The Liebster Award

Much to my surprise, i have been nominated for the Liebster Award by a really nice blogger annaethain. Thank you so much!! She has a really awesome blog, The Sailing of a Teacup. about parenting, travel, and life in South East Asia, well worth a look. Once again, thank you annaethain for nominating me.

Accepting the award means l undertake three tasks. Firstly, l need to answer some questions about myself, secondly l need to tell you eleven random facts about myself, and thirdly l need to nominate some other blogs that l like. Here we go…..

The Questions

1. What do you like to blog about?
I like to blog about all sorts of things. Mainly, i like to write about the day to day happenings as a dad. To be honest, i am still winging it and just learning as i go. I try to take a light hearted approach to parenting, and laugh along the way, so i like to share that. I have also been an activist and protestor for a long time, and i think it is important to share opinions about the current political climate, and world issues. So i try to put in my two cents where i can.

2. Describe your ideal day.
Kid free, a large cold box of beers, loud abusive, don’t play around kids music, relaxing and actually getting to paint and/or draw.

3. Are you excited about Christmas?
I am personally not too big on it, was not a big thing in my family growing up. However, my partner has a big family and a big Christmas tradition. I am looking forward to it these days because she really tried to make it magic for our little boy, and his cousins etc. It is a really awesome feeling to see him all awe inspired on the morning.

4. What would you spend a million pounds/dollars on?
I wouldn’t spend a cent. I would drop it in a bank account, quit my job and live a humble life off the interest.

5. What has been your worst disappointment in life?
This is a tough one. I am not sure i have any ‘disappointments’ as such. However i do have a few regrets, i will tell you one. I was the black sheep in my family, the oldest in a single parent family. My mother and i clashed alot, for a long long time. I don’t blame her either, i lived a pretty wild existence before i started a family of my own. She passed away a little over a year ago now. In her last few years, we actually got to a point where we understood each other again. We were close, and i do feel sad not having the opportunity now to see where that could have gone.

6. What’s the most unusual thing you’ve eaten?
I have eaten dog. Not by choice, or by knowing either. And not the kind of family pet dog you are thinking of, this thing was more of a mangy, i could get some horrid disease type thing. This was when i was 17, i was backpacking through the Pacific and stopped in Western Samoa for a few months, i was living in a village there. They served it up one night and laughed at me. Next day, i notice one of the village feral dogs missing…..

7. What are the best five words to describe you?
Hmmm……. Dreamer, Thinker, Asshole, Adventure, Kind

8. Do you want to change anything about your life?
Not really in the sense of actually changing anything tangible. I do think that everyone needs to grow and learn and change as they wander through life though. I think change is inevitable.

9. What is happiness to you?
My family, my life, my puppy. Life in general just makes me happy.

10. What songs do you regularly listen to?
Pretty much the entire discography of NOFX. Queen – Somebody to Love (mum’s favorite song), Wu-Tang Clan – The Art of Chessboxin’, Hilltop Hoods – Breathe, Mars Volta – Son et Lumiere, At the Drive-In – Enfilade, Coheed and Cambria – Welcome Home…. the list could go on forever, i have a pretty broad taste in music.

11. What and/or who inspires you?
Random acts of kindness inspire me. I love seeing people helping people for no reason or cause, just because. Also, one of my friends growing up, Benjamin Safari (alias). He makes documentaries about walking around Australia. Link here. He walked from Sydney to Perth across the guts of the country, i think that is an amazing achievement for an average guy.

11 Random Facts About Myself

1. I have given away everything i owned three times
2. I have read the bible, new and old testament, the Qur’an. I have a real interest in religion, although i do not consider myself religious
3. I spent nine months travelling when i was 17 with no more than $500AU. I had no plan, no place to stay, and just winged it the whole time
4. I was once arrested four times in one day
5. I have a lazy eye, which always makes me look out of it in photos
6. I once spent my last few hundred dollars to enter a poker tournament which i won, which in turn paid for a trip to Canada
7. I like to play with my Yo-Ho Diablo, and i have an odd talent for circus type things, always seem to pick them up quickly… must be the gypsy in me
8. The Unsimple Life blog is actually being kept a secret from my partner for the moment. I intend to surprise her with it in a few months… Blogging is something we have talked about for a while, but she isn’t confident we would be any good at it. So, my blog is intended to be ‘living’ proof… I hope
9. I have never paid for a ticket to any music festival, i used to manage to talk my way in every time
10. I used to have a full mop of dreadlocks, i eventually shaved them off to raise money for cancer research
11. I have quite literally shovelled shit for a living. I even kind of enjoyed it!

Blogs I am Nominating

Funky Daddy – A really great blog about a new daddy in Ireland. We all love the Irish. 🙂 He shares some really great content, and puts up some really nice stuff too.

Mother Of Dragons – Funny as all hell. I only started following this blog the other day. So happy i found it. Aside from being a sucker for Game of Thrones, there are some really laugh out loud posts here about being a mum raising her ‘dragons’.. 🙂

Truth Seekers Musings – Really great Australian political humour. Enough said.

Time for My Thoughts….. – Really lovely lady, i pretty much hang out for her ‘Quote Tuesdays’ each week. 🙂

Please check out these blogs! They are great.

If l nominate you – here’s what you need to do:

Your job is to answer these questions in a blog post and spread the Lieb!

1. Why did you start blogging?
2. If you could have dinner with any three people, alive or dead, who would you choose and why?
3. If you could travel anywhere tomorrow, where would you go?
4. How do you measure success?
5. Do you have any regrets in life?
6. If you had one super power, what would it be?
7. What cartoon character do you identify with most?
8. What was your favorite past time as a kid?
9. What does it mean to be happy?
10. What do you wish they taught in school?
11. What is your ideal day?

Here are the rules of the Liebster Award:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.
2. Display the award on your blog — by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget”. (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)
3. Answer 11 questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.
4. Provide 11 random facts about yourself.
5. Nominate 5-11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, who have a less than 1000 followers. (Note that you can always ask the blog owner this since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know this information!)
6. Create a new list of questions for the blogger to answer.
7. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to:
8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of it!).