Five in Five: Worth Casing Awards

I’ve been nominated for the Mystery Case Worth Casing Awards – twice! Firstly by world-traveling nomad Radhika (Legally Alien) and when I didn’t respond quickly enough, also by Ilaeria. It sounds easy enough: simply answer five questions via a blog post. But I’m also supposed to nominate five of my favourite bloggers, which I find a bit tricky. I’m not very embedded in the blogging scene, and there are in fact only a handful bloggers I read every single post of. Two of them nominated me, which means they’ve already done the challenge. I can think of two more, so I’ll nominate these at the end of this post.

1 How long have you been blogging and why did you start?

Kai and I got married in Sydney in 2004. At the time we were still living in Germany, which means that none of our close friends or family were with us on our big day. So we decided to blog throughout the journey to let others participate in our adventures. The Wayback Machine still has some of our posts in its archives (in German). Later we used the URL to document our move to New Zealand, and it slowly morphed from a German language ‘Look how we’re making NZ our home’ via a bilingual ‘Hey, we’re getting settled’ to what you can see here now, which is basically stories from home and holidays, mainly meant to be a personal diary to capture my awesome life.

2 If your wardrobe could talk, what would it say about you and tell us about your favourite or most worn item?

If my wardrobe could talk, it would probably scream “Stop opshopping!” at me every time I opened it. Especially when it comes to skirts and dresses – I just can’t walk past a clothes rack at an opshop. When I realised that I had way too many skirts and dresses, I started #askirtaday over at Instagram: every day since 1 August I’m wearing a different skirt or dress and get a picture of it taken, with the aim of giving away those I don’t like anymore. Today I’m wearing number 54, and there are still a few more to go. Just while doing this I had to get one more dress (not opshopped, but free-shipping-to-NZ at Marks & Spencer is my second downfall right after opshopping) and one more skirt (who can say no to an awesome NZ made skirt if it costs less than a coffee and supports the local Vinnie’s?). This is my favourite photo from the challenge so far:

3 What’s your idea of the perfect date night?

Nice dinner, a walk in the dark if it’s warm outside, a movie, some good talks. Sitting in front of the fire in winter. Very low key and quiet, really. It’s the company that counts, not what you’re actually doing.

4 What’s on your Worth Casing list?

For this one I had to look at what others were writing, I wasn’t sure what’s meant by it. Others seem to have used it as some kind of to-do or to-see list, or generally listed things they love and would like to preserve for eternity. Guess I’ll go with things I love.

• My garden. I love spending time outside, digging and potting, interacting with the chickens (and serving them some critters I dig up), and eating the awesome fresh things I grow. I’d love to be more successful with growing flowers, fruit and vegetables, so I read a lot of gardening literature to get there eventually. In my dreams I can fully feed us from our veggie patch.
• Traveling. While I absolutely love being at home, I also like exploring the world, one little bit at a time. There’re still so many places I’d love to see, I should probably create a list for it.
• Stationery. I love post-its, fancy pens, cards, cute stickers and notebooks. If it’s from an exotic country (ie not New Zealand or Germany), it’s even better.

5 If you had a theme song, what would it be and why?

I do sing a lot when I’m alone or when only Kai is around. I don’t sing well, so no one else will ever be allowed to hear me singing, but I guess if I had a theme song, it would be something I just made up on the spot. It would probably contain the terms love, happy, Kai, chickens and kitty. Or something like that. The one song that makes me happy since a friend from primary school got it on record is Comanchero by Raggio di luna. It’s probably the worst song of the 80s, but for some reason it makes me smile every time I listen to it. I use it even as my alarm tune in the morning. Yes, feel free to judge me. Ok, now I need to nominate people. I’ll only do two:

• Lisa, from Lisa Likes Stuff (because I know her, because I just raided her garden for seeds and seedlings this afternoon, and because she hasn’t responded to Ilaeria‘s nomination yet)
• Teresa from Adventures of a girl from the Naki (because she’s super-awesome, that’s a good enough reason, right?)