well... it would appear that I totally fell off the face of the planet over here.
1. I got a new computer. Yay! But in doing so I made the jump to Apple.
Isn't she pretty? I LOVE her except for one huge, gaping problem - an Apple equivalent of Windows Live Writer absolutely does not exist. I'm weird and I really don't like having to be chained to the internet to write blog posts. I also didn't know that they'd done a major upgrade to the Blogger interface (now I do.). Mars Edit isn't a terrible substitute but it costs money :(
3. Someone may not be technically a toddler since she's not toddling but she's sure got the attitude of one. Yikes! I am NOT prepared for a toddler. I had a clue about what to do with an infant. I am at a total loss with a toddler. I think I spent a few weeks wallowing over that realization but I'm doing my reading (parenting books are awesome) and we're just going to move forward. And she's probably going to walk soon though I have a feeling that it won't be until after Will goes to Australia (yeah - lucky duck gets the government to pay him to go to Australia).
So, I've been thinking a lot lately about a bunch of posts that I want to write - seriously, if I could just think it and have it show up on the internet, I would never disappear - and maybe I'll write a few here soon.
The day of the signing (last Saturday) finally rolled around and we had planned our day around heading to the Tradesmart book store in Littleton for the event which started at 4pm.
Sweet Pea took her nap and got up with plenty of time for us to stop off to check out a couple of cross stitch shops before going to the book store but we didn’t get out of the house in a timely manner – I mean, really, I should be used to how long it takes to get out of the house with her but I seem to end up about a half hour behind schedule (unless there’s an appointment involved) no matter what I do. So we decided to only hit one of the shops – thank goodness we did! I finally found a good Christmas stocking kit for Miss P and a really great shop (Fancimats & More in downtown Littleton).
We walked in to discover that the ladies (one employee and one customer) were discussing, what else than the very same book signing that we were headed to. I thought that was funny. We found out from the ladies that the book store had been giving out numbers all day. Great.
We decided to press on figuring that if we got there and we were way far back in line, we would just stay for the presentation, buy the new cookbook and go home. So we got there a little before 3:30. I staked out a spot and waited while Will wandered around with the baby.
The crowd anxiously waiting her presentation.
And then she finally appeared!
Her presentation is just a little history of her life and blog. She talks a lot on her blog about how she’s terrible at public speaking… well, it’s true! But she’s funny and nervous in a very endearing way.
And then she sang to Charlie. ha!
After her “song,” she came right over to begin signing books. At this point it was about 4:30. My spot won me a perfect vantage point for when she started signing books. Unfortunately, our number was 248. We were going to be waiting for quite a while so we actually left and went up the street for dinner. We’re still not sure why more people didn’t do the same.
Basically, all these people were just camped out in the store waiting to be called to get in line. We grabbed a chunk of floor and let the girl crawl around for awhile. They’d been playing an awesome country playlist but eventually the bookstore folks and the publisher folks got smart and they put The Muppetson one of the 2 screens that had been put up for the presentation. Eventually, our number got called. Not before the bookstore started announcing that if you needed to leave you could leave your books on a cart and Ree would sign them and you could come back and get them the next day. A lot of people were taking advantage of that. Aaaaaaand she fell asleep. I was so hoping to have her meet Ree too. :( But she was a little tuckered out by that point. Finally we made it!
It was about 8:30, 4 hours from when she’d started signing books and she was still so upbeat and nice. AMAZING. I was so excited to introduce her to our Sweet Pea since I know that Ree loves babies. She told us how beautiful she was and that she looked like Snow White and just wanted to pet her. Ree has to be used to people coming up and stammering at her because she just started asking questions while she signed the books. Where did we live? When we told her that we’d just moved to the area, she asked where from and then was joking that she was interrogating us. Really, she’s just as nice in person as you would expect her to be if you’ve watched her show. She even patted the babe on the leg.
Oh and thanks to the Tradesmart employee for taking the picture! Our original plan was for me to have the baby and Will to take the picture but as you saw… she was asleep so Will had to get in the picture with us.
I actually bought the new cookbook at the event so I didn’t know what was in it. I was pleasantly surprised to find two of my favorite recipes from her website.
Pork Chops with Apples and Creamy Bacon Cheese Grits which if you’ve visited since November, I’ve probably served it to you in all of its delicious glory. Though one of these days, I’ll finally make the whole thing correct from start to finish. I haven’t done it yet.
And Summer Stir Fry. The pictures are different from the recipe version that I’ve used but this is such a tasty summery dish. I can even get Will to eat tomatoes!
So that’s how I got to meet Ree Drummond, Pioneer Woman.
It’s official. As of yesterday morning, my friend A.J. of I Still Want More Puppiesand I Still Want More Cupcakesand I started our new blog to raise awareness for ovarian cancer. Well, with a secondary goal of having ZTA change or add ovarian cancer awareness to our philanthropies.
Our blog is: Sisterhood of the Whispering Crowns. Now, it’s not pretty yet. Actually, it’s super boring in appearance. But we do have THREE posts already!
And….
You can contact us at whisperingcrowns dot gmail dot com.
And…
You can follow us on Twitter @WhisperingCrown. Apparently, WhisperingCrownS was one letter too long for a Twitter handle.
ok, who out there thinks that I’ve got a severe case of blog ADD lately?
*raises hand*
Oh well. Apparently my normal nonlinear thinking is really showing on here lately. But I swear I’ll get back to my “baby crap” posts – I’ve got 2 half written – and get back to my nursery reveal – I got stalled because I need to stage a picture. Some of it is also that I got the Blogger app on my phone to encourage some real time, short posts. But if my normal thought processes are showing then it clearly means that I’ve been posting more which is a good thing.
Oh and I think I started something.
With a random comment on FB and its overwhelming response, it’s looking more and more like at least one ZTA friend and I are going to start a little campaign for Ovarian Cancer Awareness.
Ok, I’m not trying to make this into a baby blog per se ….
It’s just that I have a bunch of posts that I wrote sitting at my desk in the first couple of weeks that I knew I was pregnant in an attempt at calming all the thoughts that were catapulting around in my brain at very high velocity.
And because (a) they’re already written, (b) I can share them because most everyone knows, and (c) I don’t have to sort through pictures to post them, they’re easy to publish pretty quickly.
So no fear… I’m not going for “all baby, all the time.” At least not intentionally!
From various sources, I’ve come across some interesting things lately.
First, this video, Posted to Facebook by Victor, with stop-motion pictures depicting a guy walking across America. It just happens to also feature our favorite Edward Sharpe song, “Home.”
The second is another stop-motion video posted by Cup of Jo – this time made with actual pictures. It appears to depict a man’s life journey towards his 50th grade school reunion. Very cool!
Oddly from the same Cup of Jo post, I found a NY Timesblog, Abstract City, by Christoph Niemann. She had posted his most recent entry on being on a red eye from NYC to Berlin. Here’s just a few select images from his posts (each picture is linked back to its original post).
He uses all different mediums and inspirations. Clearly, the above is an interpretation of DC in the style of a Google map.
Paint is a common medium but he has another post that he made, essentially, little voodoo dolls and photographed them.
This one actually inspired a book, I Lego NY. The post about his kids being obsessed with the NYC Subway is a-dor-able.
I guess I’m just saying that I’m glad that there are still artists in the world and that they put a lot of time into their creations even if those creations are simply YouTube videos and blog posts.
I found Good Things Catered through Emily and have really enjoyed. I’ve made a few of her recipes already – lemon chicken and pink champagne cake – and have been very pleased. She’s been a bit MIA lately though.
I found A Cup of Jo through STF actually. Jo is Joanna Goddard one of the STF writers but A Cup of Jo is her own personal blog. She writes about interesting design related type stuff. Just quick things that are interesting. I’ve actually started to notice that she’s included in the blog rolls of a bunch of other sites that I’ve come across.
Ok… I’ve already professed my love for The Pioneer Woman on here. And I’ve already heard from someone about losing many hours with Ree as a result of me professing my love. I’d heard of her before but I can’t remember where so it was really Emily again to turn me on to this one. The Confessions section is hilarious and interesting. The Home & Garden section appeals to the daughter of an interior decorator in me. I haven’t read all of Pioneer Woman Cooks but I did recently make one of her recipes and it was scrumptious. But it’s the Photography section that is proving most instructive – I’ve been trying to incorporate her tips and instructions as I take my own pictures.
I found Shit My Kids Ruined through A Cup of Jo and it’s just downright funny. All I can think of as I look at the pictures is that Mom would have had plenty to add to the collection if my brothers had grown up in the age of digital photography.
I found out about Linda & Harriet through a Daily Candy post several years ago. But what I didn’t know until recently was that she had a blog. Also another design type blog but she’s also blogging about her life in NYC.
Hot Guys Reading Books was posted to Facebook by a girl I went to high school with and Catalog Living was posted to Facebook by a friend from college. Both are just highly amusing. Though HGRB’s author did inspire my “to read” page based on the BBC’s top 100 books.
So the blogs that aren’t written by friends… I didn’t really read all that many until recently.
Goggle Reader has made it infinitely easier to keep up with more blogs. I was actually introduced to Goggle Reader in my environmental management class but the first RSS feed I added to it was treehugger and those people are crazy with content. It just wasn’t manageable so it scared me off of Reader for quite a while.
The two blogs that I’ve been reading the longest are Glamour’s Slaves to Fashion and the Grey’s Writer’s Blog. I could not even begin to tell you at this point how I came across STF – I really don’t know. There’s a lot of content (they probably post about 10 times a day) but it’s fashion fluff so I skim and move on quickly. But I have tried a few things that they suggest. I forget how I came across the Grey’s Writer’s Blog too but I like Grey’s and I find it to be an interesting insight into the episodes.
I think STF introduced me to Mrs-O. The girl behind Mrs-O works for a company that allows for employee directed side projects that are funded by the company and this blog (and a book) following the First Lady’s fashion is her project. I like the FL as a person and this girl is pretty lucky.
How I found Blonde Photographer is actually funny… Liz knows her sister from the BL and sent me the link to BP to show me her wedding pictures. BP is an amazing photographer so I just kept up with her blog. I would love to have her do what she calls a lifestyle shoot for us.
I’ve been reading Piled Higher and Deeper since I was in college but only recently added it to the blog roll. Mostly because it just didn’t occur to me to add it to Goggle Reader. It’s a comic strip about engineers in grad school and I LOVE it. Even though I was never an engineering grad student, I still found it applicable to my experiences.
My first friend to blog was Tim. He was a house husband for awhile after he moved to Montenegro with his wife in ’07 so he started to fill his time by blogging their experience. Funny stuff made funnier by having to learn to read “Tim-speak.” But they’re back stateside so no more funny stories :(
Somewhere along the way Will’s friend Jon decided to convert his monthly e-mail “Update” into a blog “The Update Transformed” in hopes that it might keep him on the ball with it. I don’t think he succeeded since he hasn’t posted since November ‘09.
Then my friend Nikki got pregnant and started a blog in ’08 shortly before having Miss Elizabeth to keep family in the loop. Then Susan got pregnant and decided that they would have a blog too seeing as it was the thing to do when you have kids.
That got me thinking that we could start a blog when we finally had kids. But then I got to thinking that we also like to travel and that would make good blog fodder until we did have kids. Then one day I was supposed to be writing a paper and I just gave in and started up this here blog. It has since morphed in a lot of random directions depending on my mood, musings, and whatever’s going on in life.
After I added the sitemeter and its handy referral tracking, I discovered a few more friends with blogs. It turned out that we were on the blog list of a couple of friends’ blogs that I didn’t even know existed – nohner, em!ly, and amy jo. Actually, I knew that Amy had a blog, I just didn’t know what its address was.
Facebook brought to light a few others by friends – Michelle’s hey, love, my cousin Maura, and the DeLunas. Again, I kind of knew that Ruben and Sarah had a blog but I never had the address until she started reading and commenting on our blog after giving into Facebook.
Our friend Adrienne maintains a sometimes blog. She keeps it up when she does summer trips to Qatar so that could be added to the blog roll again soon when she heads back in a few weeks.
Our friend Victor just started up his site, Victor Sent Me, with the design help of Ruben. You might remember the great restaurant we visited in San Francisco – Victor sent us.
Ok, I reeeeally don’t like that what I’m editing in Live Writer isn’t what shows up on the blog so I’ve started doing some experimenting.
I’m currently in the process of trying to figure out how one uses other, ie, non-Blogger, templates. I even found a site, Our Blogger Templates, that has templates that aren’t cutesy and whatnot that I actually am considering using.
The site also gave me an idea: Start a test blog!
So I started a test blog.
I probably shouldn’t share the address but if anyone is interested in the progress I’m making…. wandmdavenport2.blogspot.com… the header there will look the same as this one because that’s one of the major things that I have to figure out.
Who knows what it will look like from day to day over there but once I figure it out – we’re talking XML and coding here – you’ll see it show up here. Though I did just realize something about this template – it automatically doesn’t underline weblinks which is something I’ve been doing by hand all this time.
We’ll have to see how I can work with the disconnect between Blogger and Live Writer.
Sadly, the fact that my posts looked exactly the same in Live Writer as they do on the blog is one of the main things I love about Live Writer. It’s actually why I’ve been kind of avoiding posts with lots of pictures for a few days now in preparation for the new layout.
As I “celebrate” one year of blogging, I feel like explaining (a) how I came to decide to get into blogging and (b) all the blogs listed over there to the right.
[I wrote this up at work on a boring Tuesday morning and after it got to be about 3 pages in Word, I realized that I was going to have to split it up some. So there will be a few posts on this topic over the next few days.]
Let’s see…
The first blog I ever read semi-regularly was “Because I Said So” which I found through a forwarded eBay listing from my sister. She was funny and had all these kids (I’m kind of fascinated with people with lots of kids). I hardly read her anymore because she started doing a lot of promotional posts for kid stuff that I’m not interested in and now she’s getting a divorce so it’s taken a slightly depressing turn. I just don’t like it as much anymore though I do wander over from time to time.
From there I stumbled across Looky, Daddy! The author is a stay-at-home Dad in NJ with 3 little girls. I found him completely hilarious and then amazingly touching as his oldest daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy at 7. Sadly, he decided to stop blogging in August of ’09 but I keep him in my goggle reader and wander over every once and while just to be sure that he hasn’t reappeared.
So they were the blogs that got me started on regular blog reading.
and then somehow I just missed 1,000 visits - as I write this, it says 1,005.
I'm kind of sad but it happened during a fun-filled weekend in Hampton honoring Kate's amazing accomplishment of finishing her 5 year general surgery residency so I have a good excuse.
And I would list all the interesting site meter things but I think the same 10 people are reading this over and over again so there's nothing new to report in the stats. :(
I wandered in this afternoon and happened to notice that we had exactly 500 visits.
Wow. I can't believe that our little blog has gotten 500 visits in about 8 months. I know that it's somewhat inflated because my mom and Eileen check in about 3 times a day (I'm only exaggerating a tad). But I still feel somewhat accomplished.
Now you may remember from this post that I'm kind of obsessed with the sitemeter stats which tell me lots of things but the ones I'm most interested in are the referral site (how did the viewer get to our blog) and location (where the viewer is from - not terribly accurate but close enough).
So here's a few new points of interest:
Who out there is reading from Mississauga, Ontario? Will's love of Canada is really curious about this one.
Why are there all of a sudden a few people who are googling "wandmdavenport.blogspot.com" to find us? Confusion over the google search box vs. the address bar, perhaps?
We've gained links on a few other friends' blogs: Maura T and em!ly Thanks ladies!
From which Mountain View, CA comes somewhat frequent hits? It would appear that there are 2 Mountain Views in California.
Why do folks that find us in Europe come up as just that, "Europe"? I want something more specific.
If you want to satisfy my curiosity on any of these points, feel free to leave us a comment!
And not to worry, there are still a few more posts about the snow in process but I had to mark this ocassion.
I'm sure no one noticed that I added a site meter to our blog (it's over there to the right at the bottom). I got curious as to whether anyone was actually reading my blog except for Amy, Liz, my mom, Nikki, and Susan. When Tim B was still writing his blog, he had a counter from sitemeter.com that would also tell you where folks were that were reading your blog. Because I'm nosy by nature, I picked that one. After I finally figured out how to add it to the blog page, of course. It turns out that it gives you even more information than just location.
After just a few days, it's interesting. I now know that:
most people use facebook to get to the blog
at least one person each has gotten here from Amy, Emily, and Susan's blogs
Nikki uses Google Reader to read it (ok, I kind of knew that one already)
someone in Canada has read it
my mother-in-law found it - Hi Sue!
a friend from UD reads it - Hi Heather!
they think my mom is in Hainesport. Not quite but close enough.
Emily added a link to our blog to her blog - Thanks Nohner!
there's a lot of just IP addresses and "unknowns"
But the one that I find most intriguing is that someone from Waynesboro, VA (or close to there) reads it often. I think it might be M. H. but I don't know. Wanna satisfy my curiosity and identify yourself, Waynesboro?
