Files and Records

Category: Random Wednesday

  • Blogging about blogging

    It’s a funny thing. You write these words because you’ve set yourself the challenge not only of starting a journal but of putting it out into the world for people to read and comment on. You hope it’s going to be entertaining, useful, informative, possibly even funny. But you carry on anyway. And then you look at the statistics.

    WordPress is wonderful for tracking this sort of thing. How many people have visited your site, what did they look at. And you get to wondering… Why did that post only get one or two views? I publicised it as much as the one the previous Monday and that got twenty. Why do more people look at my blog on a Thursday than a Tuesday? I find myself having a peek at the site statistics a couple or three times a day. Alright, I’ve got the dashboard pinned to another tab as I write this. I’m a tad obsessed.

    Then something like this happens.  I received an award.  For my blog.  From a complete stranger.

    Kreativ-Blogger-Award

    This came completely out of the blue from Tom Briggs at http://diary-of-the-dad.blogspot.com/. I’d not heard of this, didn’t go into blogging for the awards, but it gave me the most wonderful warm and fuzzy feeling inside! Someone not only read my blog, they liked it enough to share it with others. And that’s absolutely magic.

    Part of the rules around this Kreative Blogger award is that I now have to nominate ten of the blogs I follow for this award, inform them of the fact, and impart ten facts about myself. So, my nominees are as follows:

    1. Bringing Up Charlie. In no small part this man is responsible for this blog being here. If I hadn’t stumbled across his post about how to build a Gup-A it might never have occurred to me to get this up and running and, more than that, keep it going.
    2. Him Up North – Call yourself a northerner? Southern nancy, more like. Come to the proper north and see what it’s like!
    3. The Moiderer – Funny, poignant, great to chat to on Twitter, Starbucks-on-tap.
    4. Reluctant Housedad – There but for the grace of God go I. From what I read on his blog he’s making a better fist of it than I would.
    5. She Means Well, but… – Another ex-pat, this time a little further afield.
    6. Sticky Fingers – Originator of The Gallery (click the icon to the right to find out more about that wonderful gem).
    7. Paperback Writer – This is where I would like to be in the future. Writing professionally. I’m a long way off that right now.
    8. Mocha Beanie Mummy – Originator of Silent Sunday (another icon over to the right)
    9. Katie Ganshert – First Line Fridays.  No graphic or icon yet but that doesn’t stop First Line Fridays!
    10. This is where I run out.  I’m actually out of blogs I follow religiously.  So I need a recommendation (or two, three or more!)  I mean, obviously I follow Diary of the Dad but I can’t do a return nomination, can I?  This would just get stuck in a perpetual loop!  Hmmm.  If we could somehow harness the energy such a loop would generated we could power the Internet!

    That was pretty difficult, actually. Turns out I don’t follow anywhere near as many blogs as I thought I did! I know some of the nominees above have been nominated by others, but that’s just confirmation of what wonderful people they are.

    And now the 10 facts about me…

    1. I’m not a great fan of heights.
    2. I’ve bungee-jumped both Victoria Falls (Zimbabwe) and Blaukrans Bridge (South Africa)
    3. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with my wife after watching a TV programme where the presenter did just that and had horrendous altitude sickness and hated every second of his trip. I, on the other hand, didn’t suffer and loved it.
    4. I was told by my English teacher that my handwriting was appalling and that I should do something about it. I did. I took a touch-typing course and, on a good day, can still do 60-70 words per minute.
    5. At school, I hated sports. Hated, loathed, despised them. I still can’t abide team sports (football, rugby, etc. all leave me with a burning desire to be somewhere else) but it would surprise my old gym teachers to know that I’ll be running my 3rd Half-Marathon this June.
    6. I am a computer magician. I fix things simply by standing behind the user and getting them to repeat what went wrong last time. 99 times out 100 this is followed by “Well, it didn’t do that last time.”
    7. I broke my nose on a water slide in Slovakia
    8. I have known (and been together with) my wife for over half my life.
    9. My favourite city, of all the wonderful places I’ve visited over the years, is Edinburgh.
    10. I am a Browncoat.  And I’m proud of it!

    So there you go.  10 nominees, 10 facts, and a massive thanks to Tom Briggs.

  • Spring is here, and with it my nemesis. #RandomWednesday

    Spring arrived a week or two ago.  I know this for a fact because my neighbours fired up their lawn mowers on Sunday morning.  It was with a heavy heart that I approach my garage for I know one fact about lawnmowers: my lawnmower hates me.

    Last year, around this time, I was training for the Simmer Dim half marathon.  The Simmer Dim, for those not as well-versed in Shetland Dialect as I (anyone who knows me can stop laughing now, alright?  I know about 3 Dialect terms and I sound a right royal prat trying to slip them into conversation) is the term for the light that you get during the evenings and night around the end of June when we’ve got near-24-hour daylight.  It’s rather strange, kinda beautiful and I look forward to posting some photos once it’s here this year.  Anyway, I digress.  In training, just done a superb 8-mile run, round about the 9-minute-mile which is just where I wanted to be.  It was a Sunday, I warmed down then went to mow the lawn.

    After the traditional arm and shoulder exercise involved in starting the mower (a petrol-driven beast that seemed to start so easily when my dad demonstrated it) things went fairly smoothly until I turned a corner and something in my left knee went “ping”.  And that was it.  No running for several months.  Rowing, cycling, low-impact stuff, not a problem.  The second I started pounding pavement on came the pain.  Didn’t get to run the half-marathon, didn’t get to run the 10k at Spiggie later in the year either.  And I put the blame fair and square on the mower.

    So this year I’m trying to avoid the bloody lawnmower.  But unless we get a few sheep I’m going to have to get the damn thing out of the garage again.  My wife doesn’t mind mowing, as long as I start the thing first.  And she’s promised to get a rechargeable electric mower this year – with a push-button start!  So who knows, maybe the next mower won’t hate me so much.

  • Pen and Ink – #amwriting #randomwednesday

    Sometimes, in this computer age, I feel I’ve lost touch with what it means to actually write.  I mean to actually pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write something out longhand.

    Granted, I’ve had problems with my writing in the past.  My English teacher at school informed me in no uncertain terms that my handwriting was terrible and that I should do something about it.  I took an evening class and learned to touch-type, a skill that has stood me in good stead ever since and one I can heartily recommend to anyone.  However, it did nothing to improve my writing and you’ll find that “3 sides of A4” on a given subject needs a lot more words when hammered out on a typewriter than it does when written longhand in pen and ink.

    There’s a part of me that objects to the computer, that rails against using it.  This is despite my being an IT manager and website designer.  Irony, huh?  So I keep my to-do list in a notebook, or on index cards, or in a Filofax (see Monday’s post on the excellent DIYPlanner templates).  I carry a notebook and pen with me at all times waiting for the moment when inspiration strikes.  And when someone asks “do you have a pen?” I can always answer in the affirmative.  When they see it’s a fountain pen, they’re usually either confused, intrigued or a little of both.

    Unfortunately, I’m not satisfied with the humble Biro.  No, if I’m going to have a pen it’s going to be a proper one.  No rollerball for me, either.  Fountain pen.  Filled from a bottle of ink. And since I’m being honest, I have several, all filled with inks of different colours.  There’s black for the day-to-day notes, red for annotating the notes, a lovely green-brown from Noodler’s (El Lawrence, to be precise) for further annotations if they’re needed or just general day-to-day writing.

    Using these pens has connected me more to my writing than the keyboard ever could.  There’s no “delete” key on a fountain pen.  If you want to get rid of something, you cross it out and pretend it doesn’t exist.  This has proved useful on a number of occasions as something I thought useless at the time has found a new lease of life elsewhere in the Ongoing Project – if I’d deleted it it would have been gone and forgotten.  I can look back on a writing session and see stuff.  Even if half of it is crossed out, scribbled over and consigned to the “Someday/Maybe” file.

    I still have the occasional problem with little things like reading my own writing.  Shopping lists are great for that, standing in the supermarket trying to work out why I was wanting to buy a bairn (that turned out to be “bacon”).  And I have to resist the urge to obtain more pens than I really need (I think I’ve lost that battle already but I dabble in calligraphy as well, so all things find a use).

    There is a wonderful feeling in sitting with a blank sheet of paper – rather than a blank screen – and beginning to write.  Sure, word counts are a pain to keep up and there’s no spell-checker, but you don’t get Clippy trying to be helpful, there’s no Blue Screen of Death and a piece of paper can’t connect you to the Internet and distract you from what you were doing.  You don’t need power, you don’t need batteries and you don’t need a WiFi connection.

    Over to you…

    Do you use pen and paper? For first drafts? Important notes? Writing long letters to family and friends?