Squeee! Awards time!

Awwww... The Student Knitter nominated me for the Beautiful Blogger Award! ::bluuush:: I'd like to thank everyone who made this award possible... all my knitting buddies... my grandmas who both knit... my mother who knit only a little but showed me how to do garter stitch and didn't mind my filching her knitting books when I wanted to get serious about knitting... my dad for taking me to my first real yarn store and buying me some real wool yarn for my first sweater... my DH for never making one peep about the size of my yarn stash (or he gets the stink-eye about the size of his collection of magician stuff) and for getting me a spinning wheel for Christmas... the cats for -- hey, let GO of that aran alpaca, cat! Nooo... hold on...

Okay, back again.

So, here's how the award works. I tell you 10 things that you may not know about me, and I nominate ten more blogs that I like. Naturally my nominee blogs are all going to be knitting related, and while I read Wendy Knits and The Yarn Harlot and Crazy Aunt Purl, my ten nominees are blogs that I read that aren't nearly so famous. So here goes:

10 things you probably don't know about me:

1. Between Dad changing jobs several times, then the family buying property, renting while we built, getting the rental sold out from under us, moving in with grandma, then moving into our house, we moved so much during my childhood that I went to eight different grade schools. But in all that time, we never left the Pacific Northwest.
2. Until my DH and I took the boys on a road trip to Indiana to see his family, I'd never been east of the Oregon-Idaho border.
3. I have a Bachelor's degree in Biology, a Master's in Botany, a second Master's in Teaching, and a Ph.D. in Science Education. It's my collection. Everyone needs a collection.
4. I rode an elephant once. It was at the circus. Poor elephant, going around and around in circles with noisy kids on its back.
5. My first job was working at a cannery that processed beets, beans, and corn. To this day I can't stand beets. The cannery was so old that parts of it weren't safe and the city threatened to condemn it while I was working there. I would have happily shown up with a sledge hammer if they had. It's gone now.
6. A little over 10 years ago, DH and I and some friends got in on a fabulous deal for airfare to Paris and five nights in a hotel in the Latin Quarter. I want to go back. I waaaaant to go baaaaack! J'adore Paris!
7. My first ancestor on this continent was a Welsh doctor named Thomas Wynne who came over with William Penn. I've heard the Wynne house still stands in Philadelphia, but I'm not sure where it is or if it's in a safe place to visit.
8. Je parle un peu de français, mais pas très bien.
9. The coolest summer job I ever had was working as a field technician for the U.S. Forest Service, doing vegetative survey. My team was collecting data on forest types to create a forest management manual. The summer before I worked, they were surveying clear cuts, and the summer after, they were to work on riparian areas full of spiny Devil's club, but the summer I worked there we were surveying sub-alpine areas. Camping out above treeline in the Goat Rocks, on Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Jefferson all summer and getting paid for it? Yeah, that rocked.
10. I've got a brown belt in Shin-Shin Toitsu Aikido from the Oregon Ki Society. But I haven't trained in a bunch of years.
    

And now for the nominees:

1. Puff the Magic Rabbit
2. Lunaticraft
3. Moirae Knitting
4. Lazy Kate
5. Bright Havens
6. Carrieoke's Knitting blog
7. Queer Joe's Knitting Blog
8. Knitguy
9. Unwind, A Yarn Shop (formerly If You Knit You Can't Eat)
10. Chic knits
11. Green Apples
    

I gave y'all an extra because I couldn't decide between a couple of 'em so I didn't.