Blogging Award and a thank you

I am flattered that Vic Grace at Cariboo Ponderer has passed on the Blogging Star Award to me. After she received the award she wanted to pass it on to all the new friends she made through the Warm the Globe thru Friendship initiative, which she started, but since you are supposed to name 5 people, she did. I'm flattered that she named me as one of those five. I think her Warm the Globe thru Frienship initiative is a wonderful way to find blogs and her original post where she started this initiative is here. The Blogging Star Award originated from Skittles' Place and is for the following:

This award is for bloggers who shine their light throughout the Blogosphere. Some do it with humour, others with creativity, and others with their kind and thoughtful natures. We all know more than a few of them so why not give them some recognition?

It's hard for me to pick individual bloggers to pass the award on to because I'm amazed at what a fun, kind, group of people are out there blogging, but I'll give it a try.JMB at Nobody Important - I found JMB's blog through a fun blog called Addicted to Medblogs. I stumbled on medblogs through a friend I made through a melanoma support group. It is amazing how we find these interesting blogs. JMB's blog, Nobody Important, drew me in through her excellent accounts of where she lives and places she visits. She accompanies her posts with photographs which set the scene. She has a series of temptations, which show various spots in Vancouver which is where she is from, and I'm very tempted to go visit some of the beautiful places she photographs and describes. I found out about Photohunter through JMB's blog and in turn have discovered other blogs through that fun activity.

Since this is getting long, as is usual with me, I'm going to break up the post with pictures because that's what I do in all of my posts. The pictures are from my neighborhood park when I went on a photo walk. The next person I want to name is a small town RN who blogs at A Place I call Home and whose blog I found through one of the medblogger links and later rediscovered through the Photohunters. It was through her blog that I found out about Warm the Globe thru Friendship and discovered Vic Grace and her blog Cariboo Ponderer. I am glad to have rediscovered a small town RN's blog because she has very thoughtful and interesting posts. She also has beautiful photographs.The next person I want to name is Sabine at Days of my Life in Gozo. I found Sabine's blog through Photohunters and was quickly drawn in by her writing style and photographs. Sabine is originally from Berlin and moved to Gozo in the 1980s. I will confess that I didn't know about Gozo until I found Sabine's blog and it has been interesting to discover this island in the Maltese archipelago in the Mediterranean sea. One of the great things to me about blogs is how we can meet people in parts of the world we've never been and thus learn something about these places.The next person I'm going to name is Lori, who is also known as Miss Melanoma and who maintains the Official Site for the Fun Side of Cancer as well as her Miss Melanoma blog where she discusses whatever is on her mind. I have been inspired by her sense of humor, compassion and by the way she has tried to spread the word about melanoma. Lori has one of the first blogs I visited, long before I had a blog. She's in her early 30s and has maintained her sense of fun but is also wise. She returned back to teaching last year after taking a year off for the grueling interferon treatment, and is back to teaching this year, after having another surgery over the summer (thankfully that enlarged node was benign and not a recurrence as feared).
Many of the bloggers with melanoma have blogs on myspace and you have to be on their friend's list to read their blog. One of those myspace bloggers is Jane at Operation Sunshield who has battled back from stage IV melanoma (spread to lungs, liver, femur, multiple nodes) and after doing the rough interleukine-2 treatment is currently N.E.D. - no evidence of disease. In addition to her myspace blog she also has started a non profit organization called Operation Sunshield and anyone can visit the OSS site and read her story. I am naming Jane for this award and if you can't get on her myspace blog, you can still read her story on the main OSS site. Although I have named the 5 people I am passing on the award to there are so many others. I have a partial list of people with melanoma who blog and then there are all those people I've gotten to know through the MPIP who don't blog, but participate on that bulletin board and encourage each other. In terms of my blogging community, I think about so many who leave thoughtful comments but don't have blogs themselves which I can point you to. Their names come up in the comment section and to me the comments are often so much more insightful than my original post.I want to extend a big thank you to everyone I have gotten to know through this amazingly supportive internet community. I never would have believed such a community existed if I hadn't stumbled on the MPIP and then discovered this wide world of interesting and kind bloggers. The scary side of the internet receives a lot of publicity, as well it should. It's important to protect children and as adults we also have to use a certain amount of caution. That said, I think the positive side of the internet could use a little more publicity. There are all these communities springing up of people that encourage, support, entertain, amuse, enlighten, and inform each other. These are people that in the ordinary course of events you would never meet. Through the blogs and internet support groups, there are an amazing amount of positive connections that can be made. I want to extend a big thank you to all of my friends who I've met through the internet.