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Catching Up With A Friend The Old Fashioned Way

November 22, 2011 By

Technology has made us hyper-connected at every moment in the day. We’re emailing, posting, tweeting, liking, poking, polling, hearting, reviewing, sharing, vlogging, commenting, voting, texting, pinning, messaging, checking-in and checking-out …phew.

When do we have time to every truly connect and catch up with anyone any more?

This month, as part of the #MidwestMoms program, @VerizonWireless challenged me to do something I hadn’t done in way too long – actually call a friend and have a conversation the old fashioned way. I knew exactly who I wanted to call – my friend Lisa of My Thoughts, Ideas and Ramblings.  Lisa and I “met” online, and although we’ve been to conferences together and I’ve spent weekends at her house outside of Chicago, we mainly connect online through Gmail chat.  It had been a long time since we had spoken, so I called her using my Droid Bionic, which runs on the 4G LTE Network.

I called her one morning after I knew her kids were off to school and we had a nice long chat. We caught each other up on our kids, our blogs, the latest gossip. It was nice to be hearing her and not just reading text or chat words.  It made me wish I was on one of the phones we had when I was a kid, the kind that attached to the wall and had a long curly cord. I miss those days of sitting on the top step of the basement stairs, twirling that cord around my hand while I talked to a friend.

Thanks, Verizon Wireless, for challenging me to call someone I hadn’t spoken to in a while, I really enjoyed doing it!  The call clarity was perfect, and even when I moved into a different room in the house (I get 3G in some rooms and 4G in others), the call stayed connected.  Even though there are so many ways to stay in touch online, nothing beats an old-fashioned phone call.  Why not call a friend today?

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Electronics Tagged With: , , , ,

Friendly Friday 11-18-11

November 18, 2011 By

Welcome to Friendly Friday!

Thanks for joining the Friendly Friday celebration hosted by Xenia at Thanks, Mail Carrier, Christi at Frugal Novice and Charla at Healthy Home Blog! We invite you to join us every Friday to make more friends in blogville, get more blog followers and follow other great blogs out there.

To join in the Friendly Friday celebration, include your family-friendly link in our list, follow the hostesses in the first 3 spots and then start blog hopping! Visit other blogs on the list and comment to give them some blog love. Then take a minute to follow them through Google Friend Connect – this is a good way to keep up with other blogs, but also lets us show support to each other! NOTE: My Google Friend Connect badge is in the sidebar, and I will follow back! Please DO NOT list your giveaways here, links must be to either your homepage or your Friday posting with your blog title. All others will be deleted.

When people comment on your blog and let you know they’re a part of Friendly Friday, return the favor and follow them back. This way everyone gets traffic and followers out of participating, and it’s a win-win situation. If you’d like to post our Friendly Friday button on your blog or in a post, grab the link code at Thanks, Mail Carrier – the more bloggers that find out about Friendly Friday and participate, the better!

Remember, YOU can host the link list on your blog, too! Just get the InLinkz code from the link on any of the hostess blogs each Friday and copy it directly into your post. The code is different every week, so be sure to get the new code when hosting Friendly Friday on your blog. Hosting the list is a great way to get even more traffic to your blog and make Friendly Friday more beneficial for everyone!

Happy Friday everybody! Remember to look on the sidebar for my Google Friend Connect widget, and either click Join This Site if you haven’t already, or click Sign In if you’ve already joined. If you have the Google Friend Connect widget on your blog, let me know in a comment so I can stop by and follow you back!

Approved commenters will see up to ten recent posts to choose from when leaving their comment, please choose your Friendly Friday post if you did one. If not, choose a post you’d like me to read and comment on! Remember, your comments here are DoFollow, which means Google sees your link and follows it over to your site, giving you a tiny boost in your site’s page rank. It’s just my way of letting you know I appreciate you as a reader!

Thanks again for stopping by Table for Five today, hope you all have a great weekend!



Filed Under: Friendly Friday Tagged With: , ,

Table for Five circa September 2005 – Where it all began

November 14, 2011 By

Blogging – I’ve been doing it wrong.

I didn’t make a big announcement or anything – which is unusual for me, I know – but I’ve stopped writing product reviews and hosting giveaways here,  and it wasn’t even a big deal, I just…stopped.  I wanted Table for Five to go back to what it was when it started, a personal blog.

There’s just been one problem. I forgot HOW to write a personal blog. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. Personal blogging  in my mind became this HUGE thing, like if I didn’t have profound things to say, there was no point in writing at all. I had built it up in my head that every post had to be a long discourse on deep subjects.

And then this morning, while Kaitlyn was getting ready for school, it hit me.  I was remembering this blog the way it was in 2005 when it started, but was I remembering it correctly?  After the bus came, I opened up my dashboard to All Posts and filtered it to September 2005, and opened up Notepad.  Was my first month of blogging filled with long profound posts on deep subjects?

In between pregnancy updates, this is what I blogged about in September and October of ’05:

hurricane katrina
gas prices
funny post about school lunch
favorite links
stupid political moves
feelings about weight
seeing the movie Serenity
fun google search game
reaction to A.A.P. story about pacifiers
funny joke chris sent me
“Life is Good” – a post about a great day
Looking back when the boys were little
dumb thing I did
politics

And you know what the most surprising revelation was? The average post was only 200 words! I had one post that I counted and it was only 95 words. And it still got comments!

Personal blogging for me does not have to be about deep profound thoughts and hours of writing a day.  I need to stop being afraid that my writing isn’t “good enough” as it is. I need to stop worrying that if my blog doesn’t have the same kinds of posts as others, no one will read it.

When I first started Table for Five, I didn’t think anyone would read it. I thought a blog was like an online diary, that only people I told about it would read it.  When I would write a post and get 4 or 5 comments, it made me feel amazing. But writing a post and getting no comments didn’t stop me from writing again.  And that’s where I got off track this time.

I love Facebook and I respect Twitter, but if I put all my good thoughts there instead of here, I’m missing out on an opportunity to have all those thoughts collected in one place.

So those are my thoughts this morning.  I just may be getting my blogging mojo back, and that’s a good thing.

Filed Under: Born to Blog, Personal Tagged With: , ,
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