Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Blogging Conference, I can’t wait.

    I started blogging over 3 years ago and unlike now, there weren’t a great many Australian mummy blogs about then. I complained about this fact, quite a few times, but at the end of the day, I had a good group of UK and US bloggers to read and I was happy.

    What I didn’t have though, that the US bloggers did, was BlogHer.

    As much as I wanted to attend, money is constantly scarce here and while with some serious saving I may have been able to come up with 2k, there was a better chance that that money would go on power, or food, or kids stuff every week, rather than into a BlogHer kitty. And considering I’ve watched 4 BlogHers come and go and not attended (to be fair, I was still only reading blogs during the first one, not writing one yet) I think you can count where my money went.

    Every year as Blogher came around, I watched jealously, grumbling the whole time and wishing that we had something similar here.

    In the last 18 months, Mummyblogging in Australia has grown drastically – I’m reading more Aussie blogs now than ever before. So when Brenda and I started Aussie Mummy Bloggers, we knew that we wanted to create a Blogher-like conference here, for the Australians.

    And with a little planning and an awful lot of work, we’ve pulled it off.

    Brenda, Karen, Nicole, Tina and I, we’ve been working on pulling this conference together for the last 6 months and as the end of the year draws close, we’ve just about got everything sorted.

    Sponsors have come on board (although more are hoped for) and tickets have been selling like hot cakes – so if you want a ticket before they’re sold out, you need to buy one soon. We only have 28 blogger tickets left.

    I know money is tight for a lot of you – personally, I haven’t quite worked out where the money for my flights and accommodation is coming from yet (anyone want to buy some ads?) but there have been a few bloggers who managed to pick up personal sponsorships, so that is an option too, if you really want to come, but can’t quite afford it.

    I am really looking forward to this, something that is uniquely Australian and personal blogger orientated. I think it’s going to be amazing fun.

    Plus, there is a dinner and dance afterwards, which promises to be great. It is, of course, very unlikely that I will be dancing – dislocating joints are not conducive to very much of anything, but I am excellent at dinners. Hehe.

  • Sharing the love #2

    So once a month, I share the love and point you to a blog you should be reading. If you want to join in, write a blog post about why you love someone else’s blog and leave your link in the comments.

    This month, I’m pointing you towards ABDPBT.

    Anna is snarky. Very snarky, in fact, in some mummyblogger circles, she is one of the most disliked women on the Internet.

    I think her blog is fantastic however and her take on mummyblogging is what we need to see more of. Snark and honest truth, rather than the culture of silence and refusal to talk about white elephants.

    Anna blogs about the business of mummyblogging, including doing things like making us think about trust capital and our actual worth. Every post that makes me question what I do and how I do it, is in my mind, priceless.

    Her blog is set up with 4 distinct categories – I receive all of them in my reader and enjoy all four. There is ABDPBT, Commodity Fetishism, Personal Finance and Tech – each one deals with something different and while personal finance has never been my favourite thing, her posts there on the business of mummyblogging are always something I look forward to.

    I’ve found most aspects of Anna’s blog incredibly worthwhile, especially as we’re running the AusBlogCon next year, her sharp honest breakdowns of the US conferences have given Brenda and I things to discuss and also things that we hope to avoid happening to us.

    Anna might not be your thing and that’s fine. But I think honesty is always going to be something we need to read more of, even if some mummybloggers find that honesty incredibly hard to swallow.

    I recommend her blog to every mummyblogger. Reading ABDPBT lets me know which things I need to be avoiding doing and lets me learn from the mistakes of other mummybloggers – especially as the US is a few years ahead of the Australian blogosphere.

    And you know if you end up on Anna’s shit list, not only have you fucked up big time, but that you’ve made it big in the mummyblogging world. Her shit list is NOT something we should aspire to be on.

    Read her.

    Image is taken from Anna’s header.

    Other people playing along:

    Frogpondsrock

    Fiona suggests Blag Hag

    Wanderlust

    Toni suggests Mid 30s Life


  • Welcome swallows and the readjustment of my eco-system

    When we bought this house in early 2008, we joked that it came with a ‘dead’ eco-system. The only spiders were redbacks, the only birds common farm varieties, the sparrow and the starling. Both pests and in plague proportions.

    We’ve been slowly and steadily building things up, hoping that we could address the imbalance without resorting to chemicals to kill the ‘bad’ spiders. We planted a garden, we reseeded the lawn, we had horses for 6 months and we’ve got poultry – at a steadily increasing number.

    All these things have worked to decrease the ‘bad’ bugs and spiders and restore a balance to the system. We haven’t seen a redback spider in a while, the huntsman spiders are increasing in number and we’ve got a few black house spiders hunting in various corners outside.

    The bugs appear to be a good mix of everything and the ducks and ducklings spend most of their time darting through the grass catching everything that flies. The chooks scratch out the beetles and grubs and my paddock has never looked so lush, with the grass desperately needing whippersnipping – it’s waist high in places.

    It took twelve months for the small garden to look any good – that was 12 months with the soil covered entirely in hay to promote moisture and growth. We’ve had good results with everything I’ve grown in there since.

    Obviously some parts of the paddock need work, my big garden in particular. I’m slowly building that up with potting mix, sheep poo and left over horse poo. Next time I see the farm manager I’ll corner him and ask for some more spoiled hay for the garden, if they’ve got any.

    One of the best things about having planted flowering shrubs and getting the whole cycle of things sorted out is that the native birds are coming back

    I saw a honey eater the other day and the welcome swallows are hanging around.

    Welcome swallows have to be one of my favourite birds. They are cheeky and let me get rather close with the camera. Not to mention flying around my head in circles when I’m out in the paddock, making me wonder if I’d accidentally fallen into a cartoon and hit my head.

    This current pair is looking for a new place to nest – they had attempted nesting in the old water tank, but all their nests have fallen off and broken. I’m not sure if it’s the mud they’re using, or the metal of the tank. Something isn’t working for them in any case.

    In amongst all the partially built and broken nests, I found an entire one. They had made it to the lining stage, before it fell off. No eggs lost though.

    It looks like they’re favouring my barbeque area as a nesting site, or that general area. Needless to say they’ve been flying in and around my kitchen windows, darting in and flying around Nathan’s head before flying out and assessing the situation.

    It’s been great to watch and I can’t help but be pleased that they are back. Not to mention, this isn’t the only pair. I counted 4 different pairs taking a bath in our puddle last week.

    Lovely.

  • A photography kind of week methinks

    Last week I woke up to a paddock filled with droplets, the water weighing down the seed heads on the grass. It was so bright when the sun shone that I couldn’t look at it directly and the small childlike part of me wanted to run through it and get soaked, kicking water everywhere.

    When I went inside to get my camera, even without dancing with the droplets, I was soaked to my knees and my shoes were so wet that throwing them into the shower to clean off the mud and grass seeds was the drier option.

    I changed shoes, grabbed my camers and then carefully moved through the grass, taking photos.

    After the drama of last week, taking photos was restful and I was able to forget the comments and reputation destroying that I was witnessing here.

    My thigh high grass was laid over, the weight of the water much too much for it.

    I may have soaked 2 pairs of jeans and 2 sets of shoes, but it was worth it.

  • Happy Birthday to me!

    It’s my birthday today!

    Happy Birthday to me!

    And considering that none of you can actually throw stones at me, I can tell you that today, I turn 22. I know! Ancient. (We won’t talk about how old I feel though, okay?)

    So, because it’s my birthday and you all love me, can we have an unofficial delurk day?

    Yes. I said it. Stop hiding in the shadows in the back and come out and let me know who you are.

    I’d love to meet you, if I haven’t already.