The Honest Scrap Award

Today, we go off mule-topic to respond to a blog award that I received from Amanda's Veranda. I'm slightly uncomfortable right now as you read this. Its a man thing. Our brain boxes don't touch each other, and having a non-mule box in blog-o-world touching my mule box feels unnatural. Plus, truth telling in such a public forum is a bit personal and carries great risk for the average man. Men hate to wear it on their sleeve.

My posts here in Longears and Sourdough are mostly a cathartic stress reliever. I also write so my kids can sit around some day and reminisce about their heritage, which is easier than writing a book. So here comes this really nice blogger who wants me to tell 10 honest things about myself and then pass this award to seven other bloggers who I think deserve the compliment vis-a-vis their genius.

This is my list of Awardees in random, particular order: you all can now do the same.

Our Chaotic Clan seems to be a spider thing going on at her house.

Somewhere in Time shares some genes with me, but got more of the wit one than I.

Southern Mother Huck Finn lives there and Mom is a true patriot.

Island Family in the Desert Makes the everyday come to life in the most Alliterate way.

Perfect Moments Photography Extra-ordinary photographer

Plus 2 Singletons Has more twins than most, full of character

GoochTroop The consumate boys home.

Now for 10 undeniable truths. They are my story and I'm stickin to it...

1. I am an explorer. Not knowing what is over the next hill or around the next corner makes me uncomfortable. Every new vista is a relief to my soul. Every fresh smell and natural sound stops me in my tracks and grabs my heart.

2. I am a thrill seeker, and I love to pass it on. Everyone who knows me just said "Ya think?!" right now.

3. I am lucky, which perhaps explains why I am still alive.

4. I love to fly so much, I will crawl into anything capable of flight without a second thought. My career as a powered parachutist began by myself in a lonely alfalfa field. My only instruction was a friend waving his arms as I launched skyward. I couldn't stop crying and laughing as the world fell away and I marveled that I had to get my craft back to earth by myself. Over the next 8 years, I introduced over 1500 people to magic-carpet flight in the back seat of my own powered parachute.

5. I hate golf. Most eye doctors live in fancy houses and play golf. I live in a modest starter home on an acre with irrigation water and AG Zoning. After I leave my fancy office, I farm or explore. I would only trade it for a bigger farm and I would die inside if I had to live in a curb and guttered subdivision.

6. I hate chemical numbness. Liquor has never crossed my lips, and I fought every pain med, morphine drip, and epidural that the intensive care ward ever foisted on me. Neither trip to the intensive care ward was due to a thrill seeking activity (except I may have been speeding a little when that truck turned in front of my motorcycle.)

7. I love my job. When I help someone see for the very first time it brings tears to my eyes.

8. I love my sweet wife and her story. Her family's harrowing tale of survival in Cambodia's Killing Fields and foiled execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge captivates me still after 20 years of marriage.

9. I love freedom. Karl Marx and his philosophy are responsible for more misery and death in this world than any other man that ever lived in it--recall the hundreds of millions who died in cultural cleansing and socialist revolutions within the past 90 years. New Hampshire's motto Live Free or Die informs my existence and reading Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty speech makes me shout praise every time I re-read it.

10. I love the Author of it all. This is the place where words fail. There is no human language capable of communicating the gratitude I hold to the One who gave me my agency, my shot at mortality; and who alone has the power to heal every wound mortality inflicts on the human condition. I don't want to miss one inch of life, but I long for the day I get to feel His embrace. I know who He is.