And the awards goes to

There’s a festive mood at work, given that everyone in our group is out of town at an event save for me and the designers. I’m not really feeling it, though. Mostly I feel pregnant, tired and frustrated by one of the content management systems I’m working on. The chitty chat is starting to interfere with my ability to concentrate on not stressing out about it, which means I’m going to give up at any moment. Though I guess I already have.

We’re going to take a field trip after lunch, to a photography exhibit, which has about as much to do with my job as a trip to the London Dungeons, if I’m being honest, but I was asked in front of at least one editor so I figure I’m covered.

While I’m here, I’m handing out an Arte Y Pico award to Shhh, who is somewhere in the air by now, and also to Wit of the Staircase, who won’t be around to accept.

In the first instance, the website is a testament to photography, poetry and the nature of existance I'm guessing. She likes to switch it up, so I go there every so often to see how she’s getting on.

Wit of the Staircase is a website created by Theresa Duncan, a woman who took her own life after some fairly shady dealings with an unknown aggressor, which she writes about briefly. Fascinated and fascinating in equal measures, this website is immensely hard to put down once you tunnel in.

I’m also giving one to Mil Millington, for Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued About. This is the first blog I probably ever read, having had no idea what a blog even was at the time. It made me laugh (out loud!) and wish that I had a boyfriend who found me half as compelling as Mil found his partner. And then I did, and I married 'im.

Congratulations, you three. At least two of you won’t ever discover this prestigious honour, but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it! That's all the time I have for today.

Arte Y Pico, anyone?

My gratitude to Lass: for surprising me with an Arte Y Pico award and thus shaming me for falling behind on my online reads. I appear to be around because I post every day or every other day, but mostly this is to keep my writing habitual when the demands on my time are such that I can’t manage much else. The luxury of snooping through the self-published thoughts of others is no longer mine.

I’m fairly confident that if I were to miss something vitally important on your blog though, I would receive an email or phone call, or at the very least a note saying: "I got married to the King of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and you STILL haven’t contacted me to offer congratulations? What kind of a friend are you?!" And then I would know to snap back to attention.

I have been crawling through some fantastic works of fiction, but I don’t suppose published authors are in need of a blog award. Maybe if someone had given Mr. Foster Wallace an Arte Y Pico, he would have been less sad in his life. Probably not though.

So long story short: I am horribly out of the blog loop and don’t quite know what to do with my allotment of award donations. It should come as no surprise to those of you in my notes page that I am an avid appreciator of Mrs Slocombe and The Lass herself (though I don’t know if you can do backsies).

Mrs Slocombe: would you like an Arte Y Pico? Because I’d very much like to give you one (that is an AWARD for those of you who’ve only been skimming and don’t read Spanish).

Let me get back to you on the other four, because I’m at work right now. And in Londontown, we do work at work. I know! It’s so totally incomprehensible to my small-town, grain-fed prairie brain at times, but it’s the truth.

M’kay, that’s enough now – here are the rules of the award, which I’m not actually sure I’ve earned:

Post the award pic on your page, pass the award along to five others, link to the original prize site (s/he should get some sort of SEO award for that one) and the sites of your winners.

Check, check and check-ish.