May you let the love in and keep sharing your wonderful self with us readers.

For the Bloggies, apparently the pack of nominees gets winnowed by a group of 200 randomly chosen folks who’d nominated a blog in the first place. Beyond that I don’t know which categories, though one person (who provides some pointers here) evidently winnowed in 10 of the 20 categories.

My impression is that the finalist blogs might have piqued some folks’ interest for one reason or another (see the link above for some good ones), but from within the LGBT community online none of us is particularly GIANT or anything. No disrespect, but that was my impression. I don’t know Australia or its online community, so I’ll recuse myself there re: the Aussie blog. But the finalist list in the LGBT category (glad it was brought back this year) seemed a bit unlike those in some of the other categories, where quite well-known or widely read blogs floated to the finalist list. All of which gives me the sense that we in the various sub-culture niche blog areas wind up getting a bit more of a “wild card” experience in these things, if a broad cross-section of mainstream blog readers (whoever the heck that might be) provides the pool for the finalist-winnowing.

That’s certainly how I think this blog caught some finalist-winnowing person’s eye in the Weblog Awards way back in 2006. I still sometimes think this blog was plucked out of obscurity merely to stir up some dust, since several single and group-authored neo-con political blogs were also chosen. Dust sure was stirred! And I certainly appreciated the learning experience and the boost in exposure at the other end of the whirligig.

Go figure. I’m definitely not complaining about the opportunity to represent, to whichever community, on whichever grounds. If the end result is that the kids being raised in LGBT-headed households grow up in a world that comprehends their family a bit more, then great. Deal any of us a wild card and we’ll do what we can with it!

And where I will generally agree that the other blogs cited are good ones, and deserving of recognition, in my opinion the element that sets yours above the others is the great attention that you pay to the words you choose; you manage to find the ones that go through my brain and down to my heart and gut. Amazingly, your photography does the same. (Not many people have this dual talent, you know.)

So HURRAH for you, and HURRAH for those wise enough to recognize your talents!