little–education wise–online.  So I blog.
• For the past few years, I’ve been working on a book on retraining the non-dominant hand to write.  The problem is that I haven’t been able to get the software that I need to complete the “picture” and “exercise” parts of the book, and keep forgetting to call during “regular business hours,” which to me should be 24/7.
• I’m also working on teaching my non-dominant hand to draw, but the drawing lessons I’m taking are for my dominant hand because 2 months ago I was barely able to draw a stick figure that anyone would recognize as a person.
• As soon as enough people sign up, or at least commit to getting together, I’ll be adding painting to my non-artistic repertoire.  Acrylics and/or watercolor for now, as both mediums are water-soluble and are almost as “erasable” as all the errors I make in drawing.
• Living on an island in the Caribbean was fun for a while, but it’s getting old.  I want to be back where there are real department stores and malls and …
• Never will anyone say about me that I am a writer of fiction.  There is not a creative bone in my body, or, it would seem, a creative brain cell in my head.  But I keep pretending that’s not the case, and practice, practice, practice.

Nominate fellow bloggers and add their link (3)

The following people are being nominated mostly because I feel that they are versatile in their writing, I am familiar with a lot of their work (even if I don’t always remember to “like” or even visit their sites), and they are either very good or show a great deal of promise.  Some of these blogger/writers post poetry, photography, stories, commentary, all sorts of things.  Finkelstein etc. mostly posts in Dutch, but has some English posts that are very good.  That I’ve only listed six has more to do with familiarity and that I really like their stuff.  There are other bloggers who I thoroughly enjoy, but who have more than the limit of 100 followers (even some of the ones below probably exceed that number now anyway after Writing 101; I haven’t checked today).  But they are all great reads or eye candy when graphics are involved.

1. Ivabranek 
2. Jabrushblog 
3. AndyTownend
4. Finkelstein and Sons
5. Smiley like I mean it
6. Rantings of a Third Kind

Share these rules (4), provided above.

Coffee/letter (5): Done.  Great coffee, too.

Thank you again, Ivabranek, for the nomination! And I don’t expect you to write up a blog post accepting this award, since you’ve been nominated a number of times!

#educ_dr