(May 2020. Blog awards and other stuff.)

~ Greg Dennison

It has been some time since I have written here.  Life has been busy.  I started the next episode a few days ago (it will be about moving back to Jeromeville into Las Casas apartment #124, on the weekend of September 2 & 3, 1995).  But I’ve had so many other things going on that I haven’t taken the time to sit down and really write.

I did get tagged in blog awards twice over the last couple weeks.  For you non-bloggers, a blog award is where you answer questions about yourself and nominate the authors of your favorite blogs to answer the same questions.

The first time I got tagged in one of those as this blog, I incorporated it into a regular story.  Blogs and blog awards didn’t exist in 1995, so I pretended it was a chain email that some girl I talked to on IRC sent me.  But I have been tagged several other times, and I don’t want to spend my storytelling words just writing about answering emails.  So I stopped doing posts about blog awards, although if I was specifically tagged I would always answer in a reply to that person’s post.  Also, when I have answered blog award posts in the past, I usually answer “in character” as 1995 Greg, answering as I would have answered in 1995.  However, I’m going to start asking specifically if the person who tagged me wants me to answer as 1995 Greg or as adult Greg.  Also, most of the names of people and places have been changed in my blog, so I will use those pseudonyms in the answers to my questions when applicable.

I’m going to try interrupting my usual story every few months for a post specifically to answer questions I get in blog awards and other things like that.  But I probably won’t be nominating people to do the awards.  I always feel a little self-conscious about that (because of an incident I explained in the story where I answered blog award questions before).  I know that that kind of takes away part of the blog award experience, since I don’t get to share other blogs, but I will at least share the link of the blog that nominated me.

Bekah (owlservejesus.wordpress.com/) nominated me for the Real Neat Blog Award (thank you!)

The rules:

  • Thank the blogger(s) who nominated you
  • Answer the 10 questions the blogger gave to you
  • Nominate four bloggers who deserve the award
  • Create 10 original questions for the nominees to answer
  • Let them know they’ve been nominated

Bekah’s questions for me:  (I am answering in character, it is August 1995)

1. What is you favorite book to read?
Hmm… I don’t know, I’m not usually one to read a book more than once… I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King lately.

2. Do you have any allergies?
Not that I know of.

3. Spring or fall?
Fall, but I prefer summer to both of those

4. What is your favorite color?
Not pink

5. What sport do you play?
I don’t. My brother got all the sports talent in our family.

6. Prefer the City or country?
City, but I’m more used to small cities than big cities.

7. What would be your dream pet to have?
Hmm……. I grew up with cats, I can’t really see myself having any other pets… I don’t think I’m going to get a pet for a while, though

8. Favorite veggie?
Corn

9. Hot cocoa, tea or coffee?
Hot cocoa

10. Favorite fruit?
Banana

Lydia (inhisserviceandlovingit.wordpress.com) nominated me for the Mystery Blogger Award.  Thank you!

  1. Put the award logo on your blog
  2. Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog
  3. Mention the creator of the award (Okoto Enigmas, but the link I had didn’t work)
  4. Answers the five questions you were asked
  5. Tell the readers three things about yourself
  6. Nominate ten to twenty bloggers
  7. Notify the bloggers (tell them you nominated them) by commenting on one of their posts
  8. Ask your nominees five questions with one weird or funny one
  9. Share a link to your best posts

Lydia asked for my answers as an adult.

Three things about myself:

  • I attend a church that has a total of nine people right now.
  • I’ve been to all of the lower 48 states in the USA, but I haven’t been to Alaska or Hawaii.  (And for the record, 1995 Greg has only been to four.)
  • The longest I have ever stayed awake in one stretch was around 42 hours (but sadly, it’s because of stress and insomnia, not some great epic adventure).

Lydia’s questions:

1.  Do you prefer solid color clothes or a pattern?
I have no fashion sense as it is… I tend to prefer solid colors, but I have a lot of stripes too.  I guess it depends on what the pattern is.  And if I’m not dressed for work, I prefer shirts with pictures and words and favorite sports team logos and stuff like that.

2.  What are your 3 favorite things you do every day?
Breathe, eat, and sleep.

3.  How often do you post on your blog?
I don’t keep a schedule, and I don’t stress about it anymore.  I post when I’m ready and when I’m done writing something.

4.  When you handwrite, do you write in cursive or print?
img016 (2)

5.  When was the last time you ate bacon?
About a week ago.  I had breakfast for lunch.  I made bacon and waffles.

My best blog posts:
… that’s a tough one.

The one about the time I was sleeping and my friends woke me up (part 1, part 2) is a memorable one, because that was an important event in my life that led to other important things I haven’t written about yet.

The one about my last day of freshman year was good in a bittersweet way.  My mom said she got teary-eyed.

And I always enjoy telling the story of the time we played Sardines in the Death Star building.

It’s hard to narrow it down, though… so many of these stories mean so much to me.

I nominate whoever wants to do these.

My five questions for the Real Neat Blog Award:

1.  What is your reason behind blogging?

2.  How did you choose your blog’s name?

3.  If you could live anywhere else, and money and immigration laws were no object, where would that be?

4.  What is something you’re a fan of, but a little embarrassed to admit?

5.  Tell me a funny story involving farts.

My ten questions for the Mystery Blogger Award:

1-5. The same ones as the Real Neat Blog Award

6.  Tell about something that most people you know like but you don’t like?

7.  What technological advancement of your lifetime do you wish had never happened?

8.  What is a food that you really like to eat but hate to prepare (or go through whatever you need to do or wherever you need to go to get this food)?

9.  Tell me about the weirdest thing you’ve ever been invited to do by a friend.

10.  Are you typing your answer on a PC, Mac, iPhone, Android phone, or other?

I apologize if anyone else tagged me for something that I did not include here.

While we’re at it, let’s make this a question and answer post too… feel free to ask me any question you want, questions for 1995 Greg, questions for adult Greg, questions about blogging or life in 1995 or whatever.  I won’t make a separate post for that, but I will reply to comments here.

And stay tuned… in the next few days, I will finish the next actual episode, I promise.

42 thoughts on “(May 2020. Blog awards and other stuff.)”

  1. Hot cocoa is amazingg at all hours, all weathers🤩 And I’m a city person too 🤟

    And my handwriting is cursive. Though I tend to deviate, I’m trying to maintain it in the cursive style. :)

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    1. It is, although I only tend to drink it when it’s cold. I don’t like coffee. I don’t like the taste of coffee. I tried adding stuff to coffee and I didn’t like it because I could still taste the coffee. Do you realize how hard it was to be a college student in 1995 and not like coffee? Hanging out at the coffee shop was all the rage back then because of this new popular TV show called Friends (which I also never got into). I felt like my dislike of coffee seriously stunted my social life. Of course, being afraid of people also stunted my social life, but still.

      (I’ll have stories about my dislike of coffee and my thoughts about the show Friends eventually.)

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    2. And as for being a city person, like I said, I’ve spent all my life in small cities and in suburbs, so I’ve never actually lived in a dense urban area. Jeromeville had about 50-55,000 people during the time I lived there (it has grown a little, but less than a lot of cities around here, I think it’s close to 70,000 now) (and those figures don’t include students living on campus, so it’s probably actually several thousand higher). People who grew up in large cities consider that a small town, and people who grew up out in the country consider that a big city, so it’s all a matter of perspective.

      As an adult, I live on the other side of the Drawbridge, in a suburb just south of Capital City. This is part of a contiguous metropolitan area with probably about 1.5 million people, but I’m 13 miles from the densely populated central city.

      (All of these are the place names I use in my blog, not the actual names of these places)

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      2. What exactly do you consider townish? Like I said in another comment, it’s all a matter of perspective. People from Bay City think that Jeromeville is a small town, but people who live out in the middle of nowhere consider Jeromeville a big city.

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      3. Umm like a nice neighborhood with lots of houses, just not too close together, maybe 40 ft apart. but where you are like two minutes from everything, i like being close to places

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      4. My immediate neighborhood is close to a lot of stuff, but the houses are closer together than what you’re describing. The kind of place you’re describing exists where I live, but they are often a little farther out from shopping centers, on the edge of town. They are also often very wealthy areas, because land is so expensive here.

        Jeromeville is more densely populated than a lot of cities its size, because (a) it is a university town with a lot of students who need to live cheaply, so a lot of apartment complexes and a lot of houses with students sharing bedrooms and stuff like that; and (b) because of the university culture, the city is run by intellectuals who say the sprawling suburb model is inefficient and unsustainable and such. Where I live now is a large suburb right next to an even larger city; to me, this suburb in particular feels like the good parts of a small town combined with the good parts of a large city, with a good balance of suburban and semi-rural neighborhoods.

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      5. Okay. Nobody handwrites anymore these days. It’s all done by what I’m doing right now.
        So… it’s hard to fine something handwritten laying around by me! ;) I’ll try to do that today though.

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      6. I know! I miss handwriting, though. Getting actual handwritten mail was always the highlight of the day for me. When I was a senior in high school, my friend Catherine was a foreign exchange student in Austria (you saw my post about the concert a couple weeks ago, right?) and we stayed in touch through handwritten letters; she told me I was the last of her friends back home still writing her by the end of that year. A lot of my friends from freshman year didn’t have email at home, it was a newly mainstream technology at the time that not everyone used, and I kept in touch with some of them by writing letters, some handwritten, some typed. I made a friend sophomore year at UJ who spent junior year studying abroad in Hungary, and I stayed in touch with her by writing letters (we aren’t currently in touch in 2020, although I’ve seen her on Facebook under People You May Know so some of my friends are). And my grandmother, who will turn 100 in December and has never owned a computer or cell phone in her life, still writes me letters once or twice a month. And I’ve saved almost every piece of handwritten mail I’ve ever gotten, as you’ve seen in my blog.

        Side note: Molly from Pennsylvania, who I said here was the first person I met on the Internet who wrote to me in real life, was actually the second. I had another pen pal who I met on the Internet just before I moved to Jeromeville, and she couldn’t use email anymore so we wrote letters off and on during freshman and sophomore year, then we abruptly lost touch. I found those letters while cleaning the garage in 2014 and tried to track her down… that experience had some parallels with some stuff going on in my life at the time, and I wrote a novel based on it. I didn’t include her in my blog because I already wrote about her and didn’t want to be repetitive, although a few of my stories from freshman year, like the night I got upset and playing Sardines, showed up in that novel before I started DLTDGB.

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      7. Yes. That’s neat.
        Before my best friend and I (Bekah… so cool you did both of our awards in one post ;) ) started texting, we wrote handwritten letters to each other in the mail! Actually, sometimes, I typed mine out, but it was still cool.

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    1. Haha :) I really don’t think in terms of favorite colors. I’m a dude. Colors are how you can tell who is on your team. And colors are context-dependent… bright green looks beautiful on a springtime hillside, but I wouldn’t paint my house that color.

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      2. Because it is humorous.

        One time, two teenage girls dragged me into their argument to settle it. One of them pointed at the other one’s shirt and said, “Is her shirt maroon or burgundy?” I looked at the shirt, I looked back at her, and I said, “I’m a guy. It’s red.”

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