Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • My office, let me show you it.

    Continuing on my theme, let’s have a sticky beak at my office.

    Okay, so office is a little bit deceptive. It’s actually the dining room, where I’ve got my desk and bookshelves on the opposite side to the dining table. It’s all open plan, so from where I sit at my computer, I can see the loungeroom and kitchen. This doesn’t prevent Amy getting into mischief while I work however.

    My desk – with wordpress open on the screen, I wasn’t *meant* to overexpose it. You can see how messy it is, all the bills end up here, along with books and other bits and pieces. The house is always clean, but it’s cluttered and untidy. Maybe because it’s a home with people living in it, not a show home. Tissues sitting on my speaker because when the kids run around, I start sneezing. A webcam/mic for Skype, books on top of my computer tower [Elizabeth Knox: The Invisible Road, A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia, and Isabel Allende: My Remembered Country, there is also I Am Ozzy hidden next to my computer tower] and my notebook next to my keyboard.

    Further over we have the rest of the first bookshelf, another tall one from Nan’s house and a TV without a set top box, that Isaac uses to climb on and pull all the books out of the shelves. FUN.

    Behind me we have MORE bookshelves! (surprised yet? there is also another one in Isaac’s bedroom, full to the brim). Missing are my Robin Hobb books (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo leaning over dangerously?) because they’re at Mums. Isaac has also been at work pulling out books from the bottom right.

    The dining room is falling apart a little. This is the room that had the indoor pond and we’ve not concreted the floor yet. The walls are warped. Quite warped.

    The long term plan is to concrete the floor and put up plaster on the walls so we can repaint. It might take a while while we get the money together though. Why do things always come down to money and how difficult it is to work around a 4yo and a 19mth old?

    Sigh.

    Until then, I’m fairly happy. Simply having a DESK is a step up, up until a few months ago, I did all my work on my lap, on a rather slow laptop.

    Ahhh, those were the days.

    Nowadays, I even have a heater, right next to me. Luxury, right?

    So there. A little peek into my hideously messy office. Hehe.

  • How to make blogging easier.

    I suffer from blank page syndrome. As soon as I sit in front of the computer, I forget everything I was going to write about. The blinking cursor appears to mock me, until I click away and do something else. 20 minutes later, as I’m washing dishes/reading a book/changing nappies I’ll be struck with a brilliant idea for a post! and then it takes me 20 minutes to get near the computer again, at which point I’ve forgotten it again.

    Which meant that most of my blog posts were done on the fly, just jotting down whatever was in my head.

    It worked and it didn’t work badly, but I was forgetting so many things.

    So I bought a notebook. I know! Insanely simple. You probably all do this already.

    It’s nothing special, but of an evening, in the 10 minutes before I go to sleep, I try to jot down as many post ideas as possible. Things I want to write about, things I think you’d be interested in reading about, just general stuff.

    And then the next day, when I’ve got time, I sit down with the book and remind myself what I was planning on blogging about.

    It’s meant that I’ve been able to write and then schedule blog posts, which in turn takes the ‘I MUST POST’ stress off me and means I actually remember to blog things. Which is kind of extraordinary for someone as disorganised as I am.

    I’ve been blogging for three years now, why didn’t I think of this sooner? I’m a bit of an idiot sometimes.

    Plus, having posts scheduled means that they go up at the same time, all the time, rather than one post being published at 7am and another at almost midnight. I can write when I want and everything seems to fall together better.

    Also, it seems that writing is like sex. The more you do it, the more you want to and the better you get. So I’m also writing more, even if I’m not posting more.

    What do you do to stop blog fatigue and come up with post ideas? Do you plan your posts ahead, or do you write them on the fly, when inspiration strikes you?

    (Not saying one is better than the other, just saying that planning and scheduling ahead seems to be working better for me than writing on the fly. Of course, it takes some work to get ahead, I actually used some reposts and some guest posts to get myself ahead and scheduling. So you know, feel free to steal my idea.)

  • A duck egg treasure hunt

    I have duck eggs hiding everywhere, increasing in number, one day at a time. We went without any ducks laying (where I could find them) for three weeks and suddenly, I’ve got duck eggs showing up again, in increasingly strange places.

    There are 11 in the blackberries (5 pictured, it’s an old picture and the eggs are mostly covered in leaf litter and feathers now).

    I stole some, so that my father can have duck eggs for breakfast. He rather likes them.

    It’s like a treasure hunt, as I discovered another nest in the shed, next to the building materials and my BIL’s car. It’s got 17 eggs in it and so far, aside from a few foray’s into sitting, no duck has decided to turn them into ducklings. Grumble grumble fucking grumble.

    We have a ramp. Before we moved in, we think it was used to drive motorbikes up. Since we’ve been here it’s a ‘castle!’ for Amy and she runs up and down it. Underneath:

    Another egg.

    The piece de resistance though, is this.

    You can’t see any eggs?

    No. Me either. Not until the duck, whose tail you can see, hops off the nest, leaving behind sixteen eggs that she is hatching – ducklings due this afternoon, or tomorrow sometime. I’m a little excited.

    I did a walk around the yard this morning, only to discover a new nest, in an old chook shelter that we haven’t cleaned out yet. 4 eggs and counting. Two nesting boxes also have freshly laid eggs.

    However. I know that at least two ducks are laying somewhere else. God knows where. No doubt they’ll disappear one day, only to appear 5 weeks later with a shitload of ducklings. One duck was spotted coming in from the paddock across the highway (currently full of ewes and newborn lambs) and another from the paddock bordering our property.

    It’s like Easter! Only with less chocolate.

  • The reality of having your own poultry. Plus cute chickens.

    The things with having chooks, is those chooks (if you’ve got a rooster) eventually have babies.

    And baby chickens, as tough as they are, sometimes they don’t do so well.

    A week ago, one of my hens hatched some chickens. Once I braved her attacks (she’s fucking vicious! I ended up with bruises everywhere) and took her off the nest to count chicks, I found a dead chicken in the bottom of the nest. Perfectly formed, hatched and squashed. Another chicken didn’t make it all the way out of it’s shell, dying at the finish post.

    However, we had 5 live chickens, even if one was a bit iffy. I figured I’d keep an eye on it, and left the mother to her angry clucking.

    An hour later, I scooted her off the nest and found the iffy chicken was doing even worse. Younger by almost a full day to it’s siblings, it kept getting squashed and left behind and frankly, the poor thing was half dead and exhausted.

    So into my pocket it came and inside for a few hours.

    I dripped some sugar water into it’s beak for energy and then tucked it into a nest of tissues with a hot water bottle underneath it for warmth.

    It slept for a few hours – after hatching, chickens are exhausted. This little one because it was younger than the rest, wasn’t getting a chance to sleep because it’s siblings wanted to peck and move about. It wasn’t able to walk yet and needed a break. The sugar water and time inside gave it some strength and the warmth and peace enabled it to recuperate.

    And while I was hopeful it would survive, nothing is ever certain.

    A few hours later, right on dark, I put the chicken back with it’s mother – okay, so I practically threw the chicken at it’s mother, while she tried to attack my hand – and I hoped it would make it through the night.

    It did and a week later, we still have the five chicks we had the first day.

    The hawks are hanging around and I’ve seen more kookaburras in the last week than I have in the last year, but they haven’t stolen a chicken yet. The mother hen is doing a good job and hasn’t taken the babies out into the open much, staying near cover amongst the stables, chook pen and blackberry bush.

    They’re pretty cute though.

    These chicks are our next generation. The hens will be kept for eggs and any roosters will eaten (like the egg eating chook from a while back).

    I love that at a week old, they’re already getting their feathers. I’m hoping the little stripy one is a hen, because isn’t the patterning gorgeous?

    Third from the left is the little chicken that would have died. It hasn’t gotten any adult feathers yet.

    They’re pretty cute. Amy is a big fan. So are the cats – although the way the mother hen attacked our tom cat this morning, I don’t think he’ll be contemplating a chicken dinner any time soon.

  • How a flippant comment on twitter can get you blocked and banned.

    We’re all human here in this giant blogosphere and that means human things, like bad days, or flippancy don’t always translate to the written word. Sometimes, it only takes something very small to set of a chain of events that leave you watching, wondering how did that happen?

    I wasn’t part of this one, just a witness after the fact.

    Twitter is, by it’s nature, an extension. An extension of us, of our blogs, of our websites. It doesn’t matter how much we might try, we can’t explain ourselves fully in 140 characters. God, I’ve had trouble explaining myself completely in 1000 words!

    Another problem with twitter, is that if you’ve been unfollowed, everything you say after that point is moot, because they can’t see it.

    I witnessed this this week and thought it interesting, how something so simple, could spiral downhill so quickly.

    The tweets following are from @TotalArtSoul and @frogpondsrock respectively.

    Please note, I am not taking sides with EITHER person, I just thought it was interesting.

    At which point, Total Art Soul blocked and banned @frogpondsrock and left in a huff.

    Which proves my point, that 140 characters is not enough to explain yourself, or to ask questions or make statements if someone is having a bad day.

    Total Art Soul is a forum for artists. Unfortunately, not everyone who signs up for forums has time to be an active member and I can vouch for Frogpondsrock being a VERY slack member, as I’ve seen it first hand on AMB. Hehe.

    However, MY issue with this whole thing is something different:

    When does supporting your community and helping out other people on the InterWebs, start being a push/pull shared thing?

    Is there a point when you look at what you’re doing for your community and decide that it isn’t worth it? That YOU aren’t getting enough out of it personally to bother promoting anymore?

    If you run a forum, you help to publicise your members, you RT links, you share experiences and you do all that without any glory, because it’s part of being a social network owner. Banners on sites aren’t about traffic, so much as brand awareness. Brenda and I don’t expect hundreds of click throughs to AMB based on our badge, because it isn’t about traffic. It’s about having people aware of your logo and knowing instantly, who you are.

    Without the goodwill of your members, your social networking site sinks pretty fast.

    I’m not saying Total Art Soul was wrong, to be honest, it looked like she was having a bad day, with too much work and not enough appreciation. A flippant comment from frogpondsrock hurt and she got snippy.

    But, 140 characters is not enough to explain yourself in and it leaves itself open for misunderstandings, which is where TAS blocked and banned Frogpondsrock and left.

    The other problem with twitter, is that if you are too prolific, people will unfollow, not because they don’t care about you, but because you’re cluttering up their timeline with things they aren’t interested in. I’ve had it happen personally and okay, I was a bit stung, but it’s how things work.

    There seems to be a problem here on the Internet, with ‘bigger’ bloggers (I use the term both bigger and blogger very lightly) thinking that by every link they RT, by every mention, by every helping hand, that they are doing the ‘smaller’ blogger a giant favour. In reality, unless that ‘bigger’ blogger is in the league of Dooce, it’s very unlikely that your helping hand has been as big as you think it has been. This isn’t aimed directly at TAS, mind you, it’s something I see all around the blogs/forums.

    People are by nature, judgemental. You like to look at someone and know how you fit in, in relationship to their life. She’s got better shoes, but your handbag is nicer. Her car is more expensive, but you ate at super exclusive restaurant last night. She has more money, but your kids are cuter. Their house is bigger, but you’re pretty sure you get along better with your husband. Right?

    It’s how things work on blogs too. We visit a blog and while we may not notice that we’re doing it, we scroll the sidebar looking for our own link (even if we’re certain it’s not there), we tally up the amount of comments on the last two posts, we check out follower/subscriber numbers and subtly, sometimes without even realising it, we’re deciding whose site is more successful. The more blogs we discover with ‘less’ numbers then ours, the bigger we feel.

    When really, we’re not at all.

    I’m guilty of this too you know, making a snap decision on whose blog is better. I tend to smack myself up the side of the head though, because it’s not what the Internet is meant to be about – unlike some bloggers I’ve stopped reading, because their opinion of themselves makes me stabby.

    So really, no matter how much better your numbers are, don’t feel like you’re doing someone a giant favour by sharing their link. Share their link because you like it, or because you like them. Don’t feel inclined to RT their horoscope, just for the sake of retweeting them. It’s not smart, it’s silly. People will pay more attention if the links you share are quality, not if you share loads of them.

    And if that means we get to have favourites, then brilliant. I have my favourite bloggers and I share nearly everything they write. Because I love them and because the quality is there. Not because I’m doing them a favour, but because I want people to see their amazing work and love it like I do.

    Maybe that’s what we all should do. Share because we love it, not because we feel obliged to.