The Very Inspiring Blogger Award!

Extra-special thank you goes to Day Parker for nominating Gwen & Kate’s Library for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award! Please take a look at her awesome blog — she posts many inspiring quotes from books and authors, perfect for this award! This is our first award here at Gwen & Kate’s Library, and it is quite an honor! First of all, the rules of this award are as follows:

1. Thank and link the amazing person who nominated you.
2. List the rules and display the award.
3. Share seven facts about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 (or as many as you can) other amazing blogs and comment on their posts to let them know they have been nominated.
5. Optional: Proudly display the award logo on your blog and follow the blogger who nominated you.

Seven facts about us (some are already listed in our The Story Behind the Library and About Gwen & Kate pages):

1. Half of our house is a recording studio that we rent out to a small recording business, and our driveway is almost always completely packed with cars. We like to imagine what people think when they drive past our seemingly huge house with a driveway full of cars — we are definitely holding a secret spy academy in our basement!

2. We have mentioned this before, but our grandmother is Dutch, our mother grew up in the Netherlands, and our family lived in the Netherlands for one year 10 years ago. Our mother still speaks Dutch to us at home, but we reply in English and so have lost some of our ability to speak the language. However, we understand it fluently and I (Gwen) still like to challenge myself each year by reading a book in Dutch. I am also quite homesick for Amsterdam, although I only lived there for a year I have only fond memories.

3. Some of our favorite TV shows (although we don’t watch TV very often, and usually only watch single shows on Netflix) are Avatar: The Last Airbender (we could rant about this show forever) and Sherlock (just Gwen). For movies, we both love Frozen, Howl’s Moving Castle and all the other Studio Ghibli films, and the Harry Potters (among many others).

4. Both of us love to do Celtic Dance (both Irish and Highland (Scottish)), and currently dance with Heather Morris’s Celtic Company, a performance group. We perform all over Vermont and go to the Maine Celtic Celebration for the second time this summer (this year on the main stage!). Also, this past weekend Kate and I and some other dancers from the troupe competed in an Irish dance competition in Massachusetts, our first live competition! We came home with five first place medals and one second place medal together in the group dances that we competed in — but our only competition was the other group from our dance school in one of the three dances we competed in :-).

5. I (Gwen) love to write and recite poetry. I had three poems published in the local newspapers this year through the Vermont Young Writers Project, am a part of my school’s Forensics (which basically means public speaking) and Debate team, and competed in the Poetry Out Loud competition at the Regional level this year. Some of my new favorite poems I discovered through these experiences are Friendship After Love by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Death of Allegory by Billy Collins, and Crazy Horse Boulevard by Sherman Alexie.

6. A strange fact about me (Gwen) is that I am not on Facebook, don’t drink coffee, and don’t have a cell phone (and I am 16)! I know myself well, and I like to keep myself away from things I know I would become addicted to if I tried them. I failed to do so with Tumblr (even though I won’t let myself get my own account, I look at my friend Lydia’s blog often more than once a day).

7. A strange fact about Kate (besides that she clearly doesn’t enjoy blogging as much as Gwen does) is that she has feet. Yes, she asked me to write that.

*Bonus: 8. Gwen and Kate are mysterious pseudonyms.

Our nominations!

The Cheap Reader

The Hopeful Heroine

YA Bibliophile

The Book Wars

Forever Y.A.

Lilajune’s Book Saloon

Lea at Sea

Enchantology

Christina Reads YA

Belle of the Literari

Realm of Fiction

The Bevy Bibliotheque

Paper Cuts

Novel Heartbeat