Categories
Blogs Links Video Work

Do I even know what I’m talking about?

Last week I was in Houston for a conference, where I taught a workshop/tutorial on how to create a WordPress blog, and presented at another workshop on how to attract an audience to your blog.

The first one was a piece of cake–I could create a dozen WordPress blogs in an hour, and be watching TV while I’m doing it. Part of me felt like a big fake for the second one, though–I have few if any followers on any of my blogs. I’m ok with that, since it’s not my job to get readers (I just like to ‘talk’), but if I needed to, I know how it’s done. I’ve been swimming in the social media pool since before it was ever called social media. I know what attracts readers, and what keeps them, because I’ve been sucked into blogs, websites and posting boards….and I’ve left them. I’ve been anonymous, and I’ve had followers–I’ve even given an autograph or two in my lifetime.

I didn’t say any of that at the workshop, I just let them all assume I knew what I was talking about, because in actuality, I do. I’ve just never put it to the test.

Also in Houston, I saw bats. A quarter million of them. It was pretty awesome.

Categories
Current Events Links

Closing bookstores :-(

Deep sadness–Borders is in Chapter 11, and they’re closing a bunch o’stores. Here’s the list (sortable, so you can find the ones in your state easily). Looks like the one closest to me is safe, at least.

I know big box stores are evil and blah blah blah, but I loves me some Borders. There’s something about it that’s comfier than (most) Barnes & Nobles.

Categories
Blogs Links News Travel

Six months in 500 words or less

May 1st?? May freakin’ first?!!! Wow, someone needs to kick my ass. Let’s see if I can summarize the past holy-wow-six months.

May:
TroubleBad news first: My cat Trouble died. It was a terrible terrible thing, and I still blame myself for being too busy to take her to the vet sooner. She spent almost a week in the vet hospital before she passed, and I visited her every day. I wasn’t with her when she died, arriving about 30 minutes too late. 🙁

June:
Was the “official” photographer for a meet and greet fan event with Nick Brendon.

IMG_6450Got a new friend for Jack–this is Dr. Zeva Tinycat, although she’s no longer quite this tiny, as she eats like the shelter cat she was. She’s two and a half, loves string and meowing a lot, doesn’t like people food, and bounces on the stomachs of my houseguests when they sleep on the couch.

Started seeing a therapist. She’s cool, albeit expensive. The expense adds a little to my stress, but I feel it’s the one thing I can’t really talk about with her.

July:
Spot of my perfect momentDrove out to Zion National Park in Utah by myself and spent a couple of days hiking. It was an incredible experience. The park was beautiful, and being on my own and beholden to none was very freeing. Next time, though, I’d rather share the beauty with someone–and the little travelled trail I’d discovered.

August:
For my birthday I got my first ever kidney stone. Yeah, it sucked donkey balls. It hit two days before, at work. I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where my boss hung out with me until I was released (and it was *his* birthday). Spent the rest of the week on my couch in much pain. Bonus, I still have two more stones hanging out in my kidneys that could drop at any time. Yay.

September:
IMG_8398Spent nine days at Disney World with nine friends and relatives to celebrate my sister’s 40th birthday. We had a BLAST! Seriously, one of my best vacations ever.

October:
Work project kicked into high gear and the stress became the center of my life. Not the greatest month ever. However, I did make it to Carnaval in West Hollywood for the first time in about seven years, so that was cool. It’s still just as fun and crazy as I remember. And I spent four hours on a Saturday helping to assemble holiday boxes to send to troops in I believe Afghanistan. That was cool.

So now it’s November. The work project is still in progress and still stressful, but should be launching in a week and a half. Unfortunately it coincides with a Fitness Challenge being held at the work-site gym, where eight teams of eight are competing to lose the most (percentage-wise) in seven weeks. I’m blogging my progress with that little event over here, but I must say, not being able to eat chocolate when I’m stressed is doing bad things to my general disposition.

I’ve been crocheting this whole time. All summer I’d work on granny squares–boring, basic squares, each made from a full ball of Plymouth Encore. I now have 20 squares that need to be joined into a blanket. Don’t know when that’ll be happening. I also made one ginormous granny square blanket for my sister’s birthday.

IMG_8734

So that’s the past six months in a nutshell. Hopefully it won’t be another six months before my next update. 🙂

Categories
Links News Travel

40 is the new 30


Nancy and Paula

I’m back from my fabulous 40th birthday celebratory cruise to the Caribbean. There was much snorkeling (that’s my sis and me in the pic, in Grand Cayman) and swimming and walking and kayaking and shopping and sweating (lordy was it hot and humid!) and drinking and singing (karaoke and piano bar FTW!) and eating and relaxing and reading and laughing and not nearly enough dancing (my knee and ankle just didn’t cooperate) and celebrating in general. And perhaps best of all, I only gained two-tenths of a pound-?!! Woot!

For those so inclined, pics can be found here (that’s the edited-for-quantity set).

I need more kayaking in my life. Good exercise combined with zero strain on my weakened lower extremeties = general awesomeness. More snorkeling would be awesome too, but to be honest, the Pacific scares me a bit. (Sharks!)

ION, I need something new to look forward to. Too soon to start planning for next year’s Disney trip? Hmm…..

Categories
Blogs Links News

Missed it by *that* much


Polgara and Gracie, on the occasion
of celebrating Miss Gracie’s 2nd birthday

I just realized I missed my blog’s two year anniversary last month. Oops? That’s what I get for neglecting it so.

Also celebrating her two year anniversary is Miss Gracie (as well as her brother Noah). Unlike my stale and boring blog, Grace grows more adorable and engaging every day. Unfortunately I’ve been neglecting her too, which is even more shameful than ignoring this blog. This is my note to myself to go visit her next weekend.

In related news (related to the blog, that is), I’ve been working on updating JaneEspenson.com this weekend. It’s been languishing in the very outdated Greymatter that it first started in, so yesterday I just up and ported it over to WordPress. (Yes, it was that easy!) Now comes the hard part–the design. Man, I suck at design. I’ve gone through bazillions of free theme templates and downloaded a bunch that I like, but I don’t want a cookie-cutter design for Jane’s site, which means actually doing some work on my part. Yay? I found one template I thought I loved, but really I just love the colors (not the layout or the font), so now I’m looking for the right layout that I can then edit with the pretty colors. Someday I will learn the ins and outs of CSS enough to build one from scratch, but that day is not today.

But because of this quest for improving Jane’s site, I now look at this site and think, Booooor-ing, and yawn in its face, so it’s very likely that this site will be getting a facelift soon. I have to finish JaneEspenson.com first, though, as it’s been stagnant for far longer than this site has.