twitter isn't good for blogging

Blogging is another way of telling stories.


Or at least that's how I always thought of it. My stories, like I'd tell you in a letter or a phone call or a conversation. Stuff maybe you didn't even really need to read, but things you might enjoy hearing if you wanted to know how I am - how my life is - better. If you wanted to know me.

Blogging is taking big bites. Whole stories, setting a tone, giving your readers a feeling so they can peek through this door you've opened into your home and sigh in recognition. Letting them get to know you.

Twitter and Facebook, with their status statements and character limits, don't allow whole bites. They only give you a taste, a nibble of who the whole person is. How can you get a feeling for how someone writes, for how someone is in a sentence or two?  Too often twitter messages are about plebeian things like eating out and diapers and traffic jams - if I wouldn't write about these things in a blog post, why would I think you'd be interested in my tweets about them?  And why on earth would you be? Are we so starved for automatic content that we need to tell each other about our laundry?

I've grown weary of status messages and the like pointing the way to blog posts. It smacks of self-aggrandizement. The way Twitter is structured now, the people that see that tweet are friends with you already - chances are they know you have a new post out, via feedreaders and bloglines and their ilk. The number of new readers you can pick up that way is very low.

I think the most obvious way Twitter and Facebook harms blogging is by erasing the storyteller in all of us. If I report, via status message and What's Happening?  the 140 character bare-bones of my day, what's left? What do I post? Where is my story?

I belong to both Twitter and Facebook, and I'm sorry to say I've been gleaning more information about how my favorite authors - my blogging authors - are doing on those two programs versus their own blogs.

Where are the stories? Where are the peeks into your life?
Stop telling me about your laundry and whether your husband got home on time.

Tell me a story. Write a post.

unsuitable

I've been listening to books-on-tape (books-on-CD, actually, but it seems wrong to call them that) in the car on my way to work, and have been enjoying being caught up in something else rather than the usual Am I late? Am I going to be late? How fast am I going? Shouldn't I have been at that intersection three minutes ago? etc.... The story takes me out of all the clutter going 'round my head, in other words.

Today, though, I tried to listen to The Shawl and  realized that I can't read stories about concentration camps. I just....can't.

It was a mistake, grabbing that audio CD in the library - I was ready to go and my hand gripped the wrong one, and when I got home and discovered it I just thought I'd give it a try - and now I'm perched at my desk at work, trying to look busy but seeing the faces of my great-grandparents and remembering how soft Grandma Gebhardt's hands were.

Some things are just unsuitable for consumption, no matter how many generations gone they may be.

a banner weekend

The weekend started with a bang and has just been getting better.

Yesterday was the Spring Fair at the kids' school, and it was a huge, rip-roaring success. Families came from all over and played games, won prizes, ate home-made pie and cake, looked at displays, bid on items at the silent auction, and cheerfully put each other in the mock jail.

I am always astounded at the overwhelming love this community has for the school. We need this school, need this heart of the area, need the bright spot it puts in our town.

We raised over $4,000. That's a LOT of hamburgers and hot dogs sold at the BBQ, a LOT of .50 cent chances bought on vacation raffles and bubble gum guesses, a LOT of goodwill and stuffing an extra buck or two in the donations jar.

That is a darn good definition of family, in my book.

Happy Mothers Day, everyone. Now I'm off to take my children to the library and the playground, so they can play in the sun.

boy I'd like to write a post, but........

....there's a monkey on the stairs, and she won't go to sleep.

shared heritage

I've done posts about graveyards before.

Rosey asked today if we could stop and see Papa. She misses him, and my girl likes to go and see the grave, to put her hands to the cool, carved stone, talk to him about her day and who she played with, and say hello to her Nanny May. Then after a few moments, she wants to explore the hills

and ask questions about the other people who are buried here. 'Were they friends of Papa's? Did they live here too? Do their grandchildren come to visit them here?'

Before I can formulate an answer more articulate than I have no idea, honey, she spins and stares down at the river, watching three ducks paddling by.

'This is a good place, Mama.'

I think I may have found a companion to walk the stones with.

woes is me

Three-fourths of the major players are gone from work today - not illness, but scheduled things (which means no one is calling looking for them) and the phone is quiet and the day is subtly gray and drippy and we're all stifling yawns. Hitting the coffee hard and hoping for four-thirty to come, quick and painless.

(bugger, bugger, bugger) After assuring the man at the copier repair shop that YES, I turned the damned thing off and turned it back on, the copier guy came and...I don't know....rubbed his thumb and fingers together and look! Now the copier is working!

It's more aggravating than trying to explain 'that noise' to the car mechanic.

(Anyone else besides me astounded that the technology has come so far - I mean, the copier machines now can fax and scan and upload and download from flash drives and print on both sides and staple, for cripes sakes,  a far cry from the ones in the past, where collating wasn't even an option - and the first advice from the repair shop is still unplug it and plug it back in?!?!?!)

I'm getting a haircut after work, and am stupidly excited about this. I have so much hair I'm lost in it, (a cold-weather trick of mine, grow out the mop) and need a shearing. Also some highlights.

Okay, the copier fella (he's a nice guy, really) is still in there, futzing. So he can't have sprinkled pixie-dust in all the right places. Actually, he's conferred with a colleague, so maybe I didn't make a bad call after all????

Ooh, and the sun is coming out. My haircut awaits (well, okay, in a few hours.) But the day is getting better.

plotting

The kids rooms need to be updated.

Cass still has the paint job that he had as an infant - his nursery was very gender-neutral, so it's a mixture of yellow and white and blue, with kites flying overhead and puffy white clouds painted on a blue ceiling.

He still loves the sky-ceiling. But all the rest we could change, and he'd subside without a protest. We're thinking a loft or bunk bed, many, many shelves to hold toys, and a good tall bookcase for his books. I'd also like to put in some matting (something that could be shaken out if necessary) - perhaps some sea-grass stuff?

The trouble is that I want to do something pulled together, at least vaguely, and not too-little-boyish, and yet don't want to do a room in camo or anything. (He'd love that. I would weep every time I went in.)

Rosey's room is green (a very gorgeous green the colour of rose leaves on a cloudy morning) and ivory. She loves purple and pink. Flashy, splashy purple-and-pink.
Sigh.
I want to do rooms they can live in for a few years without them being too baby-ish. Or too pink.

I've been watching Sarah's House, and eying decorating blogs, and I've got some ideas, but holy....this scares the heck right out of me. (I'm the one who doesn't choose paint colours well, remember?)

Mostly, storage. STORAGE STORAGE STORAGE. But well-thought of storage, not just masses of containers to dump things in.

So I started today. I ordered both the kids shades for their rooms. True, neither is a fabulous colour (one is gray and the other gray-purplish, but it's a start.


And I want a chandelier for R's room. B'cause they're pretty.

week end

It's a gorgeous day here, and I think I'm going to take my daughter and my camera and go look for things to take pictures of. I may or may not get to working in the garden.

It's a lazy, wonderful day.

Back with pictures later. Are you having a great day?

in the sweet by and by

My mother's memorial service was last weekend, and while I wasn't able to be there, I spent quite a bit of the weekend remembering, hauling out old photos and cards and trinkets, thinking.

It sounds sad, doesn't it? But it really wasn't.

Above all, I was loved.

 Above all, I am still loved. Your love goes with me. Always.

Miss you, Mamacita.

photo credit Edw.J. Van Dyne, 1971

the house in troy

When I was very small, going back to where my father grew up was a wonderland.


It was a big old house, not country-style at all, but trimmed out with colorful fabrics and thick rugs and souvenirs from my Granddad's travels (my brother and I learned early on not to be startled by prayer masks from Swahili or Peruvian wood figures leering down from the living room walls) and full of corners to find a sunbeam in and read. Or relax. Or hide from a younger brother. It was large enough that the usual stirring of the household noises wouldn't wake you, and set far enough back from the road that traffic sounds never got loud enough to become a background noise.

It was framed by fields of apple trees (the family business) and a river. It was a perfect place for tearing around, creating scenarios and intricate games, and discovering new things every time. A new animal-in-residence, for instance, or a half-remembered place to throw sticks in the water and smell the sweet mud and the new grass growing. There were lilacs in the backyard and everywhere the soft droning of bees, happily doing their jobs on the apple blossoms.

It's amazing, but I can run all through that house in my mind - the layout of it has never left me.

A friend sent me some pictures of my graduation party from high school - several of them are outside the house I lived in for twelve?more than that? years, and I remember my grandparent's house, a house I probably visited no more than twenty times, a house not in the family now but still lovely and standing in a field of apple trees in Pennsylvania - better than that one.

Such is memory.

needing an overhaul

Well, this Spring, so far, blows.

I have just received confirmation that there is no way all my paperwork will come back in time, so I won't be going to my mothers' memorial service - something that I think I'm okay with, but I hate the thought of disappointing my father and my step-father and my grandparents (who are being gracious and lovely through all of this. Actually everyone's been really supportive and kind and understanding - anger at how this turned out has apparently made me think they'll turn on me like raging dogs, or something. Which isn't their personalities at all.)

My friend M is the same. Which isn't all bad - at least she's not dying, right - but isn't great, either. I keep remembering chunks of our history together - she and I lived together for four years, and I have old and doddering cats that were our pets then - Chumba, in fact, my steadfast purring machine, my cat-hat, my giver of kitty-zen, was her kitten - and she hasn't gone through that time yet in her head. It's bewildering and sad and bittersweet, all at once.

My job continues to go well, with my only complaint being that they're under-utilizing the support staff. (me) But I'm hopeful that I can corner some big projects soon.

My children didn't go to the music festival today - Cass came in to our bedroom in a high state of anxiety because he couldn't remember the words and thought he was going to throw up, and after he blubbered a bit B (soft-hearted B) let him out of it (which of course meant there was no way R was getting up there either. Five, for her, is all about what's good for the gander is good for the goose.) Not that I'm the hard-hearted parent, exactly, but I wouldn't have given in.

And I'm tiring of this set-up for my blog. Maybe a move? Do I want to jump into more serious blogging territory? Will have to think about that....but definitely at least a face-lift for daysgoby.

My brother had a good friend that used to come out to supper with us quite a bit - and it used to kill my mother that we could go to any restaurant (Mexican, Chinese, Guatemalan, Italian, whatever) and he would order a hamburger and fries.
And now my daughter is taking on that role.
Yesterday she suggested that we all go out to eat at the Chinese restaurant here in town. SHE suggested it. I was thrilled at the idea of more hot-and-sour soup, so off we went - where she promptly ordered fried fish and chips.  At least she ate some of my soup.