Totally unexpectedly, I have been nominated for a Sunshine Blogger Award. I thank you humbly, Alex of brianlilyandardbeg, for throwing this on my head! As they say in cartoons, “WHAMMM!” I am deeply honored and more than a little overwhelmed. When I started blogging two month ago, I had not known what to expect, and I certainly had not expected to find such fascinating people in blogosphere as Alex herself, a true intellectual and a savior of animals in distress, and as those bloggers I am, in my turn, nominating for this award.
The Sunshine Blogger Award is an award given to bloggers by bloggers. It is given to “bloggers who are positive and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere.”
Here are the rules to accept the Sunshine Award:
- Thank the person who nominated you in a blog post and link back to their blog.
- Answer the eleven questions sent by the person who nominated you.
- Nominate eleven blogs to receive the award and write them eleven new questions.
- List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo in your post and/or your blog.I would not be myself if I didn’t post a funky picture, so there:
Don’t start drooling, beautiful people, it’s not my bike! Mine was a lot smaller and by far not so gorgeous (Java .5, for anyone who knows what it is). I think this photo will describe me better than my answers to 11 questions, but Alex, you wrote excellent questions, so I am answering.
- What would you like to wipe off the surface of the Earth?
Ignorance, hatred, violence. Ignorance leads to hatred which, in turn, transforms into violence.
2. Who has influenced you most?
My grandmother
3. What’s your favourite poem? (I am keeping your British spelling, darling! You guys know the correct English!)
Listen!
If stars light up the sky,
That means someone needs it,
That means it is essential
That every evening
Above the city
Lights up
At least one star.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Listen!
4. What’s your comfort food?
Chocolate! Need you ask? One more time, for the record:
My Own Rules of Dessert.
Rule #1. It’s not dessert if it’s not chocolate.
Rule #2. The more chocolate, the better.
5. What job/ profession would you choose if all jobs paid the same?
The same – educator. I have never cared what it paid, as I have always believed that if you love what you are doing, you will do it well, and if you do it well, someone will pay for it. I taught my children the same philosophy, and they seem to be happy in life.
6. What do you like most about yourself?
I am what I am. I am not perfect by any means, but I am content with who and what I am and with the process of growing and striving to correct the imperfections, one by one.
7. What makes you happy?
Music, dancing, the ocean, art, people and animals, and most of all, grandchildren!
8. Why do you blog?
I addressed it in my first post Hello, Beautiful People! I don’t think I can – or should – do it again. Suffice it to say that it’s therapeutic. It has helped me to start coping with the loss.
9. What’s your biggest talent?
Reaching out to people and bringing out their best.
10. How would you like to be remembered?
I am not sure whether I want to be remembered, but it is said that the one who saves a child, saves the whole world. My most gratifying moments come when I see the graduates of my school for students with special needs succeed in the wide world out there. Just recently, a father of a boy who had come to us with a severe emotional disability which was causing him to keep failing his classes, up to 5th grade, called me to report that the boy – already a young man! – has graduated from a mainstream high school with honors and has been admitted to a prestigious college. I cannot publish names or pictures, but I do keep their postcards from camps and cry at their weddings.
11. If you were to give humanity a piece of your wisdom, what would it be?
I wouldn’t presume! A piece of Higher Wisdom has already been given to humanity – Love! Love for every speck of sand and blade of grass, for everything that walks, flies, swims, slithers, and breathes in the Universe.
The next step is to nominate 11 blogs. It was difficult to choose since there are quite a few others who have inspired me at one time or another, but here they are, in alphabetical order:
Tomorrow – that is, already today! – I will contact all of them and I hope they accept the nomination. Meanwhile, my 11 questions:
- If you were an animal, who would you be and why?
- What is your first thought when you wake up in the morning?
- What do you do to calm down when stressed out?
- Do you prefer indoors or outdoors time?
- How do you vacation?
- How often do you smile and why?
- What kind of art makes you breathless?
- What do you think of social media?
- Wine, beer, or strong liquor?
- How much green is in your food?
- Rain or shine?
I guess you know which animal I am. This is my second post without any recipes in it, and I will have to compensate for it.
With that, beautiful people, I am saying Good Night!
koolkosherkitchen 
I love your answers! I like your blog so much I always start my wordpressing with reading your post 🙂 I know I’m not the only one and there are still so many people in the world who would love to discover it! I like Russian poetry (and the Russian language, I read in Russian and even speak it very badly) – the poem will make me explore Mayakovsky -as I’m ashamed to admit, I don’t think I have read much of it. I liked Yesenin when I was learning Russian years ago (but it was Dostoyevsky who was my reason for learning it at all- still one of my favourite writers ever)
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Thank you again! I also love Yesenin, especially his poem The Black Man. Unfortunately, most translations do not do him justice. If you understand Russian, you can see and hear the difference once you watch https://youtu.be/ngQplID937g, which is a very unusual animation of this poem. As to Mayakovsky, it’s more my son’s territory, than mine. His dissertation “The Urbanism of Vladimir Mayakovsky” received an award as outstanding (you can see that I am bragging about my sons too, not only grandkids!). I translated this little poem, as it was the first that popped into my mind when I saw the question, and I don’t like any existing translations. That is not to say that I don’t know or don’t like English-language poetry, of course. However, if you are into Dostoevsky, have you read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita? It tells you even more about the elusive “mysterious Russian soul” than Dostoevsky.
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I love the sound of Russian! It’s difficult to translate poetry -especially if the languages are so different. I’ve read Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’ -it was long time ago and in English, so I should probably do it again. I remember it was confusing…kind of enjoyable because it was so weird, but I’m sure I didn’t ‘get it’. And I think Dostoevsky will always be my favourite. Seriously, I started learning Russian to read ‘The Idiot’. You should boast about your son. I expect my Mum to do it (and would be hugely disappointed if she didn’t). You have a clever family-but it doesn’t surprise me at all!
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It is difficult because you want to get the rhythm and the alliterations as close to the original as possible, but again, my son is the expert on that. If you are planning to re-read Master and Margarita, I suggest you get the 1997 Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. It is objectively the best. There is also an excellent movie, and it’s available on Youtube. It is quite surreal, yet very true to reality which WAS surreal for the entire 75 years of communist regime. Please understand that one could get 8 to 15 years of hard labor for READING this book, let alone being an owner of it. Perhaps bearing this in mind will help you relate to it in a different way. “Clever” is not the reason for achievements. We were drilled from birth that education was the most important part of life, that you spared no effort to be as widely and as deeply educated as you could (which wasn’t easy for Jews in the Soviet Union), and that you got as high as you could in your degree-seeking. My son was seven when we came here, but I have drilled it into him, and now he is drilling it into Alisia. I do appreciate your kind words, though!
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I remember when I had my ‘Russian period’ some 20 years ago my teacher was telling me surreal (for me) stories – even the authors lives were full of this strange death drive, the yearning for self-destruction, almost as if suffering was necessary to create and they seemed eternally torn between being ordinary, perhaps happy but then forgotten and being in constant pain of millions of those ordinary, perhaps happy but then forgotten. I remember my teacher reading a passage in Russian, translating and then explaining. And it wasn’t only the countless adjectives, the infinite diminutives and augmentatives, the idioms, strange sounding collocations and all the conjugation and declination that made Russian sentences twisted and mysteriously vague till I fully understood the sense. Most of all, the words had their own history, so rich and complex that I thought my own beloved mother tongue was somehow deficient (I don’t feel like that anymore, I believe the language lives in the user and all languages are equally beautiful-albeit not all of them for all of us).
I’ve never experienced even the slightest limitation on my personal freedom, so even though I don’t take it for granted, I don’t think it would ever be possible for me to truly feel the fear of losing it, or the dilemma of sacrificing everything and fighting for freedom while wanting to be alive.
Because I was brought up as a non-believer and I’ve never been either tempted or able to follow any religion, my brain is wired in a different way than someone’s who has ideals beyond my understanding and they are more important than anything else (well, this is a really complex issue, I only mention it to point out why I might never ‘get’ the book).
Anyway, I’ve just ordered a copy online. I’m sure my second reading (after so many years) is going to be vastly different.
As to your clever family: my comment was light-hearted (and I guess the connotations in American English might not be entirely positive, ‘clever’ for me doesn’t just mean gifted, it most definitely includes hard work and determination). Anyway, I mean: you should be very proud of your family 🙂 I’ve never been explicitly told that I should study. My parents always said that it’s better to be a happy bin man (or woman) than a frustrated professor (though they would have been disappointed if I hadn’t gone to uni, even if they’d have pretended otherwise). Every experience we’ve ever had makes us the unique individual we are. I try to understand other people’s worlds and I know they always enrich mine. Whether I really can see the world from another person’s perspective is another matter.
That is a long, long comment…anyway, I’m going to read ‘The Master and Margarita’ again and find some publications on the Soviet Union -ideally describing Jews living in the communist reality. I’m ashamed to admit I’m totally ignorant on the subject. Thank you 🙂
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I think I’ll respond backwards, or upside down, if you will, i.e. from the bottom up. First, Jews were not the only ones persecuted under the communist regime. However, other ethnic minorities did have a home, or a territory where they constituted a majority; therefore, as long as they followed the party line, nobody bothered them. Jews did not have such a safe haven, unless you count the Jewish Autonomous Republic, another one of Stalin’s “brilliant” initiatives, that enable him to send Jews all the way to far east, out of sight. Obviously, by that time there were practically no Jewish farmers because of the expulsions from the land and prohibitions to work the land that had been instituted before the revolution. Mostly, Jews belonged to intelligentsia, the intellectual class, where education was perceived as the only means of survival. So, no, I have not taken umbrage at “clever” – it’s just that my family wasn’t the only one, but a very common one among Russian Jews of those times. Secondly, even though some chapters of Master and Margarita feature a religious figure, the book is not about religion at all. It is phantasmagorical, definitely, but even the most bizarre scenes, such as the famous Satan’s Ball, are actually based on real events. I once wrote a paper about it, when some interesting archive documents surfaced in Germany. I’ll see if I can find it. And what about Yesenin – is The Black Man not phantasmagorical? Wasn’t his life and death? Wasn’t Bulgakov’s life, or Mayakovsky’s? Or Isaac Babel’s? Mandelshtam – the genius! – who was reciting Petrarch to criminals and politicals huddled together around the fire in a hard labor camp in Siberia… I had a dear friend, of blessed memory, who had been arrested at the age of 25 and served 15 years for a joke told to his roommate. The roommate informed on him. We knew that every third person was an informer, so if you were sharing a bottle of wine with two close friends, and you were pretty sure that you were not “it,” then one of them definitely was! If you have read Solzhenitsyn (not my favorite person, but he wrote the truth!), you know that it’s not only Jews who were the targets. Being considered Jewish, incidentally, had nothing to do with religion. In an atheistic state, where any religion was proclaimed to be “opiate for the masses” (Lenin), citizens were not identified or labeled by their religion. It was simply a line in the internal passport (the infamous 5th line), that indicated one’s ethnicity. A Ukrainian was a Ukrainian, and a Chechen was a Chechen, no matter where they were born and where they lived. In this the communists were actually correct: a non-religious Jew is still a Jew, if he or she was born of a Jewish mother. We do not force anyone to be observant, G-d forbid, and we believe in both the free will and the free choice. Now, freedom is a curious construct. Janice Joplin once remarked that freedom is what you get when they have taken away everything else (I don’t guarantee the exact quote, so please don’t kill me!). I can affirm the truth of this statement! I think I am getting carried away, so let me end this by saying that, of course, I am proud of my family – how could it be otherwise? On a little aside, Russian is not my mother tongue, and English was #4, chronologically. Finally, a quote from a Russian song: “My friends, my friends, how much I want to shoot myself among the the Russian birch trees…” Here is the entire “mysterious Russian soul” in one phrase! Thank you for allowing me to ramble.
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I think it was Solzhenitsyn who put me off learning about Russian history and culture. ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was a bit too much for my young self. Well, it definitely had an impact on me, though I didn’t really want to remember the book. I don’t mind spirituality in literature, I just don’t think I’ll ever read something that would touch something deeper in me. My ‘reader’s perspective’ will never be the same as someone’s with a religious/spiritual upbringing and deep beliefs. And I’m glad you ramble, it makes me think.
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At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I don’t consider Solzhenitsyn a great writer. However, I think ‘August 14’ is stronger than the ‘Archipelago,’ and so is ‘In the First Circle.’ However, the 2008 film ‘B Kруге Первом’ is better than the book, in terms of understanding the atmosphere of the epoch. It is available on youtube. Going back to Dostoyevsky, there was an incredible film ‘Идиот’ made in the 50s, but there was an even more incredible stage production with the late great Smoktunovsky playing Myshkin. I thought they had it on tape, but apparently I was mistaken. There are excerpts on youtube, though. I keep giving you those film references, but I don’t know how much of a theater and film person you are. I know you are an avid reader, so if you are really interested in understanding those times, try ‘Московская сага’ and ‘Ожог’ by Aksyonov – a much better writer that Solzhenitsyn, in my humble opinion. And Alex, remember James Bond: Never say never!
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Love it & thanks for the nomination 😊
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You definitely deserve it – I love your blog, and I’ like more people to read and appreciate it.
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Congratulations to you!! And thank you for nominating me. 😀
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You totally deserve it! I love your recipes, and your DIY projects are so creative and thoughtful – I thank you for sharing your taste, skills, and creativity.
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Hello Dolly! I love you on that motorcycle lol.
Thank you again for this nomination. I’ve accepted and completed my response. See it here. http://earthacooks.com/2016/07/26/sunshine-blogger-award/
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First of all, I thank you for accepting the nomination. You definitely deserve the award for spreading the Green Goodness throughout the world and for your unfailing ebullience! Secondly, I love both your answers and your questions. I also thank G-d for gifting me with yet another day when I wake up in the morning. I love Lord Byron, a strange character that he was. And I love to dance – yes, just music and me! You are the only one who got what I meant by the quirky “green” question – I meant it literally, as in green color. Of course, I’ve explored the Cooking Green Goodness section of your blog, and I love it! And BTW, I’ve posted Banana Pancakes quite a while ago – did you see? So keep on blogging AND smiling!
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So first I googled “ebullience” – now I can move on. You are very kind. I’m happy you enjoyed reading the post. Don’t know how I missed your delicious pancakes – and that video is HILARIOUS!
Aside from the pancakes, you left us with this…“What do you do with bananas that have gone bad? The same thing you do with kids who have gone bad, for no fault of their own – you peel off the dark stuff that surrounds their lives, and you give them love and attention according to their needs.”
Love it!
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This is what happens to us, to whom English is a learned language. We come up with inane words and expressions that normal people don’t use in their normal lives. When you get to making pancakes, let me know how they come out!
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Great picture!
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Thank you, dear Eva!
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Reblogged this on koolkosherkitchen and commented:
This was my very first award, Beautiful People!
I am signing off for Yom Kippur. Those of you who are fasting, have an easy and meaningful fast and a great year! May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a sweet year, full of blessings!
The party is still going on, guys, so put your dancing shoes on and come over! https://koolkosherkitchen.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/award-party-with-cats-and-coconut-cake/
In response to today’s prompt WITTY, I am sure you’ll bring some witty comments with you https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/witty/
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Thank you for pingback.
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Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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Thank you for reblogging.
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Hi Dolly 🙂 Congratulations on this wonderful well deserved award. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know you more through reading your answers to the questions> Have a lovely week ahead. 🙂 x
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Thank you so much, dear Lynne! You too, have a great week! 😻
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Thank you 🙂 x
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😻
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The Sunshine blogger award is so fitting for you !
Your faith, educator commitment, love of chocolate, recipes and bright posts, all encompass my ideal of what the award represents.. May God bless you thru this life into the new life coming 💛
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This is probably the best blessing I have ever received, and especially now, at the beginning of the year and in the midst of holidays! We believe that He blesses those who bless others, so all the blessings you bestow upon me will be returned to you thousandfold! 😻
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