Spring has Won

Britain has been in a perpetual Narnia-like state of winter for the past, oh, six months. But it seems that spring is finally winning the battle to emerge and reign supreme. The sun is out, skies are blue and flowers are blooming (tentatively, but still, we’ll take whatever we can get).

The Versatile Blogger Award

The rules for this award are as follows:

• Thank the person who gave you this award.
• Include a link to their blog.
• Select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
• Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award.
• Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

So here goes. BIG thanks to The Peckish Kiwi who nominated me for this award – and at the same time set me a subtle challenge to blog more (now, I’m just got to step up to that challenge!).

Now, for the 15 blogger/blogs that I would like to nominate for this award:

- Querido Rafa

- A Blonde’s Point of View

- A Leek Writes

- Bibek Journal

- Two Black Doggies

- Little London Observationist

- An Aussie Eye on American Sport

- Just in Time Travels

- An Observant Mind

- Miss Interpreting

- Jody-Lan Castle

- Raising My Rainbow

- Ms Elena Levon on Travelling

- Cee’s Photography

- Emmas Random Thoughts

Seven things about me…

1. I have endless lists (on my phone, on my laptop, on paper) of books that I want to read one day.

2. The reason I started watching tennis (and the day I fell in love with the sport) was the Men’s Singles Final at Wimbledon, 2008. Yip that final between Nadal & Federer.

3. I can count to ten in Maori, Japanese, French and Italian.

4. I don’t speak Maori, Japanese, French or Italian.

5. If I won the lottery (big-money lottery, not £50) I would spend most of it on travelling around the world, ticking things off my bucket list.

6. Until two years ago I had never been to a concert before. Now I’ve been to, two.

7. I believe whole-heartedly that pineapple lumps, orange chocolate-chip icecream, Tim Tams, mint slices and sour-cream-and-chives chips are the best foods in the world. You should try them (not all together, that might be gross).

Why we shouldn’t be afraid to fail

I recently went to a Hacks/Hackers event about ways of funding new, innovative news. While that may have been what the event was about, that wasn’t what I got out of it.

The first speaker, John Bracken who created the Knight Foundation, said that we should “fail early, fail often”.