An End to Nablopomo 2007
Well well, what an interesting month. As a new blogger, I thought that Nablopomo would be the perfect opportunity to really tone those blogging muscles and teach me a thing or two about how to blog effectively. I think that my writing style and comfort level on the blog will continue to evolve. The thirty days of practice has certainly been rewarding. Exhausting, time consuming, overwhelming, surprising, etc. I think I’ve learned that the best kind of blogging comes from, well, having a life. It’s a simple equation - first comes life, then comes a good blog entry. While I may still post quite frequently moving forward, I think that hopefully I will have a little more of a chance to selectively produce entries that are less rushed.
Bits and Bites:
1. Cocomment. Any other bloggers out there should know about this, if they don’t already - it has simplified my social blogging connectivity in countless ways. Essentially, anytime you make a comment on anyone’s blog, with the browser extension, it automatically stores that conversation and keeps track of replies for you. That way you don’t have to subscribe to comments, but just check all of your conversations in one place. Of course it also works for if you are interested in a particularly good comment thread, providing a single place to store and update them all. I’ve always thought that a big benefit to the blogosphere would be greater connectivity of comments - this is a good step towards that.
2. I’m on Goodreads: a social network for literature that allows you to archive the books that you’ve read, review books, etc. If you do join, please add me as a friend, I love to get book recommendations. I’m actually reading 5 books officially right now (on the profile page it only lists 3 books, but if you click on my currently-reading shelf you’ll see the complete 5). That may seem like a lot, but there are reasons I can handle so much. The Ani Phyo and Raw Food Real World (un)cookbooks are merely references for some recipes I want to try, the Art of Loving by Erich Fromm is one J and I are reading aloud when we have the chance, the Taming Your Gremlin book by Rick Carson is a cheezy yet effective self-helper I read when I’m in the mood, and finally the Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the main novel I’m engaged with. One of my pet peeves for newer novels is pretension. When authors in the highly competitive book market attempt to write in a ‘unique’ way which just comes off as plain obnoxious. So far, Eggers is managing to be clever, creative, and interesting without being snotty - so I’m encouraged to read more.
3. My financial system really needs a makeover - while I mull this over with dread, I can learn more about the needed skillz from great articles such as the one by The Simple Dollar: Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards.
4. In the hopes that we can jazz up our chore life - and get off each other’s cases for not doing this or that, J and I have signed up for Chore Wars. I have to include the delicious graphic below. Apparently I’m a level 1 sorcerer while J is a level 1 barbarian. While J is the one into various types of irritating roleplaying/computer games, I will use every method possible to motivate him to feel positive about chores, especially the meal-making and grocery-getting varieties (I have learned there is nothing more fantastic to coming home to a meal at the end of a long work day). And if there’s a bit of fun in it for me too, I can’t really argue. I have to say that I think it’s really appropriate to visualize cleaning tasks as monsters - I think the bathtub especially qualifies as a real ‘monster’ to clean - it sure terrifies me.
5. Via Elaine Vigneault, a great poster:
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