A little blog-hopping, a little cleanup...

More visiting, until I can get the kids into bed.

D.Ann

And, even though it wasn't an official goal, I purged a few things from the sidebar. Will do more next time.

It's a Plan!

Per Trish's tweet about Wine Wednesday, with the Hump Day erotica addendum, I'll be settling into 50 Shades of Alice in Wonderland and a glass of Merlot after I get the kids into bed.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Weekly Wrap, Edition #1

Here's the abbreviated (yes, really!) compilation of what I've found on the 'net this past week. Let's start with books from the Kindle store. I don't have a Kindle, just the reader on my iPad. For the most part, I grab freebies, and most of these will probably have reverted to buy-only If you're lucky and have a Kindle and a Prime account, many of these are free to borrow.

Strictly G.I.: The WWII Letters of Cpl. Wanda M. Renn

River Ghosts

Running Barefoot

Goodnight Dear

Retro Family Recipes

Demon Hunter and Baby

Among Women

Hand of Fate

Amazingly enough, I pinned only one item, a recipe for Apple Pie French Toast Casserole.

A few of my facebook "likes":

Painted Bees, my qigong instructor's etsy shop

I need to do this for myself more often:

This too, actually...

I retweet, a lot, apparently. Here are some articles, sites, and funny bits:

Reducing paper clutter

This site links to youtube videos of scrapbooking tips and tricks.

Promoting science literacy for girls through mentorship and education

One of my favorite sites is funding for a rebuild

This is the guy who is (slowly) turning me into a yarn slut. Watch the video. No, I'm not in it.

Bloggess at the TX Book Festival. I squeed.

Here are the links that made it onto my SpringPad:

2012 Stories

5 Love Languages

Texas Autism Conference

And, lastly, a few articles that I sent to Instapaper:

Productive Procrastination

Useful Ringtones/Alerts for Smartphones

Geography of Nope

And that's a wrap!

Visits and meandering and chatting it up

Books. Lists. Life. Where I committed to doing this Pinterest challenge for the month of October.

Stuff As Dreams Are Made On Where I gave the author a hard time for posting yet another interesting meme I'd like to participate in. And, I may have set myself up for hosting my own someday. EEP!

Stainless Steel Droppings Where I committed to doing this read-along.

Returned the "hello" from Maria.

Returned the "hello" from Mel

Complimented Trish on her "old-school" challenge.

Let Brianna know I was having trouble with Pocket on my iPad

Thanked Joy for all the great Evernote ideas.

Let Tanya know which of her blog topics I'd use in the future.

Took a survey!

Proposed, pie-in-the-sky blog schedule

Sunday--book review

Monday--Mailbox Monday (host changes monthly--schedule is here) October

Tuesday--On the 4th Tuesday, will do this:What's on Your Nightstand? Will do the Where Are You? meme (which used to be hosted by raidergirl3) for the other 3 weeks. Since these should be short entries, I'll also post a book review

Wednesday--Write on Wednesday (was a separate blog, now a category)

Thursday--Booking Through Thursday and Thursday's Thoughts (the latter has old posts, pre-2009, so I may find another meme)

Friday--Friday Finds Now I will have to be sure to track all those Kindle titles I've been loading onto the iPad. And, will post another review. 3 per week might be overly ambitious, but I am so far behind... it's no longer funny.

Saturday--Will post my 1-3 reviews at Saturday Review of Books just to get a little more exposure. I'll also use this day to do a Weekly Wrap-Up: posting items from other sources (twitter, pinterest, etc.). If I'm feeling super-ambitious, I'll try to complete past challenges from Weekly Geeks I've been trying to figure out if anyone took this meme over when Dewey passed. Someone please point me in the right direction if you know :)

And, here's a picture of my hardcopy schedule:

Yes, it's sideways... because I have dorktastic editing skills.

Ready, set... GO!

It's Bloggiesta time!

Let's see how far I can get while my grrl watches her favorite horse-themed dvd.

Goal list:

Get a blogging mobile app installed and running on phone and iPad. Done! Went with Blogsy for the iPad, and will use Evernote on the phone.

Do the organization and scheduling mini challenge from Amanda of On a Book Bender. Done!

See if the format of Trish's mini-challenges works well for me.

Check out Pocket per Brianna and see if I can be disciplined enough to use it instead of Instapaper for my blogging topics. Update: I downloaded it, and all it does is display 4 colored bars that do nothing :(

Carve some basic html tags into my arm so I don't have to keep tabbing over to the cheat sheet. Kidding. Really.

Try an Evernote notebook system per Joy's mini-challenge.

Use Tanya's list of topics to beef up that schedule

Give my readers a better idea of life in the boonies and fulfill Maria's challenge.

Catch up on a few reviews (there's no way I'd get through half in a few days) and commit to the Can’t Eat Just One challenge at Hannah's site.

Go visiting! Can I make 10 each day? Sheila challenges us to build community.

Attend at least part of one of the twitter parties.

Bloggiesta September 2012

How sad is it that the previous post is about the same event held 6 months ago, in which I did not get to participate? *facepalm* OK, so here I am, trying again...the weekend of Bloggiesta hasn't been booked for anything else yet. It would make sense for task #1 to be: "call dibs on adequate blocks of time to make this worth the effort." Might as well carry over my goals from last time: "do some community-building, and maybe create some real motivation to clean this thing up and start the process of bringing it up to speed. Oh, and I need to set up mobile blogging on my phone." I'm pretty sure I have enough on the account to cover the necessary app. No clue if anyone is still reading this, but here's the link to sign up, just in case anyone wants to join me: here At least this is more do-able for me than the Austin Blogathon, which is a similar, but more costly endeavor: BlogathonATX

Bloggiesta March 30-April 1

After, what, 3 years of availability, I'm going to make a real effort to join these 100+ bloggers in order to do some community-building, and maybe create some real motivation to clean this thing up and start the process of bringing it up to speed.

Oh, and I need to set up mobile blogging on my phone, in case I'm away from home (which may be the case on Friday evening, will see how the family calendar shakes out for that week).

It isn't as if I haven't been reading, and I've been adding books to my iPad like crazy. What little online writing I have done has been so personal, it's tucked away on a blog that none of my real-life friends can access. Whole new identity and everything. I've pointed only one person to it, someone I met online and with whom I made a really true connection. Funny how I can trust a complete stranger with the dark and scary things.

Anyway, this is where I play nice, if not necessarily coherent, with the world.

Thursday Thirteen #9: 13 Things I Remember About Sesame Street

*in honor of it's 40th birthday this week. I'm turning 43 in a few months, and was so the target audience when it came out*

OK, so it's been a while since I've done a Thursday 13, and the site actually no longer exists.

Here it is anyway, because it's been over 3 months since my last post, and it is also only the third one for this year.

Pathetic.

Frustrating.

1. Super Grover, because he's "...cute, too."

2. Ernie's Rubber Duckie, because I can sing that song in the style of Marilyn Monroe and really mess with people's heads.

3. Mr. Hooper's death. Yeah I cried.

4. The opera-singing orange (was that song from Carmen?).

5. When Bob was trying to tell (in sign) Linda that he liked her, and she thought it was odd that he needed to share that he liked spaghetti.

6. The pastry chef that always fell down the stairs.

7. Manah-manah (doo doo doodoodoo) 'Nuff said.

8. When the grownup characters finally took Big bird's word that Snuffie existed, even though they STILL hadn't met him yet. People had become concerned that kids would not be brave enough (due to the prior precedent) to say something if they'd been molested.

9. The Mad Painter.

10. The Count. How could vampires possibly freak this generation out when we were raised on him and on Grandpa Munster? Seriously!

11. I remember watching it in college to wind down from a particularly hard class during freshman year. No one gave me a hard time, and a few people even joined me.

12. Ladybug's Picnic. Earworm. You're welcome.

13. They switched Gordons on us! Well, if the people at Bewitched can switch Darrens... I guess it's ok

A Belated Post for BTT (a twofer, actually)

Which do you prefer? (Quick answers–we’ll do more detail at some later date)

* Reading something frivolous? Or something serious? Serious
* Paperbacks? Or hardcovers? Paperbacks
* Fiction? Or Nonfiction? Nonfiction
* Poetry? Or Prose? Prose
* Biographies? Or Autobiographies? Autobiographies
* History? Or Historical Fiction? History
* Series? Or Stand-alones? Series
* Classics? Or best-sellers? Classics
* Lurid, fruity prose? Or straight-forward, basic prose? Basic
* Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? Plots
* Long books? Or Short? Short
* Illustrated? Or Non-illustrated? Illustrated
* Borrowed? Or Owned? Owned
* New? Or Used? Used

and: What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?

Battle for the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians), by Rick Riordan
The author does a decent interpretation of the old myths, and modernizes them pretty well. They're written for the middle-school crowd, but they aren't dumbed-down. Great adventures, good characters, and pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh out loud, even if your setting isn't conducive to it.

I can't believe I've been AWOL since January. Really will try to remedy that.