Awards, Apparently, And Rule-Breaking

So some lovely ladies out there in Blogland ("blogosphere" is a bit too buzz-word for my tastes now) have awarded me with some very manly looking prizes for my chronicles with my family as husband and step-dad. Here they are, with proper props and thanks:
First, there is the "Lovely Blog Award":
This is thanks to Mesina over at And then there was me, and by her own admission, it comes off as a little bit sissy-looking. I can live with that. I even kind of like rose-petal scented tea, although a teacup full of roses/petals with ribbons around the base has never appeared in my life before now and is unlikely to appear many more times in the future. Sullen and Moody (the older daughter, who just turned 15 and pointed out to me that she's very close now to being legally able to drive a motorcycle... yeah right!) would probably like it if the cup was chipped and there were some black roses in the mix to make it kind of pseudo-goth (she likes to pretend that she's goth). My wife would think it's not very pretty at all, but I'm still glad to have the award, however anti-manly it looks. Thanks, Mesina! You rock for noticing that I rock!

Then there's the "Splash Award":
This is courtesy of the Redhead Riter at her eponymous blog. I'm pretty sure this is a picture of a mermaid that looks like a fairy. I'm pretty sure that neither "fairy" nor "mermaid" is the image I'm trying to give with my blogging efforts, a fact I can now attest to more certainly because my redhead wife just saw this and busted out laughing. I'm thinking someone needs to design some more studly looking awards... again, not that I'm looking a gift-horse in the mouth. I do appreciate the recognition, for sure.

On the other hand, these blog awards apparently carry "rules" or "instructions" that remind me of spam e-mailing. I like the idea of recognizing people for their efforts, but I'm not the avenue for that kind of thing: I'm sort of a withholding praise kind of guy. Both of the women mentioned above have outstanding blogs that are worth checking out and even following, but I'm apparently supposed to nominate some odd number (or prime number?) of other blogs that deserve to have a manliness stamp of each sort placed on them. That's probably not going to happen. Sorry for breaking the rules, but I am who I am.

To balance out the girliness of the above awards, I hereby award myself the "Smashing Tim in the Face and Making Him Fall Down" award. It looks like this:
My wife is still laughing, but not because of how incredibly manly it looks that I'm smashing a guy named Tim down with my fist and an intense look under a very sweaty brow (this happened in London, btw, Mesina!).