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#blogjune

on blogging, and #blogJune

My final post for #blogJune 2013.

Why do I blog? I guess there are several reasons. In no particular order, they’d probably be:

– to keep in touch with online friends and family – let them know how I’m doing, what’s happening in my life, and so on and so forth

– to write. better. more succinctly. more powerfully. to practise – and although that practise happens out in the public eye, at least its ‘real’. kinda! (and yeh – sometimes I love looking at sentence fragments that have no capital letters at the beginning. sorry!)

– to process my own thoughts and feelings. To get the stuff that’s sworling around in that vortex in there, inside that cavity I call my head, out onto the screen so I can see it, read it, evaluate it  – and again, if that’s out in the public eye, then so be it.

– to keep myself accountable. If I start a ‘challenge’, such as this #blogJune one, then I will want to do the best that I can, being realistic in the time available. I mean – I’m pretty disappointed in myself that it took until almost mid-June before putting fingers to keyboard, but I’m quietly very stoked with myself that I’ve managed almost-30 posts. Even though some are pretty darn short. Hopefully I wasn’t just ‘posting something for the sake of getting that tally line closer’, but I know that some posts were shorter than I would have hoped that they’d be. But that’s life. They’re done. Published.

I started this year with the aim of daily blogging. I did pretty well too – and then something happened – was it school starting back or something? I can’t remember now. But #blogJune, and the companionship of other bloggers, seems to have put me back into the habit again – and now it seems that there’s #commentJuly to join in with, tomorrow?! Not sure if I’ll be able to do that… the few times that I’ve tried commenting directly onto other #blogJuner posts, for some reason I haven’t been allowed to – possibly a problem with my two WordPress accounts or something? Anyway, that’s why I’ve been commenting by replying to tweets instead. Not ideal, but at least it’s something…

Anyway, that’s probably it. As much as my headachy brain will allow me to write, anyway.

Thanks, #blogJuners – and maybe we’ll all be back again next year?

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#blogjune

Billie B Brown – #blogJune post 28

My Miss 8 is one of those ‘reluctant readers’. I put it down to the fact that she’s dyslexic, which was only diagnosed officially just recently. Along with the fact that she has Irlen syndrome, and her glasses now have coloured lenses to help her brain cope with those particular sections of the colour spectrum that she can’t see / doesn’t recognise.

Anyway, since new glasses, she’s discovered Billie B Brown. A series written by Sally Rippin – a lady who I think I’m now in love with, because my daughter LOVES reading!!! For the first time EVER!!!

So. Over a dozen books in the series down (and in only two weeks! Not bad, huh?) and I’ve also learned that she’s written another series, Hey Jack, that revolves around Billie B Brown’s best friend and next door neighbour, Jack.

I want more though. More options, for when she’s run out of books in these two series. Books that are similar in difficulty, a little tom-boyish, and fun to read.

Know of any?

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#blogjune

Trello – and HootSuite

I’ve just discovered this – last night, to be exact. And I’m liking it. I’m thinking that perhaps it may revolutionise the way that Bloxham Marketing works.

Anyone else come across this yet?

And HootSuite. I’m a little bummed, because I rely on HootSuite heavily for work. I *hate* it when it doesn’t, when something goes wrong or when it works slower than it should, or just when it doesn’t do what it should. As in, I post a reply to a friend’s tweet, while signed in to my @KRidwyn account – and the reply posts from my @BloxhamMkting account. Which is REALLY very very very very very very annoying!!!

But at the moment, my HootSuite twitter accounts aren’t updating. At all. And yeh, it’s probably my fault – I probably haven’t updated or something – but it’s SOOOO annoying when it doesn’t work and I so badly want it to! Sigh. Guess I’ll have to work out the problem. And in the meantime, use twitter.com – which is yet another thing to get my head around… 🙁

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#blogjune

#blogJune post 26 – the generations to come

I often wonder how it is I’m going as a parent. If I’m teaching my kids the right stuff, if I’m helping them to become the best possible people that they can be, if I’m exposing them to the situations and lessons that they’ll need, later in life – like resilience, persistence, compassion, tact – and more.

Then I followed a facebook link the other day and read this story. A Gen Y girl had to post something – at a real Post Office – and was completely stumped because she’d never done it before.

Although hilarious (and I’d encourage you to read it, by the way!) the story got me thinking. In one sense, her story is probably true, to some extent. Okay – it’s more than likely exaggerated in terms of her thoughts and feelings – but that’s good writing for you. But the premise remains the same. Will my kids, one day, be just as stumped as this GenYer was? Am I failing them in areas that they may need one day?

Questions, questions. I guess the only way I’ll ever know the answers is – in many many years time, after the fact, when they’ve been in situations that completely stumped them – and then weren’t too embarrassed to tell me about it.

Oh well. I guess you can only do the best that you can do, right?!

 

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#blogjune

Library peeps

This morning was a long one. Miss 5 came into our room just before 2am, needing assistance. Then Mr 4 woke up at 4.44am, needing a nappy change. And after that, I figured that there was no point trying to get back to sleep, because my cherubs are normally up before 6, so I just stayed up & played with Trello.com (I think I’m loving this – but more to follow in another post, I think).

But I’ve been battling a sore throat (again) and what with the interrupted night’s sleep, I was feeling pretty flat.

Praise God for twitter, huh? iPhone in easy reach, so I was able to catch a reply from @librarianhoi to my tweet on her #blogJune post – and then I noticed my tweetstream full of #ALA2013 tweets.

Aha. Library conference over in Chicago, huh? Hundreds of tweets. Probably thousands, but I didn’t scroll back that far. And all providing great PD – following links, smiling along to succinct snippets of wisdom – meanwhile the sun is s.l.o.w.l.y. rising and the house is still dark and quiet. A quick #ALA2013 tweet to say Hello and thank you – and it’s favorited within minutes by @ALAannual – cool, huh? Another tweet to say that the #blogJune and #ALA2013 tweets and links are cheering me up on a ‘flat’ kinda morning – and it’s retweeted by @amyecroft to her 1000+ followers.

Gotta love twitter – and especially those library peeps who are just so darn awesome!

Love you guys!

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rain

I’m a sun type of person.

 

I don’t like the rain. I don’t like being cold. Or wet. I find it harder to be cheerful on grey days.

Like today.

It’s just gone 6pm and I’m exhausted. I’ve been up since 5am, and I’ve been pretty much non-stop working since then, which would account for it. Plus that coffee that I enjoyed with a friend, yesterday morning, meant that I only really slept for a few hours last night. Not really enough, to be honest.

I want the rain to stop, the clouds to go away, and the sun to come back.

Please.

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#blogjune

inbox insanity

I have a few email accounts. One I started back in 2009 when I founded goodoldtalk.com – and unfortunately, it’s been hovering around the 1000-emails-in-the-inbox for months. A lot of months.

Another I started about eighteen months ago, when I decided to rebrand myself online, because ‘Ceridwyn’ is too problematic. So I called myself KRidwyn, and got a new email address. Shortly thereafter, I then decided that it wasn’t particularly appropriate to send marketing business emails through to a personal sounding email address, so I made my latest, and most frequently used, email address.

I also have a old, and rarely touched, yahoo account – and unfortunately two of my clients have insisted that they give me email addresses on their own internal systems… and then, I got yet another email address when I started back teaching again in January this year.

Add that all up, and that’s a heck of a lot of email addresses. And emails into inboxes. And time spent checking said email inboxes. Sigh.

But I’m proud of myself.

This afternoon, I got my goodoldtalk email address down to less than 325 emails. Ecstatic about that one. My KRidwyn address is down from the almost 200 mark, to now being all on one page, under 50, and – wonder of wonders – my main, marketing email inbox, is down from 80-odd, to less than FIVE.

How awesome is THAT?!!!

SOOOOOO  darn stoked with myself!!!

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#blogJune post 22 – motivation

It was in first year Uni, doing my Bachelor of Education, that I heard about ‘Intrinsic’ and ‘Extrinsic’ motivation. Extrinsic – where you’re motivated by external rewards; intrinsic – internal rewards. So if you want to get your students to work for you, you have a choice of stickers / stamps / class prizes etc etc or even ‘not get a phone-call to your parents / a detention / more homework’ (external rewards) or you can get them to realise that the feeling of accomplishment that they receive, is reward in itself (internal reward). Use both, in appropriate situations.

The same applies to life. I am rather lazy, as I mentioned previously, which is why extrinsic motivation in the form of chocolate helps me with my filing (kind of a hated chore).

But why do I then blog? why do I do blogging challenges like #blogJune? I started late this year – and yet it’s now the 28th and I’ve caught up more than I would have expected to. Why? To look good? to impress others – other #blogJune writers who may happenstance onto my blog? To prove that I can “catch up”, in some measure, in spite of the lateness of the start? I’m not entirely sure. I guess there’s both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators there – but I don’t have the time, energy or (to be truthful) the inclination to look too deeply.

I’m happy with my efforts. Not all of my posts (in fact, very few of them, I’m thinking) were great, readable, “meaty” pieces. But some were. And that’s probably the best that I could do, considering my circumstances with regard to time & energy constraints. I’m actually surprised at how little time I have these days, to blog – even just to sit at my computer! I thought I was busy before – I guess life *can* get busier??!

Anyway, kids are up and breakfast needs to be gotten. Have a great day, dear reader! 🙂

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My cherubs – #blogJune post 21

I am in love with my kids. All three of them – Miss 8, Miss 5 and Mr 4. To watch them play happily together, to watch them learn and discover and grow and just ‘be’ – is one of my favourite things. To snuggle them close (especially when they’re wearing their super mega soft dressing gowns that I bought them the other week) is like heaven on earth. I love listening to them singing; I love watching them read, and draw, and dance, and play music. I love watching them eat (especially when they appreciate healthy food!) and listening to them eat (ahh – silence!) and I love slipping quietly into their rooms at night when they’re asleep, watching them breathe and marvelling at just how truly blessed I am to be able to look after them, for this time in their lives. Yes – I love my kids. To bits.

Except when they decide to fight.

Sigh.

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World War Z

***** Spoiler Alert *****

I’m not the biggest fan of suspense movies. The way I see it, I already have enough drama in my life. Enough tension. Enough adrenalin. So I actually don’t need any more.

Like most of the First World, I’d seen the trailer for this movie. “Cool!” I thought. “A Brad Pitt movie – I quite like his acting…”

It looked like he was a husband and father, returned from an important job involving guns, killing, a “saving the world” / 007 / CIA / FBI type of job, and now it looked as though he was going to be called in to the same type of action – but now he’d be saving his immediate family, rather than unrelated hundreds, in various overseas countries.

I figured, that with a name that included the words ‘World’ and ‘War’, that there’d be violence. That’s okay – I can handle that. I absolutely LOVE action movies (Die Hard II is my absolute favourite) and Hubby is a war DVD buff – both documentary and fictional – so I’ve seen more than my fair share of War flicks. And I figured that the ‘Z’ bit was probably similar to ‘Z for Zechariah’ – that YA novel that I had to study back in early High School, which was ‘the end of the world as we know it’ type of scenario.

So even though I *knew* that the word ‘Zombie’ starts with ‘z’, it wasn’t until someone was bitten, and then “turned”, that I realised, “I’m probably not going to like this movie. At all.”

And I was right. Even though the plotline was rather predictable; even though I *knew* that there would more than likely be some kind of a smile at the end of the movie, it seemed like an eternity to get to it. An eternity of on-screen screaming and scary music, not really helped by the idiots at the back of the cinema who insisted on copying the zombie noises, in an effort to make the movie even more of a realistic experience for the audience. I was glad when it was over.

So. Next time? Hubby’s not picking the movie. I am.