blogging | jmgoyder

A hesitant activist

by jmgoyder

Earlier today I reblogged a post written by Lady Barefoot Baroness who many may be familiar with. She and her friend have combined their talents, and a shared passion for child safety, to create a new blog, the details of which will be announced soon. Here is the link to more information:

http://cobbies69.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/will-you-join-us/

Now, as I’ve said to Baroness, I don’t like reblogging because I often don’t read reblogs due to time constraints and I don’t think I am alone here. For newcomers to blogging, reblogging is when you read a post on someone else’s blog and you want to share it on your own blog, so you click ‘reblog’ which is what I did today. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that some bloggers do not want to be reblogged so it is important to ask their permission first. (I hope that is clearer than mud!)

My own passion for this cause is difficult for me to describe because the thought of any child being hurt appals and disturbs me, and I have a longstanding aversion to news items about child abductions and disappearances because, as I am a parent, I cannot imagine a worse horror.

Reblogging and linking my own readers into this cause has scared the hell out of me because I am a bit of a wimp in this way and certainly am no activist. However, if my reblog of Baroness’ most recent post and the link above can possible help find a lost child then it’s worthwhile – absolutely.

I will not reblog in the future; instead I will figure out how to put the message out there on my own blog. Please go to both of the aforementioned blogs to get more information and many thanks!

blogging Family Friendship

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If you have been following this blog ….

by jmgoyder

If you have been following this blog you will already know that my husband, Anthony, is in a nursing home now due to advanced Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer. He is 76. He is the best person I have ever met. He is my hero.

If you have been following this blog you will also know that our son, Ming, developed a severe scoliosis and had his spine fused surgically this year. He is 18. He is the best person I have ever met. He is my hero.

Ming doesn’t have his car licence yet due to the surgical interruption so he still needs me to drive him to music school etc.

Anthony takes an incredibly long time to answer that stupid phone.

I have two recurring nightmares: the first is of Anthony reneging on getting married; and the second is that he and Ming are in the ocean and I can only save one of them. Both nightmares never reach a resolution because I always wake up too soon.

If you have been following this blog you will know that I am very happy and very sad.

blogging Family

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How are you?

by jmgoyder

‘How are you?’ has become, in whatever language, an almost universal way of saying ‘hello.’

Nobody ever wants the ‘how are you?’ recipient to say anything beyond, ‘I am fine, thank you and how are you?’

Sometimes I forget about this ‘How are you? I am fine’ etiquette and I either respond to ‘how are you?’ with a novel-length tale of woe, sprinkled with some joy (or vice versa) – or, even worse, I interrogate the howareyouer by probing how they really are. Neither of these two alternatives have proved satisfactory because, inevitably, I either give or receive that thing that is sometimes labelled ‘foot in the mouth’.

‘How are you?’ has become a statement of niceness, a verbal gesture of care; it is not a question requiring an answer because it is sort of rhetorical – it is just a form of greeting and, as such, it is lovely.

Just imagine if we really, honestly answered that lovely question, ‘how are you?’ like this:

I’m tired and I don’t want to talk to you
My life sucks
I don’t know
I’m envious of your perfect life
I’m bloody sad
Anthony is deteriorating
I am on the brink of poverty and wondering if humans can eat grass and leaves
How the hell do you think I am?
I am hating the world today
I am crap

So, you see, you can’t answer the lovely question in those ways because you would seem rude, ungrateful, self-indulgent etc. and the poor howareyouer would never ask you again!

‘How are you? is a bit like ‘What are you doing today?’ because the latter is a question that expects you to be doing either something or nothing, but it mostly wants you to be doing nothing so that the asker of the question can help you do something. So you either have to say ‘I am … ‘ and try to remember your schedule for the day, or you have to be really honest and say, “I am sitting down and I plan to sit down for much of the day, so I don’t want my sitting down interrupted.”

But you can’t say that to the really busy people who care enough to ask you how you are and what you are doing so you say things like, ‘I am about to embroider the paddock with sunflowers’ or else just say you have lots of appointments (but you don’t divulge that most of your appointments are with the chair you are sitting in because you really love the chair and are a bit frightened to get off the chair today.)

How are you?

What are you doing today?

blogging Family Friendship

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A sunshiny soul

by jmgoyder

This lovely woman, niasunset, who I only know via blogging, has sent me the most incredible gift of four cushion covers that she hand made. I admired her cushion covers when she photographed them in a previous post and asked if I could purchase a couple – one for me here at home and one for Anthony in the nursing lodge. But nia wouldn’t let me pay and wanted to make and give them to me and yesterday, when I went to our post office, there was the parcel!

It took me ages to unwrap it because it was wrapped several times over and then I opened the last layer and gasped with delight:

I am not very good at arranging things artistically but I did try with this photo. Nia is the artist as you can see if you check out http://photographyofnia.com/about/

Thank you so much, niasunset, for your niasunshine!!!

blogging Family Friendship

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Blog suggestions appreciated!

by jmgoyder

I don’t know why but I am, once again, receiving all of the comments made on the blogs I subscribe to, so I have contacted the WordPress help people to stop this because the inundation of email notifications has been overwhelming and in the end I had to keep deleting so please forgive me if I accidentally deleted you blog post.

But, in the interests of not wanting to waste a post on blogging glitches, I do have a couple of questions for more seasoned bloggers:

1. I would like to ‘reblog’ three of my previous posts to give a bit of historical context to what is happening now. Is that an okay thing to do?

2. My spam often contains ‘trackbacks’ – are these the same as ‘pingbacks’ and should I accept both? Also, can anyone tell me what both of these things mean? This would also be useful for novice bloggers.

3. Sorry, I can’t remember what my last question was!

blogging

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A combinational post

by jmgoyder

I thought I’d try something new today and combine two completely different things into the one post.

Above: From left to right – Daffy, Ola, Woodroffe, Seli, Diamond, Pearl, Godfrey, Zaruma.

Below: From left to right – the ‘End of Life Requests’ form that I have been asked to fill out and return to the nursing lodge. I am supposed to discuss this with Anthony I think but not sure if I can. Anyway, I haven’t been able to find a pen.

blogging LOVE STORY Wings

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The scariest word in the world

by jmgoyder

This word keeps launching itself at me like an army of arrows because it knows how to multiply itself.

Sometimes it comes from other people but mostly it comes from myself. It is an absolutely horrible word, one I never inflict on others.

I loathe this word and wish it could be eradicated from the English dictionary so that I didn’t have to feel its continual prongs, taunts and its arrogance.

There are lots of other words that compete with this one but they are often shouted out of the picture because this word wants to be the boss.

This word knows its finger-freezing power; this word delights in disseminating misery and guilt; this word bides its time and then leaps from unexpected places and doesn’t unclench its jaws until it has extracted blood.

If you respond to this word, sometimes it will lick your blood up, swallow it and give you a kiss of approval; sometimes it will leave you alone for awhile so that you can torture yourself the way it wants you to.

The only way of escaping this word is by ignoring it. Eventually it will give up.

And what is this word?

SHOULD

blogging Family Friendship LOVE STORY

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A ‘Happiness Engineer’

by jmgoyder

Due to my ongoing WordPress glitches, I finally resorted to contacting WP and have been in email conversations with Bryan, one of WordPress’s Happiness Engineer, for a few days. With his guidance, I eventually discovered that all WP notifications had somehow ended up in my email spam list (not my WP spam list), so I retrieved all of them and then nearly fainted when my inbox filled with over 1,000 emails. But I decided not to faint and, instead, to face my incredible popularity head-on before discovering that many of the emails were notifications of comments on your blogs – yes, your blogs, fellow WordPressers, not mine!

So once Bryan and I have figured this latest problem out, I will probably re-unsubscribe in order to re-subscribe in order to go insane, and then I will probably go back to doing what I have been trying to do over the last few days which is to keep up with the blogs I have re-subscribed to, which all went into my gmail spam, by reading them via the Blogs/Follow option (easier than the Reader), after which I will re-contact Bryan to see if his happiness engineering prowess covers life issues as well. You never know. I just hope my relationship with Bryan doesn’t deteriorate in the way my relationship with Godfrey has.

Are you following?

blogging

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by jmgoyder

Feeling a bit nostalgic!

jmgoyder

Before replacing my pig passion with birdiness, and before Mathilda experienced her growth spurt, I purchased another little piglet – Vegemite – who happened to be Mathilda’s half-sister. This worked out beautifully because our dogs (two miniature – yes miniature – dachschunds) hated Mathilda, so she was a bit lonely. Mathilda and Vegemite adored each other.

However, it wasn’t long after the above picture was taken that both pigs became bored with simply nibbling grass and began to dig and I mean DIG! For those of you tempted to get a pet pig, let me tell you pigs dig; they dig with their snouts and they dig fast. In the space of a few seconds Mathilda and Vegemite would dig holes the size of small craters. I could have planted a forest if I had wanted to.

So, in the face of Husband’s and Son’s fury, I was forced to…

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Animal blogging

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