Almostgotit.com

See that little “blog stats” thing on the right?  Mine’s just a no-frills, free plug-in that shows me some of the places my referrals are coming from. (Thanks TrueVyne!  Thanks Stranger!)  But today, there’s this ONE LINK that is sending huge amounts of  traffic to the site.  It seems to be someone’s webmail inbox, which is just wide open and lets me click around in there as if I owned the place.  (My computer probably has a really bad venereal disease now, too, because I was so nosy.)  My brilliant brother,  whom I always consult about internet and computer stuff,  can’t figure it out, either. 

It’s a little scary, all these hits.  Like suddenly having a whole herd of stampeding elephants shift direction and start heading straight towards me. Who are you people?  Where did you come from? 

 (What I mean is) 

Hello, how are you today, and can I get you a coke or something?

It’s not nice to be jealous.  But if I could write a story on the top of my refrigerator as well as Miranda July, I maybe would be one of the happiest people in the world.  I’m pretty sure I would be.  I’m also pretty sure my brother only had the nicest of intentions when he brought this to my attention,  and so my official story here is that I’m looking this green because of all the jelly beans I ate today.

This is a photo of one of my favorite things: a path that disappears around a bend up ahead.  I took this one in Oxford (hi again, Solent!) on the tow path along the Thames.  We walked here often when we lived there.    I also have just changed the subtitle of my blog to “surviving unemployment.”  The original, “surviving the job search process,” seemed slightly disingenuous.  I can always change it back later.  

 This page template was designed by Jide (scroll to bottom) who’s French, and thus the lovely date stamps.  In every place except America, people write dates this way, in very logical day/month/year sequence.  Why do Americans write dates all out of order?  Have you ever thought about that?  It’s silly.  It’s important, I think, to remember that we do a LOT of things for silly reasons.  Like saving irreparable Christmas tree holders, for instance. 

Winston Churchill’s greatest nemesis arrived at our house over the weekend in a way that has taken us all by surprise.  We are taking Very Big Steps to remove the beast from our lives – some of them, by necessity, fairly public.  And I suppose that by refusing to wallow helplessly in emotional ruination, our future political careers are ruined now, instead.  Darn.

That link, by the way,  for any delving paparazzi looking to expose us:  http://almostgotit.com/  TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS! 

So, are there still laughing babies, and whiskey barrels newly seeded? Yes. (Here’s four babies laughing at once, as a matter of fact.)

Are we comforting ourselves with Easter chocolate?  Some…  but even now, we’re sticking to our guns on the slave chocolate issue– my kids even more than I!  Several people tried giving my daughter various chocolate gee-gaws, the kind mass-produced somewhere overseas, of equal parts chocolate and plasticine, but *very* festively wrapped.  She decided to accept them, but did so with such a funny expression on her face that it made me want to giggle and cry at the same time.  I’m sure it confused the heck out of her benefactors.  Fortunately, I’d planned ahead so we had generous reserves of non-slave-chocolate “Green & Blacks” bars (the best!!!)  and lots of other candy as well.  So really, it was no great loss. 

A good friend who lives too far away just emailed me a casserole.  Just the thing. (Thanks!)

Dare you to watch this video without making ANY NOISE WHATSOEVER.

While I regret not having had the pleasure of emptying them all of their original contents, (hic), the barrels are pretty fun to fill on a sunny March day, all in good anticipation of the flowers and vegetables we’ll plant in the next couple months.  Here’s how:   First, you cover the bottom with all your UNEMPLOYED plastic recyclables, plus the broken UNEMPLOYABLE Christmas-tree holder (also plastic) which was still in the garage for no good reason.  This fills space up faster, and also makes the barrels lighter.  Ta Da!!  Brilliant, or what?   *BONUS FEATURE*  They smell very interesting when it rains.  A little like  a PUB, Solent, but without all the cigarette smoke ;0)

I was wrong. It is really important to know the color of your parachute, especially when you are looking for a job! And advice isn’t always a bad thing, either. Also, normally?  It is probably not a good idea to tell other people to shut up.

This is still an experiment. Viral communication is the next big thing, as Seth Godin and others have convinced me, and blogs are at the vanguard. The good news is that the threshold is very low, so it’s very easy to get started. Keeping on, though, is a lot harder than it looks.

My sister once ran a marathon with Joan Benoit. In what other sport can beginning athletes compete with Olympic gold medallists? Blogging is like that. It’s definitely a mixed bag, drawing the exhibitionists and bores right along with the experts and professionals. I have to admit my own first impressions of blogs were pretty dismissive. But as I’ve immersed myself further in the past month, I’ve been floored by the quality of writing, the gorgeous immediacy of the medium, and all the emergent possibilities for its use. Like any other kind of writing, it’s very easy to put words on a (web) page, but very difficult to do it well.

I’d like to do it well. It’s very helpful to read what many successful bloggers have written about the process.

Sort of like, oh, I don’t know, finding a new job?

Both take a lot of time, particularly at the front end, and it usually takes a while to establish the right tone (= parachute) and audience (= employer). Most of the best blogs, like careers, are those which have been heavily and repeatedly reworked, even to the point of starting over. Have you seen all the orphan blogs out there? There’s a reason for that.

The topic of slave chocolate would not, probably, be my first choice of campaign issues.  With Easter just a few days away,  I feel fairly evil for even having brought it up!  A friend’s daughter read my last post and now won’t let her mother buy a regular chocolate Easter bunny for another friend.  And I’ve been wondering, myself, too, how I’m going to handle this at MY house next Sunday.

Well, the most obvious solution seems to be: put on my Birkenstocks and head for the health food store – darn, and I just shaved my legs this morning, too.    Our local gourmet food and high-end grocery stores have fair trade chocolate, as well.  At Kroger yesterday, we found a single fair-trade chocolate item, in the Natural Foods section:  some kind of sports bar, and it was pretty horrid.   Oh, for a Trader Joe’s! (not in our part of the country, I’m afraid.)  Too late for mail-order, but by the NEXT holiday, I’ll have had a little more lead time.  What is that… Hallowe’en?  Or are have they started in on Labor Day, now (tiny little chocolate Jerry Lewises?)

Another loved-one wrote yesterday about a new candy factory she’d just toured in Seattle, Theo Chocolates, which claims to be the only factory in the U.S. which produces chocolate that is both organic AND fair trade. 

And how about this?  Here’s an entire BLOG dedicated to reviewing candy: this link takes you to their thread of Fair Trade candy reviews! 

And here’s a list of suppliers of both Fair Trade and organic chocolate…  the latter generally being considered as also being slave-free, as it’s grown on special plantations.  Be sure to scroll down to find even more information in the comments at the bottom of the site.