Two funny little words = another 1st for me
Thursday, July 6, 2006 at 08:45PM Two funny little words:
Pickles and hiccups.
That's what started it all.
Turn back the clock to a little over a year ago and I'd just returned home after a family vacation to Florida and I was dead tired but I had an idea in my head for a Toddler essay that would be about, well, a family vacation to Florida. When you're a writer and you get these ideas in your head, you know the drill: you have to get them out or they will nag at you like a pesky mosquito buzzing in your ear drum. Non-writers don't get this at all; they just think writers are sleep-deprived nuts.
Pecking away at the keyboard late into the night, propping my eyelids open with toothpicks, I finally hit Save & Close well past the witching hour on "Pickles and Hiccups," which would go on to surprise me when it became the most commented upon entry on my blog in 2005.
Jump ahead about ten months and I take a leap of faith and enter my book, Lost in the Ivy, in the Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest, which is sponsored by the Illinois Woman's Press Association (IWPA). While completing the entry form, I'm surprised to find a couple of other categories that I might just be able to compete in. One for website development/creation; the other for web content for personal or hobby sites. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, I entered this website in the website development/creation category and two essays that I wrote for this website, "A Cubs Fan Finds Hope in Sox's Success" and "Pickles and Hiccups," in the web content for personal or hobby sites category.
Hop forward another couple of months and the most amazing thing happens: I take 1st place in each of the categories I had entered. Each of those 1st place winners went on to national judging, in the National Federation of Press Women's Communications Contest.
Take one last leap with me, to earlier today, when I get an e-mail from the IWPA and it's the announcement of the winners in the national contest. Right at the top it says that out of the 42 IWPA member 1st place winners that went on for national judging, 15 have been named national winners. Out of those fifteen winners, there are four 1st place winners, four 2nd place, five 3rd place and two honorable mentions. But to find out who those are you have to open an attachment. As I wrote the last time I got one of these kinds of e-mails from the IWPA, it is at this point when your heart starts racing and your palms get all sweaty. You don't even want to read it because you tend to think that good things just don't happen to you. But you open it and then you see the names of the winners but they're in alphabetical order so you have to read almost all the way to the end before you see your name.
So you've already guessed what comes next, right?
Yep, 1st place in the web content for personal or hobby sites: Randy Richardson for "Pickles and Hiccups."
The Toddler, who has since grown into The Kid, thought pickles and hiccups were funny words. They are. But I wouldn't have appreciated just how funny if not for him giggling so hard his belly ached when he said those words out loud over and over again.
Funny, isn't it? It all started with two funny little words.
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