In Our Lighter Moments

Just like Ms Jolly Blogger (my jolly tagger!) I used to enjoy these games — they gave me something to write about! This one was a lot of fun, and I kept two of her questions for others to answer. I decided not to tag anyone, but people can answer if they would like to.

The game of Blog Tag works like this: Once you are tagged, you must follow these simple rules:

1. You must post the rules. (These are THE RULES.)
2. Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post.
3. Create eight new questions to ask the people you’ve tagged.
4. Tag eight people with a link to your post.
5. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

**Here are the questions by my tagger:**

1. If you could be any character from a movie, who would it be and why?

Scary things happen to characters, even in happy movies, so I don’t know who I would opt to be. It’s also hard to imagine being someone other than myself… I would bring something completely different to the movie and would probably ruin the plot.

I found myself thinking I would quite like to be the mother in Mamma Mia!… living in bright sunshine with happy, cheerful friends. I have old flames that my movie daughter could invite, including a song-writing guitar player with long hair. And I like Abba!

2. What do you miss most about being a kid?

That one’s easy… all of my family being there. Proper Christmases with six people at the table.

3. What’s the best present you’ve ever received? Given?

Received? A pink mouse.

Given? For the sake of conversation (though I doubt if it’s true), a Mozart bear who plays Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

4. Name your favourite book.

Ah, that would depend on my mood! Light option: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Heavier option: Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian.

5. It’s your last meal ever.  What are you eating?

Rich pea and ham soup, followed by hot BBQ chicken with soft white crusty bread, followed by a good quality chocolate sundae with whipped cream. A nice sweet white wine along with the main meal. And then coffee, with a square of good Scottish tablet. Make that the whole packet of tablet, if it has to be my last…

6. What song(s) would you include in the Soundtrack of Your Life?

Eleven songs, placed in approximate chronological order of my life events.

Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight / Mbube) I still love this video!
Isn’t it Amazing (Hothouse Flowers)
Dreaming (OMD)
Same Old Scene (Roxy Music)
Heart on My Sleeve (Gallagher and Lyle)
The Sound of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)
This Land is Mine (Dido)
Dream a Lie (UB40)
New World in the Morning (Roger Whittaker)
Going Home (Runrig)
She’s Leaving (OMD).

Notes on my choices:

(a) My sister and I were brought up on Wimoweh!

(b) People interpret The Sound of Silence in different ways. I believe Paul Simon himself suggested that it was just a bit of teenage angst about the young being ignored by society. That’s what I read into it myself, though I feel it can speak for many others who aren’t teenagers.

7. What last experience did you have that made you a stronger person?

Books are nothing new, but the Kindle itself might count as a recent experience, or discovery? It helps me tap into the world of books without filling our rooms from floor to ceiling. Books of all kinds have gone a long way to making me what I am, good or bad.

8.  Favourite season of the year and why?

Summer… I’m a hot weather chick. I was born in a hot weather country… I don’t like being cold, and I don’t like it when it’s dark and wet. Though sometimes I’m in the mood for the first signs of spring, violent storms, golden leaves and Halloween, Christmas, pine trees, snow… and Moomin dreams.

**Now here are my questions for the Tagees:**

1. If you could be any character from a movie, who would it be and why?
2. What do you like best about your hobbies?
3. Do you feel that reading other blogs changes or shapes your attitude to life?
4. What is your favourite cake?
5. If you ever had to leave your current continent and live in another, where would you go?
6. What was your first ever favourite song?
7. Do you have any bad habits that you don’t regret?
8.  What song(s) would you include in the Soundtrack of Your Life?

Season of Fruitlessness

I’m more ‘creative’ (Photoshop, Bryce 3D etc) when it’s summer and the days are brighter and warmer. In winter I spend less time in such projects… and it’s happening again now. Halloween is not all that far off… the days are cold and rainy, and my room is chilly and dark. It is driving me back downstairs to read a book!

People are affected differently by the seasons, but perhaps I would feel more creative at this time of year if we were living in a hot country or a brighter, warmer house.

I’m in more of a ‘blogging’ frame of mind than I’ve been all year, though. I suspect other interests have shifted, leaving more room for that. I’ve been looking around  and reading more; wondering more about other bloggers. I doubt if I will be here every day, especially if I’m so cold that I’ve taken refuge downstairs… but I have more appetite for it.

Sometimes I miss being young… I used to feel there was no limit to what you could do or write about. To think of something was to write, and I didn’t worry about originality as such… if it came from me and wasn’t a repeat of something I remembered reading or hearing somewhere else, then it was original. I wasn’t stupid — I realized that true originality is rare… ideas are derivative and people often think the same thoughts independently. But the world seemed big enough and diverse enough to bear it.

The reason I miss my naivety is that my world seems to have shrunk… I have fewer options and less faith that I will write about the right things in the right way. I’m no longer some carefree child leaping off the plank at the deep end, sure that I will swim, and swim well.

I wonder if the internet has added to this over-flowing cup? My pictures are the same as everybody else’s, and there is nothing new under the sun. Some articles, discussions and reviews are repeated word-for-word on different sites, and it doesn’t matter how hard you try at something, there’s always someone else who does it better.

Anyway, when the weather takes a nose-dive, so does my mood. Perhaps switching off and reading a book is not such a bad idea!

Book on Blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking Dangers

I recently read Blogging and Tweeting without Getting Sued by Mark Pearson. It’s available as a Kindle book or a paperbook. (It may also be available in other ebook formats too, but I haven’t checked).

When trying to decide whether or not to buy it, I worried that it might be dry or unnerving, but decided that it didn’t matter. As a blogger, I should read it anyway.

In fact I enjoyed it, and made a lot of highlights for my personal reference. (Incidentally, I decided a long time ago that I would only allow people to see highlights I made on older books such as Dickens. I’m just being cautious!)

It looks at international issues, which is something that affects all online communications anyway. It doesn’t pretend to cover all of the dangers, but I learned things I didn’t know… as a very new and uncertain Facebooker, it was mostly Facebook issues I didn’t know about. But there are issues everywhere, really. Better to be aware of them than not.

My Blogging Last Year

Inspired by an old Daily Post: A Year in Posting.

According to my stats, I only posted 37 times last year. So… what prevented me from blogging?

Some thoughts:

The publish button ‘looms’…. once you’ve pressed it, there’s no way back. You can delete or edit your post, but in the meantime people will have seen it in all its roughness.

Sometimes I wrote something and it seemed empty.

Sometimes I just wanted to turn off the computer and be by myself… write my private journal (without feeling constrained), read a book, watch Death in Paradise.

My sight has been ageing and I’ve had trouble concentrating on all of my usual hobbies (e.g. digital art) along with new ones (such as trying to draw). It was unpleasant switching my focus from a book or magazine to the computer screen (or a drawing pad) and back again… there’s a point where you just can’t do that without developing a stoop in the back and a crick in your neck! Varifocals have helped, but my vision will never again be as good as it used to be.

What would I do differently this year??

I have various computer ‘projects’ that never seem to be firing on all cylinders at the same time. I was listing them last night: Facebook, digital art, blogging, a small chat forum, the Kindle Reader (it’s a world of its own)… and I think I forgot to list the DVD Subtitles site! It’s a while since I’ve rated any DVDs.

Anyway, where was I going with all that…? I feel I need to get all of these main hubs of internet activity organized and functioning equally, so that I don’t spend all my time in Facebook, for instance, leaving my other interests to suffer. It has to be easier to reach everything and get involved.

The most important thing I’ve done so far is setting Google Reader to show up automatically every time I fire up my browser. The blog posts of my blogging friends are the first items I see every day… so keep blogging! Fuzzy Bear is watching.

A Tag Cloud Dropped In Unexpectedly

One of the things about having fallen out of blogging for so long is that WordPress has changed a lot, and I don’t quite know how to use it any more! I’ve been slowly finding out. The last time I created a blog post, it made tag suggestions and gave me the opportunity to add them. It also invited me to choose from the ‘most used’ tags, and when I clicked on the link, this image came up…

It didn’t take me long to work out that this isn’t a list of common tags on the WordPress site… this is my OWN cloud of tags!

The word ‘trivialities’ is unsettlingly huge. On the other hand, ‘grumbles’ is surprisingly small. Perhaps I just forget to add it most of the time…

Spring-Cleaning My Blog

Still spring-cleaning…

I’ve been weeding out my mailbox. I found a lot of unread Daily Post emails, but have been reading through them as I delete; making notes of some of the tips and suggestions. They did inspire a few more blog posts out of me last year than I would otherwise have managed, so I knew the potential value of them!

I’m only partway through the task but have already put a new badge in my sidebar (‘I’m part of Post A Week 2012′)… better late than never! If you click on the badge, it will take you to WordPress’s  Daily Post page.

I have also set Google Reader to appear whenever I fire up my browser. I used to do that before, but for a long time it’s been displaced by other sites.

Reading the Daily Posts have got me dusting off my blog again, thinking about the posts I could write… thank you to the staff there. I don’t know if I can keep blogging even once a week, but would like very much to get back into the swing of it.

Signs of Life

After a lot of buzzing and blinking, the screen slowly flickered to life…. the Diddums robot sat up and looked blankly around.

It thought for a moment, then the following words appeared on the screen in green letters.

 Working on blog post….

 Working on blog post…

 Working on blog post….

 [Click click whirr].

WordPress Ads

I saw the ads at the foot of my latest blog post while logged out. Nearly deleted my entire blog on the spot! So much for my ‘mellowing with age’.

Mellowing

The older I get, the mellower! It’s strange. Either that, or living with Mum is making me civilized again. There’s nothing like a little light banter every day to make you feel nothing’s that serious or annoying.

Well, I read some WordPress posts saying we should blog often, even if busy or tired, so I’m trying. I got busy doing five pictures at once (one for a small informal contest… nothing special or grand) and when I started posting them, it all turned into a bit of an anti-climax. I’m still working on Pictures 4 and 5, and have even added a Picture 6, but the pace has slackened noticeably.

Maybe it’s time to socialize a bit… all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

Mum caught me looking abstracted the other day. I explained I was thinking how naive I was as a 20 year-old. My friend Honey and I didn’t know that the slang word ‘barf’ wasn’t a cute word for ‘bath’! But another 20 year-old… a boy… knew perfectly well what it meant.

I was wondering how both Honey and I got to the age of 20 not knowing that, and she said little boys always collect rude words to impress each other!

Perhaps. But I’m glad it was not just me! Possibly Honey and I realized we had exactly the same depth of ignorance, and so we were in the same boat… hence our friendship, which still goes on, though on different sides of the Pond.

In those days we didn’t have the internet. I’ve learned a lot from it since I got online, and I can’t imagine doing without it. I probably wouldn’t even be using software like Bryce… might not have heard of it. Might not know as much as I do about Photoshop etc. Won’t have heard of certain bloggers, and be wondering how they’re doing…

Thinking how nice it will be to get some sleep, though… that’s something that comes with age. I remember telling my favourite primary teacher that I never wanted to go to bed, but in the morning I never wanted to get up, and it seemed rather odd. She said when I got older, I’d be very glad to get to my bed, though not wanting to get up in the mornings remains about the same. Some things we can always count on.

Surfing on a Mac

Have to admit it’s more fun blogging and blog-reading on the big Mac. If I look at the browser history in Safari, it shows me all the pages I have visited, and I can scroll back through them.

Also when I’m actually reading, there is a lot of space on either side, but I don’t have to scroll down as much as I do on the smaller Mac. As I couldn’t have a more recent browser on the old Mac (cheese cheese), it wasn’t working very well, and scrolling could be a sticky business. I wonder why I waited so long?