OK, if you’ve been following along, I’ve been chatting about my youngest son’s strangeness.

So, I had to work a bit late Friday night and Diane took the kids to the White Trash Feeding Trough…oh sorry, Golden Corral…it’s an all you can eat buffet frequented by folks that really shouldn’t eat all they can eat. I can’t stand the place but my kids love it. Why? Because they have a claw machine that’s easy to win plus they like being in control of what’s on their plate – who cares if the food is sub-standard and a salmonella-fest.

Anyway, apparently there was some guy there doing balloon animals (by the way, how sad is your ?career? of master balloon-animal-dude/clown when the best gig you can get is the freakin’ GC?) and Harrison freaked. He’s 4 so you’d think he’d be OK with this, but the poor little guy was petrified by the balloon animal guy.

This is so priceless…I’m immortalizing all of this stuff that you’d certainly forget by the time they’re teenagers trying to look cool in front of their friends

I’m constantly staggered at the number of people that don’t use email (or use it very badly). Mostly at church….good grief at work when our email server goes down everybody just start milling around with this lost expression on their face because they have no clue how to do their job anymore.

But ya know, I can understand it a little. Maybe you can’t afford a computer? Maybe you’re afraid of technology? Email is not hard though and I’m sure that you can get someone’s soon-to-be-discarded old computer for $0-$40. Presumably you have a phone? And I’m betting that you have a neighbor, friend, nephew that’s just “really good with computers” that can get you going.

OK, those of you that do have email, let me poke at you a bit here…..

1. Please read your email at least once a day. Do you only go check your physical mail box once a week?
2. Please learn what CC and BCC means and please learn the difference between Reply and Reply-To-All
3. Stop sending me chain emails…nobody likes getting them in the real mail, why would I want them in my email?
4. Please learn some basic typography….don’t use ALL CAPS because it’s yelling. Please use the “rich text” features of your email and use bold and italics to emphasis things. And please break up your text into small paragraphs.
5. Please use the spell checker – it’s your friend.
6. Keep it short and to the point.

Okay, I feel better now.

You’ve probably noticed that I started ‘talking’ again here. I just wanted to share with you how this came about. I’ve actually felt some guilt in the back of mind for a long time about not posting. Why? Especially since I warned you all that it would happen…long spaces of nothingness filled with random posts of questionable value.

I think I realized that I wasn’t feeling guilty because I’d let you down or because I’d not done something I promised anybody that I’d do. Instead, I think I just felt guilty about letting myself down because I was letting all of those inner voices in my head keep from writing and I was ashamed that even after I’d given myself ‘permission’ as it were (on my blog for Pete’s sake) to do whatever I wanted that my response was to do a big fat nothing.

You know, in addition to not blogging, I’d stopped reading too.

So, I flipped the good ol’ Google reader back on the other day and glazed over when it showed that I had 1000s of posts that I HAVE to read. I said ‘screw that’ and just hit ‘Mark all as Read’ . I declared RSS bankruptcy and moved on.

Then I read a post from one of my fav bloggers that listed a bunch of his favorite blogs/feeds. I love those kind of posts because it’s sooooo hard to find blogs that I truly dig (no pun intended). All of those tools out there that are supposed to help you find blogs that you’ll like don’t work for me.

Anyway, one of them that he mentioned (sorry, don’t even remember who it was and I’m too lazy to go look it up) had a blurb about Havi Brook’s The Fluent Self. Really, I checked into most of what he linking, but for some reason, I just kept reading more of Havi’s posts and liked it more and more (although it took a while before I stopped mumbling that I didn’t get the freakin’ duck thing – I’m still not sure I do, but I don’t care now).

She’s got an awesome, fantabulo.us kick-arse series on blogging. Havi, you got me going again….

group hug (even though I’m totally not into the hippie stuff, I sort of got it – I think…ah who cares, it worked). Thank you!

If you’re not blogging (and I have no idea why you’re here if you don’t because I think read somewhere that a ridiculous portion of people that read blogs are bloggers themselves), please read her posts and start. We don’t need another site to tell us how to make millions on the web in your pajamas, but I can guarantee that there are people that need to hear you.

If you do blog, you owe it to yourself to go read them. (Havi probably wouldn’t like my implication that you should feel obligated or like you have to go read them, but I’m less touchy-feely…so go do it already )