the whining diner and wellfedfred: cavewomen: hunters or gatherers?

I took a day or two off from shopping and from activities that make me think about shopping - blogging, commenting, walking around in the City, checking emails, organizing clothes, cooking, cleaning out makeup drawer, paying bills, watching everything except public TV and HBO... hard to think of something that doesn't tell the inner Abbess that she should be out pawing through racks and rounders or bouncing from one web site to another. Even cooking, since I buy most of my ingredients. Well, it's over. On the way to the Post Office I passed a market I don't usually go to, and took the opportunity to see what kinds of bittersweet chocolate chips they had. In a word: mine! Hunting, gathering, stalking: at it again.

This brings me to another one of my Favorite Theories of Human Development. I believe that the first Hunters were women. In an epoch when weapons were snares made of vines and rocks that could be swung with only one hand, you had to stalk your prey and get very close to it to render it unconscious or dead so you could drag it home. This required Patience and Perseverance, ergo: Women! The men stayed back at the cave and were cave-dads or artists or Gatherers. Well, we all know that good Gathering is not natural to men. They might pick up wood or berries or sports memorabilia, that's about it. It was not until the invention of weapons that could be used from a distance - the spear, the slingshot, the fall-in-onto-sharp-sticks trap - that the men decided it was safe enough for them to go out and bring home the bacon. Because the weapons were by no means 100% safe, the women were fine with gathering, making stuff out of hides, observing that when a berry stayed in the ground long enough there were sprouts, making fires and the like. The women just let it go on too long, is all. Any student of history will tell you that when men have lots of weapons and lots of ego, good things do not follow.

So back to the blog: I am surprised and delighted to see that The Whining Diner and Wellfedfred has been awarded the Liebster Blog award! Many thanks to Rose, of the terrific One More Shopping Blog for this award! Wow, Rose, thank you! Liebster means "dearest" in German. So, just in case the blog deities are fussy, vielen Dank!
This award is given to bloggers with fewer than 200 followers. It has these stipulations:

1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you. (see above)

2. Reveal your 5 blogger picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.

3. Copy and paste the award on your blog. (see above)

4. Hope that the people you have sent the award to will forward it to their favourite bloggers.

Here are my picks - I've tried to pick blogs that haven't recently received this award (it really gets around! I checked), but which I enjoy. I hope you will too.

So now there are some new friends with whom we all can go virtually travelling, shopping, dining out... Not bad for a few days of quiet rumination. Um, actually I was working on some more awful poetry. To be continued, maybe.

a recovering shopper and the Liebster blog award!