blogging

This is 32


Go 32

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Which is not the answer to everything but it’s pretty amazing to me. Today’s blog post makes 32 posts for the month of November between this blog and the one on BlogHer. My wrists ache, my brain feels emptied, and I am going to pretend that yesterday’s posts didn’t offend anyone.

From a pure writing standpoint, the last month has been quite productive. I’ve been taking an online class with Christina Katz and by this time next week, I should have a nice body of work to start shopping about in the big bad world of print. Take a stab at the freelancing thing.

Blogging daily. Twice no less. Has been good for my brain but I am still probably leaving my best stuff all over Twitter and Facebook.

I was on fire on Facebook today and not in a friendly way but certainly in a progressive feminist writer way, which someone mistook for “leftism”. When did refusing to be suckered by the politics of class-ism and racism and sexism become a “liberal” rather than a “moral” issue?

But aside from that and the fact that I made pizza crust from scratch for the first time in eons, the day was a lazy one. Wednesdays are slug days for me. I had good intentions but my ear is still bugging me and throwing off my balance and my brother, CB, called and we talked for over an hour. He talked. I listened. I’m a good listener. Just so long as I am not sitting in front of the computer because Rob will tell you that I have the attention span of a gnat and will feed my ADD if given have an opportunity to do so.

Which is why he shouldn’t give me a Samsung Galaxy II S with gazillions of speed and ninja functions for my birthday – but he so is!!

I will now be tagged and as baggable as every over sheeple in North America.

The Top Mom Blogs contest ends at 5 P.M. PST tomorrow. I am still no shoo-in for the top five. Most of the others in the top ten are sponsored and have advertisers. I am so out of my league, but I am giving it the good fight. Cajoling FB friends and family daily and have a few people helping solicit voters from among their FB and Twitter lists. Adds up slowly. The woman in the top spot effortlessly gains a hundred or more votes a day. She’s got over twice as many votes as I do. I have no idea how one does that. I should ask The Bloggess sometime. She wins these contests all the time. But one last plea, hey? Click over and vote for my blog. I’ve never won anything and this would be beyond awesome despite it being nerve-wracking and the fact that I will never do this kind of thing again because it’s bad for my fragile sense of self.

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A Prairie Wife Kind of Day


Photographed by Kenneth Chan. youngjediboy@hot...

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Except for the sleeping until nearly noon, it was a farm wife on the little prairie day. Rob rescued our pitiful potato crop on Friday and they needed to be turned into delicious meals before they rotted.

I began the process yesterday afternoon with stock pot full of potato soup. I outdid myself. It was soup for which to die. However, I put barely a dent in the potato stash and so determined to make another pot today for the freezer and turn the rest into delicious breadstuffs.

It’s not fun. Gardening, harvesting or transforming. I am left with little doubt as to why women abandoned the kitchen and cooking in droves as soon as technology, cultural norms and the fast food industry made it possible for them to do so. I am fortunate that I have a husband who doesn’t believe that all things drudgery is women’s work. I experimented with a new soup recipe yesterday and found a way to turned mashed potatoes into tasty buns today, and he dug in, peeled and diced while I made everything else “so”. We are a team like that. Slightly awesome to behold if I do say so.

Before we started, a trip to town was necessary. Hard as it is for me to wrap my mind around, we don’t have enough Tupperware for freezing.

“Canadian Tire or Walmart?” I asked.

Unless we make for the edges of the city or the city itself, our shopping venues are quite limited in The Fort, which is the one thing I don’t like about it. I have no idea why the town council thinks young families would want to settle a place with overpriced, poorly constructed home and zero convenience and ease of shopping when they could find better, cheaper options closer to the heart of the city? But I digress and will leave the puzzlement of the town’s management for another day.

“I guess we should patronize Canadian businesses,” he said and so Canadian Tire it was.

Known generally as Crappy Tire, it has its niche in automotive parts and sporting goods, but it’s no Target.

I haven’t been in since the remodel, which consists of mainly rearranging where is what – something that doesn’t endear a store to me in the slightest. They did nothing about the faded worn feel of the place or to fix the fact that even with a dozen easy to access employees walking around, no one has the any idea what you are talking about when you ask them questions and fewer of them know where specific stock is housed without needing to contact a supervisor.

Tupperware, a new bread maker and Christmas decorations later, we were on our way to tea, slushies and home. Seldom do we indulge in the North America Sunday consuming rituals, so it’s a novelty when we do.

I am not done with the wifery. There is bread to make tomorrow. I am okay with baking. It’s not the worst thing about being a homemaker. That would be cleaning. Not the daily tidy up, but the deep sanitizing/dusting stuff. Baking does shoot your day to shit however, but the oven time part does facilitate writing pretty well.

The day ends with Rob on his knees grouting. The kitchen is about three steps away from done done, which makes this Prairie wife’s day.

 

 

* Just five more days of this mom blog contest thing. I’m precariously perched in the 6th spot and honestly, to get the maximum mileage out of being linked in the list – I need to be in the top five. When the site promotes the list, it only shows the top five and you have to click-through to see the others, which I am guessing doesn’t happen a lot. So to get to the fifth spot – I need more votes. 25 or so to catch or just overtake her. If you care to help out, click here. Remember you can vote daily and more than once if you have a smart phone and a work computer. Thanks!

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Forgot How Hard This Was


The Gazing Nude.Emmanuel Marcou

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I haven’t tried to blog every day in eons, so I’d forgotten how hard it was to do. Consider my lack of interest in gazing at my own naval unless I happen to be on a yoga mat,the fact that I’ve kept it up is astounding me – if no one else. The fact remains though that I just don’t need to angst over the minutia of life or create issue from detail. Not anymore anyway.

And technically, I am blogging twice a day because yesterday, I posted original material to the BlogHer site as well as here, which is not exactly what a great many bloggers do. Take for example the mom blog that is whooping bum at the Canada Mom blogs competition*.  It’s an aggregator serving as a community events page for the most part. Not much content and this is another reason to be pleased with myself, even if I am going to barely maintain a spot in the top ten list there.

More spectacularly is that I have finally gotten around to taking an online writing class in addition and the extra hours pounding at the keyboard are showing and not just in my sore achy forearms because I am getting back into the habit of outlining and drafting, which is something that bloggers don’t really have cause to do. Progress is being made with my voice and technique though I sadly remain an indifferent speller and more fond of punctuation’s eye-herding and melodic usages than what the moldy oldy Strunk and White have to say (and the irony of White pontificating about punctuation still amuses me).

If I were really ambitious, I’d start up the yoga blog again too, but I am not really ambitious. That’s my eternal issue. My inner Annie has never seen the need to work myself like a rented mule even if there was a really good reason to do so, and there never really is. Work should never crowd out life or even compete with it seriously. I suppose one could argue that I chose teaching for this reason, and you’d be mostly correct except that I also had to be freakishly good at it. The big bonus of being a teacher was that it came to me easily so, unlike some, I didn’t have to take it home with me after the first few years.

But it’s late, this post will just come in under the wire for the day. It was a big day. Potato soup. Which was excellent. Herding a child to soccer practice and enduring a spur of the moment play date sans benefit of sleeping in and snow. It has finally snowed.

Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps more interesting and then again maybe not. But I will blog. And again the day after. Twice daily until the end of the month. A modest ambition and just maybe, ambition can be cultivated.

* Just an fyi, thanks to all that have voted in the last two days, I am back in 7th place and have a shot at 6th if I can snag another 20 votes. If you are inclined, you can vote daily by just clicking here. Six more days and then we are done with this – I promise.