Day 314: Winners Get Trophies. Sometimes.

by Claire, Claire@TrippingOnWords.com



The picture tonight is of baby Axel, being eaten lovingly by his dear dog.

As Ellen Degeneres so aptly explained tonight, the Oscars are really about winning. Thankfully, at Amalia's Oscar party, I managed to do just that. Yes, I won with the ballots - getting 15 out of 24 categories right and proving that my intellectual worth extends beyond merely trivia about the current stars of useless reality programming and Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor. There were many key moments for me in tonight's 79th Oscars, and so it is hard to select just a few. However, these did stand out: Ellen referring to Gore's 2004 win; Melissa Etheridge winning for her awesome song, and then thanking and kissing her wife; and Steve Carroll's face when Ellen referenced him as an integral assest to the diversity of the industry.

With less than two weeks before we go back on the road, Lara and I have been getting a lot of help lately. Here are some thanks to our personal winners, who know they will not recieve any trophies because we have no money to buy them, nor time to ship them.

Firstly, on the Kenyan Kids Marathon Running Shoes Needed front (Hope Runs is the name of our project) there are too many people that are being helpful right now to even remember. As such, we'll try to start mentioning one a day, in hopes that you can all understand how thankful we are of your help in this effort. So, tonight thanks to blog reader Allie of Savannah, who is going above and beyond in her efforts to help us and the kids out. She keeps astounding us with her amazing generosity of time, enthusiasm, and resources, and we have lately simply forwarded the emails we get from her back and forth to eachother with exclamation marks and expletives.

Next, I want to thank Personal Pizazz, the new boutique that my fantastic high school math teacher and then principal Laura Leventer started in Berkeley near my parents' home. Since I remember clearly that she once said that she never wore the same outfit twice in one year, I thought that alone was cause to open a store. However, upon actually entering I found that the clothes were fantastically cute AND I now own a magical new product Ms. Leventer recommended that takes the white deodorant stains off shirts. All thanks to Personal Pizazz.

I also want to thank Splendour Hyaline, the band of our friend Jonathan. For the last several weeks, I have used his music as the backdrop to my daily runs, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. If you are human, you might, too. You can get their music here, and I can guarantee that if you do buy a song you don't absolutely love, TrippingOnWords can reimburse you, since we are basically like Nordstrom's, only smaller.