Book Blogger Hop & Follow Friday

It's that time again: 

Follow the yellow brick road, follow your dreams, and follow me
because it's 

Book Blogger Hop and Follow Friday!

This week's Book Blogger Hop question:

  "Since Thanksgiving is coming up next week, let's use this week's Hop to share what we are most thankful for and what our holiday traditions are!"

Most thankful for - how to answer without being a cliche or a jerk? I'm thankful for all the usual - a loving family, my fairly decent health, the fact that I have a job that allows me to buy fresh, local, and organic food most days of the month. But I'm also thankful for those things most people don't openly talk about:

- I'm thankful I'm recognized as an attractive person by most physical standards. I genuinely believe life is more difficult for those judged as having a less-than-traditional beauty.

- I'm grateful I have some sort of fashion sense (not saying it's good fashion, just that I have a sense of it), so that I know how to dress my non-commercialized body type in attractive ways.

- I'm thankful I was born with a natural intelligence. The educational advantages my parents worked hard to give me, aside, it's undeniable that I have both book and life smarts and I use them.

- I'm thankful I was raised to question life, to give in to curiosity, and to be a "doer", as in one who gets off one's ass to go out and explore the world first-hand (though this really goes back to being thankful for my family).

- In short, I'm thankful to be me, where I am, who I am, right now.

As for Thanksgiving traditions, well, first I try to reconcile Native American history with European American history. Then I travel to Syracuse, NY to have a big Thanksgiving dinner with my Polish grandmother, my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, and my 3 cousins (and whoever they bring [of the paramour variety] to Thanksgiving this year). This will be our first Thanksgiving without my uncle. PJF, may you forever rest in peace. You, and your wine-loosened tongue filling in the awkward conversational gaps with even more awkward family stories, will be missed.

Today's Follow Friday question:

 

"How long have you been blogging?"

That's a complicated one. As you can tell by the archive on the side of this blog, I've been blogging since February 2009. In reality, I've been blogging since 2007, but the original blog was more for me and my family. Those posts were deleted to make way for a new book-related public blog. BUT to complicate that, the original book blog was actually called Afterthoughts..., accompanied by Afterthoughts for Adults, accompanied by Afterfonts. I also blogged on my former store's blog, A Reading Odyssey, as well as blogging with my former grad school cohort (former grad school, former cohort, current good friends) on The Guinea Pigs blog. 

 

My current blog, Wildly Read, began in early November when I decided I wanted one blog to rule them all. Collected here are all the posts from all three of my previous blogs, the bookstore blog, and the Guinea Pigs blog, plus all the new posts I now create. Hence the need for new followers. I can import my posts; I can't import my follower list.