A Fool of Myself

Chris and I should never own an RV because we would be nomads, unable to stay in one place for very long. But since we own a home, we still get anxious to switch things up every now and then. Last weekend, we started on of our biggest projects yet: a massive overhaul of the living room, office, and spare bedroom. Here are the pictures:

762 Gets a Makeover

Aside from the mold we found in the office closet, everything went really well and everything has been put back together. All the stuff in the spare bedroom is supposed to go in the office closet, but we’re waiting to take care of the mold situation before putting all that away.

This phase of the project is done. We still have to paint the spare bedroom; don’t ask about the colors–we were going through a weird phase when we bought the house. We’re also getting a day bed from my mom, and we’ll paint it, too. We had plans to recarpet the bedrooms before we found the mold, so that might not happen for a bit longer. Stay tuned for more changes!

I’ve finally sorted through all the pictures Chris took while we were in Chicago (why I never take the camera, I don’t know), and I’ve posted them on Picasa. View at your leisure…

Everything is completely, totally, irreversibly insane today, this week, this month, this fall, but I’m using the final five minutes of my lunch break to get in an update. Here’s what’s going down:

• Allergies. They suck.
• Long run. Eight miles on Monday night without any knee pain. Six miles next week.
• Mold. In a spare bedroom closet. Praying it is isolated and not contaminating my entire house. Also praying this doesn’t get expensive.
• Bookshelves. Chris and I are rearranging/painting some bookshelves this weekend and cleaning out crap. We filled up the trash cart last night, we have a huge pile in the living room going to goodwill, and we have a huge pile in the entry that needs to go to eBay.
• Cats. They’ve been watching other cats on YouTube. You should friend Mowgli and Ravi Austin (Nixa, MO) on Facebook. They’re lonely because I’ve been so stinkin busy.
• Lo mein noodles. Yum! I made some last night.
• Jesus. Knowing that he knows my breaking point and that he won’t let life/work/finances/mold go past my breaking point is the only thing getting me through my day.
• Cookies. Thank you, HG, for making snickerdoodles! They rocked!

That’s all I have for today’s lunch break. Back to craziness…

Yes, it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog review (it’s hardly been weekly, as I promised), but it’s time to get back on the horse. This week, I’m reviewing BloggingFingers.com, a blog with “ideas, tips, creativity, and money-making strategies for blogs.” Bueno. That’s exactly what we need! BF is owned and authored by Matt Jones of Cambridge, England, (coincidently, not the Matt Jones with whom I went to high school). Let’s look a little closer:

Posting Frequency
About once a week

# of Subscribers
382

Emphasis
BloggingFingers is mostly focused on tools and techniques for making money with a blog; however, several posts are directed to beginner bloggers or are about social networking and increasing traffic.

Essential Reading

• Top 5 Blogging Success Stories: Exclusive Quotes From John Chow, Yaro Starak And More
• How Many Blog Comments Should You Reply To?
• Top 11 Blogging Mistakes I Made
• Why the Pillar Content of A Blog should be Written First
• My Cure For Bloggers Block

My Thoughts
Weird name. Maybe it’s a British thing, but I don’t get how fingers and blogging relate. Because I’m a bit finicky about my grammar, a handful of grammatical and mechanical errors distracted me from the content, but those can be overlooked. I’m not at all crazy about the design—there’s too much happening in the sidebars, and there are too many forms that request information from the reader.

All that said, blogging is ultimately about content, and for this reason, I’ll keep subscribing to it. The information BF presents is useful and practical, and the author has plenty of experience to draw from, which keeps the content fresh.

Have you checked out BloggingFingers.com? I want to know what you think about this up-and-coming blog!

I love being twentysomething because I’ve entered a phase where I’m deciding for myself what I like and don’t like. When you’re a kid, you have to do what your parents tell you to do, and when you’re a teenager, you tend to do what all your friends are doing, and when you’re in college, you tend to do what everyone is not doing. The same goes for likes and dislikes, and in the last year or so, here are a few of the things I’ve made up my mind about:

• I don’t like chicken unless it’s fried.
• I would rather drink chai than coffee.
• I don’t like crowds.
• I don’t like surprises.
• I want to spend my evenings at home reading.
• The telephone is the worst invention ever.

Let’s discuss that last one. It’s true, I hate the telephone, which is ironic because one of my primary job responsibilities involves answering the phone and being pleasant. Here’s the thing: the telephone is interruptive by nature, and a phone call is primarily convenient for the caller–not the called.

This is especially true in the workplace. Contrary to popular belief, I actually stay pretty busy in my office–especially on Monday mornings. And many of the tasks I engage in require quite a bit of concentration, and when I’m interrupted during those tasks, it’s very difficult to get that concentration back. This morning, for example, I was working on a task that I do every Monday morning and that usually takes 10 minutes max. But I received three phone calls in a row, two of which required sending an email message after the call ended, and when I got back to my computer, I had to think about what I had been doing.

OK, so I’m venting a little bit about work, but this is really about an invention that I’m so over. I have the Internet and email (and I know I wouldn’t have those if it hadn’t been for Alexander Graham Bell), but I’m ready to hang up on the telephone.

Life is crazy, right? And for amateur bloggers, our blogs can easily get shoved to the back burner when our lives get in the way. That’s what happened to this blog in August, and as I try to get back on track, I’m making my blogging life easier with these five WordPress plugins:

1. Akismet. Honestly, I don’t know how you can use WordPress without this plugin. I mean, there’s a reason it comes pre-installed, right? I help a friend manage his blog, and I signed in to do some updates, and he had over 400 spam comments! And Askimet was not activated! Yes, this plugin sometimes has some flub ups, but it captures 99/100 spam comments on my blogs. Totally worth it!
2. WordPress Database Backup. Regular backups are on the to-do list of every good blogger, but I’m guilty of postponing that little task more often than I should. This little plugin backs up your WordPress database automatically (according to the schedule you set) and will email you the file!
3. WordPress Automatic Upgrade. I’m sure I’m not the only one who dreads seeing the nag appear when WordPress is ready for an upgrade. And this is one more task I tend to put off mainly because I have five blogs that have to go through that process, and I know manually making the upgrades will take half a day. This plugin creates backups, deactivates your plugins, uploads the new WordPress, activates your plugin, and everything else involved with upgrades in five minutes. It’s a breeze!
4. WordPress Related Posts. I’m not currently using this plugin on Blogger’s Guide, but I have it in place on another blog that has more content, and I love it. It takes a post’s tags, matches them to other posts with the same tag, and lists those posts at the bottom of the post. It slows down page load times a little bit, but it encourages readers to stay longer on your site.
5. All In One SEO Pack. I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to search engine optimization, but I do have two minutes to type up a description and a list of keywords for every post as I write it. Easy peasy. And the plugin lets you set descriptions, title formats, and keywords for your entire blog, too. Gotta love it.

No, blogging cannot be fully automated, but by simply automating or putting to use the above WordPress plugins, my to-do list is shorter and I feel less out of control when it comes to my blogs. So tell me, what WordPress plugins can you not live without?

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Photo source

Phew! My life has been veritably insane the last few weeks, but I finally have time today to share some incredible material that’s on the Web. Well, I like it, at least. Here we go:

• Baldness Pattern: A New Cold War Analysis I almost wrecked my car this week listening to this story on NPR’s Morning Edition. While it’s fascinating that there’s a pattern of baldness among Russian’s leaders, the silly song at the end really made me laugh!
• Introversion and Leadership Yes, another article about introversion, but ever since I’ve accepted that quality about myself, I love reading about it. And now there’s news that many great leaders were introverts!
• Video: A Renewed Mind is the Key to Bad Dancing Thank you, Betsy, for sharing this. I’ve spoken with the leaders at LifePoint, and we’ll be adding this as a new ministry next spring. We’re holding open-call auditions for bad break dancers.
• And We Wonder Why We’re Hated No kidding! This is by far the worst church sign I’ve ever seen! And for the record, I prefer to sing, “I kissed a squirrel…”

And that does it for the week! I hope you’re enjoying the Olympics as much as I am! That should be sufficient for this weekend. Be sure to check out my other Google Reader Shared Items and Delicious pages.

This is the first day I’ve had to think about this blog in a long while. I started because I was passionate about blogging and about all I was learning about blogging, but then life sort of got in the way, and what was once a priority got shoved to the back burner. Ugh.

So I have a bit more free time now that things are settling down at work, and I have published all the back issues of the Blogger’s Guide Carnival. I also have a fancy little to-do list of Blogger’s Guide tasks I need to complete every day/week, and hopefully, that will keep me motivated to keep this blog alive.

A good friend and I are meeting every Friday to work: she grades papers and I work on miscellaneous projects, so in theory, I have time set aside to work here a little bit every week. More later…

I just watched this video, and there are no words. I am speechless.

I conducted a little science experiment last night, and I must say, the results are promising. As many of you know, I’ve had trouble with my left knee and a little condition called ITB tendonitis ever since my half marathon last November. That was 10 months ago. How depressing! In August, I turned 26, and I resolved to run a marathon in this my 26th year. After the triathlon, I gave myself a week off and a trip to Chicago and came back ready and raring to train.

Last Friday was my first scheduled long run of seven miles. On Saturday, I actually set off to do this run around 11 AM, but about two miles into the run, my knee started hurting. Crap! It was raining anyway, and my feet were wet, so I capped my run at five miles. About one week before the triathlon, I went out for a 6.5 mile run in the middle of the afternoon, and my knee started hurting after about two miles. I had to walk the last two miles back to my house.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Sarah, maybe you shouldn’t run farther than two miles at a time. Maybe you just can’t run long distances anymore.”

I say, “That’s baloney.” What I haven’t told you is that the week after the triathlon, I completed 3 five-mile runs without any pain whatsoever. As I’m running in the rain on Saturday, I go over and over the painful runs and the painless runs in my head and try to identify possible variables that might contribute to the knee pain. There were two: time of day and my water pack. My painful runs were during the middle of the day while my painless runs were after 8 PM. Hmm…

So Monday night I did a little test. I went out for seven miles at 7:30 sans water pack. Guess what? Minimal knee pain. Whereas my normal knee pain gets up to a 6 or 7 (on a 10-point scale), it only reached a 3 or so last night. Does this prove my hypothesis correct? We’ll see.

I’m going to take marathon training a week at a time this fall. I’m moving my long runs from Fridays/Saturdays to Monday nights and see if night-time running continues to work. I’m a bit concerned about my pace. The slower I go, the longer I can run; however, my run on Monday night had an average pace time two minutes slower than my normal pace (14:00 miles rather than 12:00 miles), which adds up to a very, very long 26.2 miles.

In science, an experiment’s results are only valid if they can be repeated, so I guess we’ll see if I can go 8 pain-free miles next Monday. I’ll keep you posted…