my acceptance speech to the arte y pico award

For the second time in my life I've won a blogging award. For the second time the award has come from Abel -- an accomplished writer, incredibly nice guy and above-average demeanor. In effect, it's praise worth bragging about. Officially the award is given out for "El arte es maravilloso, mas aun cuando se puede compartir con otros," at least according to the website. I can't argue with that, partially because I'm overcome with emotion and I really don't know any Spanish even thought I took Spanish for a couple of years.

In an interesting turn, I'm going to now make a couple of petty complaints about receiving the award. First, is that most other authors who display the award have white backgrounds on their blogs. As a result I had to open up Photoshop for 15 seconds in order to blacken the background on the award image on this page. Second, I really can't stand pico de gallo. Whenever I'm at Cafe Rio I always have to tell them to leave the squishy gross stuff off my salad and I hate that and sometimes I forget.

I guess the rules of Arte y Pico are as follows:

1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award through creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogger community, no matter of language.

2. Each award should have the name of the author with a link to their blog.

3. Award winners have to post the award with the name and link to the blog of the person who gave them the award.

4. Please include a link to the “Arte y Pico” blog so that everyone will know where the award came from.

Last time I won an award, the award pretty much stopped at me. That may be because I just re-awarded myself to some of my other blogs. This time I'll actually award some people who aren't me, so here goes:

1. Marmalade Memoirs
It may seem like I'm doing this just because she's my girlfriend, but her blog is awesome, outdated title and all, because it's great to hear what's going on in New York through an interesting non-tourist. Also, as a semi-Latina she may understand all this Spanish stuff going on up in here.

2. Simply Stephanie
Steph is a relative newcomer to the blogging scene, but she's totally posting with a vengeance.

3. Penny Fathrington
This particular blog isn't written by Penny himself (THAT would be amazing), but is a tribute to him by the fortunate souls who have come across him and tasted of his sweet sweet ribbon candy.

4. Locke Vs. Demosthenes
I threw this one an award because I need to remind myself to comment on the recent post on choosing candidates. Plus, it's a really good idea with some good writing. Either Locke and/or Demosthenes should run for office. One or both of them will probably rule the world some day.

5. Average Joe's Sports
This guy is not a sports drone all about stats and facts. He's got some real incendiary and thoughtful opinions that are awesome (even though I rarely actually agree with him especially when he DOESN'T talk about sports which actually is quite often, but is still just as good if not better than his sports insight).