Today I reached the milestone of having published my 300th post, all in a little over a year.  During that time I have had the honor of being nominated for two awards:  The Liebster Award and the Beautiful Blogger Award.

The nomination for the Liebster Award came to me from Rose, at forestmtnhike.com.   The Beautiful Blogger Award was passed to me by Anthony at sexycuisine.wordpress.com.  I want to thank these two people for their kind words in nominating me. Rose is a very positive person who finds joy in many of the simple aspects of life, especially the outdoors.  Anthony is a creative chef who  writes a most interesting and informative blog.  Please check out these two blogs.  I’m sure you will enjoy reading them as much as I do.

Both times when I was notified by the nominating bloggers I felt surprise and a certain amount of pleasure and I sincerely appreciate that they both selected me to nominate. Since I was nominated I have allowed some time to elapse before responding, basically because I wanted to give some serious thought to the issue of blog awards on the whole.  There are certain aspects to this whole process that I find troubling, and for the reasons that follow, I have decided to decline the nominations.

In my experience when one is nominated for something, a selection process of some kind follows and then one of the candidates who was nominated wins–the prize, the title, etc.  In the case of blog awards it seems that being nominated IS winning.  The blogger, in accepting the award, must then select a predetermined number of other bloggers to “pass the award” to.  To me, the process of passing along an award seems a lot like a chain letter, which I have never participated in.

This aspect of the awards process is troubling to me in that there are no clear criteria for selecting other bloggers to nominate.  Thus the whole idea of blog awards becomes rather empty and not very meaningful.  I would like to see definite criteria introduced into the nomination process such as “thought provoking, informative content, use of humor, use of photography,” and I could list a host  of others, but you get the idea.

Each and every time I sit down to write a draft for this blog, my goal is to write something you will enjoy reading, or learn something from, or be entertained by.  The fact that the number of readers and followers has been growing steadily since I began this journey, is all the satisfaction and reinforcement I need to keep going.  Writing this blog has put me in touch with people all over the world with whom I feel a certain bond.  Thank you so much for your friendship, your interest and your support.  I love your comments and feedback.

To the two bloggers who nominated me:  I thank you sincerely for the honor,  it means so very much to me that you made that effort. I hope that you understand and can accept my reasons for declining the awards.