Blogs That Make Me Laugh

I’ve found so many terrific blogs. I review them for work, so I stumble across some really great finds. Sometimes they’re not exactly appropriate for work (where I’m looking for a health focus), but I scribble them down so I can add them to my own Google Reader at home. Plus I’ve met some really cool people on Twitter and in the blogosphere and would love to add them to my “friends” blogroll. I also have a few family members who are blogging now, including my son, who (of course!) I think is a brilliant new talent!

So, without further ado, I present the first installment: blogs that make me laugh.

I’ve already told you about Cake Wrecks. I still read that one every day and find it to be hilarious. But I have a few others in my “Funny” folder:

The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy — J-Money cracks me up every day with her adventures as she approaches 30, not really sure where she’s going or how she’s getting there. Her rapid-fire punchlines and stream-of-consciousness humor have a bit of a Dennis Miller sound (but make more sense!). Her site was nominated for Best Humor Blog in the Blogger’s Choice Awards. She never lets me down.

Amalah — Amy Storch’s tales of mommydom make me laugh as often as they make me tear up. This editor-turned-blogger weaves us through her tales of raising two small boys in Washington, DC, battling confusing “learning evaluations” for her older son (who she constantly worries has a learning disability) and wondering if she’s taking as many pictures of her second son as she should (they’re adorable!). Her writing style is top-notch and always has me tuned in the next day. She’s a 2007 Weblog Awards winner for Best Parenting Blog. Continue reading

Every Writer’s Nightmare: FILE NOT FOUND

computer-crashYou say it’s not going to be you. You put your manuscript on a flash drive; you diligently back it up; you take care not to have only one copy. You know there are such things as fires, floods, and crashed computers – you’re smart. You take precautions.

But then … it happens.

Backing up a manuscript is sort of like the good behavior you exhibit after getting a speeding ticket. Right after the ticket, you’re careful. You say you’re never going to do it again, and you drive around with extreme caution – for years and years, even. But then you start going a little faster. And a little faster. And faster still. You forget the danger. You forget the ticket. And then you see the lights flashing in the rear-view mirror again. …

The lights flashed for me again recently. I had spent a whole day making changes to my manuscript: it was one of those thrilling days where I had no obligations, nothing to do but write. In fact, I told my husband I wasn’t getting out of my pajamas unless absolutely necessary. I planned to spend the entire day with the laptop, making changes to my manuscript that were long overdue. I had thought them through during vacation and was eager to get started. It was a sweeping change – involving changing a character and her motivations – and I had numerous notes and several snippets of dialogue written in my head. It was all concentrated into one area – Act III (for me, about ten chapters, all in one file, where all the changes take place for the character’s arcs). It was a glorious day – I worked from morning until late in the afternoon, tweaking and polishing. I wrote for hours, excitedly telling my husband how much better this book was going to be. I went into my seventh hour. I was on fire. Continue reading

My Launch Back Into Exercising

So I went on a walk today in my quest to get back into shape. (And by “in shape” I simply mean able to do a simple hike at Yosemite without panting and having my lungs feel like knives are ripping into them. …) Sheesh. … 

Plus, I need to lose weight, and I know exercise is a huge factor I always ignore.

So the quest was on. I decided to start by carving out a simple hour on the weekend. When I was younger (and more spontaneous and less picky), I think I used to be able to just “go on a walk” without much difficulty. But now … holy cow … now the moon needs to align with Saturn for things to be “just right” for exercise.

First, I couldn’t find my old running shoes. Well, I couldn’t find ONE shoe (which is really the same thing, right?). One was right there in my closet, but the other was nowhere. I remembered that my daughter borrowed them once for P.E. early this year, and I tried to picture where she might fling them when finished. I looked under the bed, in the depths of the closet, under the nightstands, in her room, in her bathroom. Argh. Plan thwarted. Back to bed.

The next week, I had found the shoe (it was under my armoire, by the way), but when I went to get ready, I realized I didn’t have any socks. I tried to hobble together some combination of my daughter’s socks (which are quite huge) and my husband’s (which, as we’ve discussed here, are BLACK), but I couldn’t bring myself to go out into public like that. Plan thwarted. Back to bed. Continue reading

Twitter 201

tonywright_birds02_470x3501Hi, all! Now that you’ve hopefully found some helpful tips in my post Twitter 101, and are not so freaked out by followers anymore, you might be ready to move on to Twittering 201. You should be following at least 50 people, and therefore at least 25 people are probably following you (if, that is, you have a decent bio and photo avatar). You now have a Twitter community!

Keep adding to your community by finding more and more people – add at least 5 to 10 a week. Read what they have to say. You don’t have to read every tweet — think of it like tuning in to a radio show for a half hour a day: Just get on Twitter, read what’s going on with “your people” during that half hour, jump in if you feel like it, write to a few folks you like, then log off. Tell your new friends interesting things about your common interests – cool things you’ve read or things you’ve seen. Ask people questions with @replies. People will also continue to find you, and your community will grow. Keep watching how people interact to get the lingo down pat.

Now here are some fun things to do as a “second level”:

1.    Add your blog stream. If you have a blog, you can have your blog posts upload to Twitter automatically.  Do this at www.twitterfeed.com. (I have to admit, I had help with this from my company’s SEO guy, so I can only answer the simplest of questions on this – like the name of the site. …) Once you feed your blog into Twitter, the title of each post will go up within a half hour of posting. (I get a lot of clicks to my blog this way.) Continue reading

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