Proud to be an Honest Scrap

After being offline for a while I am proud to report that I have been awarded the title "Honest Scrap" by a fellow garden blogger, Deborah at Kilbourne Grove (do look at her great Green Theatre blog). I am delighted and thank Deborah for this distinction! The admiration is mutual.
Although despite intensive googling I haven't been able to discover exactly what this award means or where it came from, it does include some clear duties that I will gladly comply with. Some might think that Duty 4 has some similarity to chain letters, but it doesn't promise you true love or ten thousand postcards, and instead may make you aware of or even connect you up with some bloggers you weren't familiar with before.

Here are the duties:

Duty 1: Brag about the award (which I'm hopefully fulfilling by writing this blog post on it.
Duty 2: Link back to Deborah (see above and below)
Duty 3: Write ten honest things about yourself (see below)
Duty 4: Pass on the award to 7 fellow bloggers you admire.

So here goes. Duty 3, ten things about me:

1. I have curly hair which was the bane of my youth and which I haven't grown to accept until middle age. My teenage daughter (also curly) has the great fortune to have been born in the age of electric hair flatteners, so needn't resort to the ironing board, as I used to.
2. I sometimes wish I had become an elementary school teacher.
   
3. Gardening has turned out to be a completely unexpected passion of mine.
   
4. For about ten years I've had an outline for a murder mystery on my PC. Any day now...
5. I never miss the Sunday night crime series on German TV ("Tatort").
6. A few years ago I got interested in my family's genealogy and discovered that some of my forebears may have been Mennonites who fled Europe in the 17th century for Pennsylvania.
   
7. My favorite vacation activity is doing long-distance cycling along Germany's many river routes (except now I have to stay home and tend my garden, see #3).
8. I have two sisters who live in San Francisco.
9. I've gone jogging with the same three women every Saturday for 18 years.
   
10. I am also an avid figure skating fan. Would anyone like to go to the European Championships in Tallinn, Estonia, with me in January?

And now for Duty 4, passing on the award. This award has been spreading like wildfire, and not surprisingly, just about every garden blogger I'd like to give it to has already been awarded it! But I'll name them anyhow. Since I don't know that many bloggers, this list is going to have to grow with time.  I'll start with these wonderful blogs:

1. Green Theatre, Deborah's gardening blog about Kilbourne Grove. There aren't that many of us out there that love clear, geometrical shapes and straight lines in their gardens!
2. Lou Murray's Green World. I've been enjoying this garden blog from a gardener in Southern California, far away both in kilometers and in terms of gardening conditions from where I am - but that's what makes the web so wonderful.
3. Elephant's Eye. A South African blog I've recently discovered with gorgeous photos.
4. Autumn Belle at My Nice Garden. Another blog I've become familiar with through Blotanical, a website where you can find all of these blogs and hundreds more, united by a common love of gardening.
5. Garden of Eaden,  Simon's very informative website with an ecological slant.