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For the last two weeks, I’ve started taking one child to the grocery store with me. Taking all three equals stress and anger, but taking one gives me the chance to a) teach them about grocery shopping, 
b) let them play with the cart and feel useful by pulling things off the shelves, without me having to arbitrate whose turn it is for what, and c) spend quality time!
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This week it was Alex’s turn. He took possession of The List and the pen, and crossed off the items as we picked them up. At least, at Aldi. He yielded control when we reached Gerbes. I would like to share with you fine people the difference between his concept of crossing items off a list…and mine. (The left column is his handiwork…can you see which item we found at Aldi even though it was on the Gerbes list on the right column?)
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I’m confused by Twitter. I am following a paltry 97 people, and I can’t possibly keep up with the tweets. And yet I keep finding people who are following 10,000. I know Twitter is supposed to be used by writers to reach lots of people, but how can anyone find your tweets (and remember you) amid that clutter? This is a sincere question. If anyone understands how to use Twitter, please have mercy on me and give me a good lecture!
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It really is astonishing…and a wee bit disturbing…to see how much novel relationships are mirroring real-life ones, when I didn’t realize it at all. You think you’re writing something completely unrelated, and wake up one day to discover you’ve been projecting all your own feelings onto the characters’ lives. Disturbing.
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Yesterday was my birthday. (I’m 37 now. See, I have no problem with age. 😉 ) I started the day in a really bad place, but I’m glad to say that going out to dinner and shopping for a gift made a big difference. Still, I think next year I want to stay home the day of and have the family dinner.
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The Hyundai Sonata is on the top ten list of most stolen vehicles, presumably because it’s reliable and has a lot of gidgets on it. We could do without the gidgets, but eh bien. I knew we had a car alarm, but I didn’t realize that it just was…I thought we had to turn it on or something.
So yesterday, I was trying to get Nicholas in the car to run over and pick up Alex from school, and although all the windows were open (I’m trying to rid the car of that noxious new car smell that makes me carsick**), the doors were locked. I had tossed my keys through the passenger window onto the seat, so I just reached through the window and unlocked the back driver’s-side door. And oh, my goodness, all hell broke loose in my garage. I’ve accidentally hit the panic button on the van remote before, but always with the key in my hand, where I could turn it back off. Not so this time! Nicholas ran away on his chubby little legs, and by the time I skirted Alex’s bike and the shelves (garages evidently aren’t built with storage and vehicles in mind anymore) and rounded the car to get the keys out of the passenger seat, it had mercifully shut off. Nicholas stood on the step into the house with his entire body plastered against the door, staring at me wide-eyed as if to say, What was THAT?
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Coming up short, and that one was long, so I think I’ll sign off for today. Have a great weekend!
**Incidentally, did you know that “new car smell” has a Wiki entry? The things you learn via WP’s “recommended links”!
11 Responses
You share a birthday with my mother! And now that I come to think of it, you also have the same job, as she’s a writer. 🙂
I follow 700ish and have a little over 300 followers on my playstlouis twitter account. I don’t read anyone’s tweets, I use the search feature to find people talking about local parks to retweet things. I post links to my blog entries to get more people to visit. If there is someone I really want to see my tweet, I tag them with @ at the end of the tweet so they get email notification and then read the tweet (and retweet it I hope). I don’t know how other people use it but I use twitter strictly to get people to my blog.
Does it work? That’s the question. I haven’t really seen many hits coming from Twitter referrals. Maybe I”m doing it wrong.
You and my son are almost-birthday-buddies!
An article I read that helped me finally ‘get’ twitter a little was to imagine it as one never-ending cocktail party. When you come in, you can’t go back and try and figure out what everyone else is talking about. When you enter, you glance around a bit…if you hear something interesting, you might hop into the conversation. You can start your own conversation by asking questions or tweeting directly @ someone who you know will be interested.
Besides that, I am a total novice. Other people use special programs like tweetdeck to “manage their twitter feeds” and I just don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean! Um, hello….I don’t even know which way the letter ‘z’ goes, ya know?
Have a wonderful weekend, Kathleen!
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Seems unlikely to develop much name recognition, I would think…which is the only reason I’m on it, as a writer: platform-building. (Pathetic, I know, but otherwise it’s just a time-sucker!)
Happy Birthday!
My daughter and I had the same experience with a new house alarm recently… it seemed like forever before we coudl orient ourselves and egt it turned OFF. Sad that the things we use to protect ourselves often end up leaving us feeling somewhat tramatized.
Have a wonderful weekend!
LOL! Our smoke alarms do that to us, too. Ours are the newfangled ones, y’know, that are all linked together. Earlier this week they all went off at 5:35 a.m. while Christian & I were stretching & exercising. Fortunately for us. Not so fortunate for the kids, who all woke up in sheer terror. It was not a good day, as you might imagine. 😉
I just joined Twitter and I don’t understand it at all (and at 24, I’m supposed to be part of this generation?). I follow way less people than you and I can’t keep up. And I am home all day without any kids to care for and I still can’t read it all.
PS- I will be emailing you soon for some cloth diaper advice! Thanks for the offer.
i have been reluctanct to try twitter …
oh, and Happy Birthday!
happy birthday mine is this next week and I am just a smidge older than you LOL
Happy belated birthday!
I don’t use Twitter “correctly” (pretty sure that they originally intended you to follow fewer than 50 people-ha!) but when I do use it, I don’t want to be bored, so following a lot of people is essential to always having something new when I do spend time on Twitter.
I don’t see all of anyone’s tweets, but when I happen to be on, I see all of the tweets of those I follow who happen to be spewing er tweeting then. I used to *hate* it when people schedule tweets because it destroys the real-time interactivity whatever of Twitter, but I realize that half the time I tweet and then don’t come back for a few hours, so I’m often not responding immediately anyway.
I have found the time of day and day of the week really do have a huge impact when tweeting links, so you might want to consider that, especially if you’re looking to be retweeted by a “big” user who will then get you many more clickthroughs from their followers. And it is all about the “@” when it comes to having those you want see what you want them to.