Snoskred - Life in the Country

When I lived back in Adelaide, we were living within a short distance of West Lakes. I always used to love seeing the (manmade) water there. My dream at the time was to live in a house with a little pier and to have a paddle boat to paddle around the lakes with.

So a few years later, a completely different state, a completely new life that I did not anticipate, and I still want a paddle boat. Though not quite the same kind. I want me a Kayak. To be specific, a Hobie Mirage Outfitter.

This from the girl who never swam in the sea until a year ago for fear of sharks. This from the girl who went kayaking for the first time about a week ago and was utterly terrified by it because we couldn’t get the kayak to go where we wanted it to go. It wasn’t a Hobie, it was a cheap crappy double kayak that we hired and the darn thing was like a shopping trolley that refused to go straight.

Did you know you can get kayaks with pedals as well as “paddles”? Seriously there is some amazing kayak technology going on from Hobie.

Tomorrow we test drive the one we intend to buy, and hopefully will have it by the weekend. w00t! Of course I’ll post pics.

There is much going on in my life at present, much of which cannot be blogged about. Community volunteer work,  the other half on holidays and actually smiling for a change, an exercise bike, roast chickens, kitties being cute, blog design, and filing cabinets. There is much I want to tell you and I hope to have some time to do that soon!

But for now, read about kayaks.

It’s insane here at the moment - The Other Half is on holidays, I have been busy working on a community project or ten, and also behind with my posting ahead of time.

The Thought Of The Day is taking a little holiday - it will return soon. I usually write an entire month’s worth in one sitting and then Wordpress just posts them for me daily, but I don’t see a chance for doing that until Friday or so.

And I have a confession to make.. I am obsessed with Dexter. I will write a post about that soon..

So. Once upon a time, I used to have a routine. I used to do things in some kind of order. I used to daily read over 170 blogs, plus comment on 20-50, write one major post on my blog per day plus the thought/song of the day plus respond to emails plus get loads of stuff done around the house.

Then, I had the crazy idea of hosting blogs for people. On average since the start of this year, I have created 6-7 blogs every week. There is a huge amount of work involved in the process of doing that. It isn’t just set it up, activate the plugins and away we go.

People tell me which blog template they want to use, and then I customise it for them. I create them a blog header. I answer all their questions - and they are not one or two questions, sometimes it can be up to 50-100 emails back and forth. And even though I have cut and paste answers to a lot of the stuff people ask me now, I haven’t had a chance to organise them in a way I can access them easily to paste to the next question asker.

Life has become a game of catch up - I can rarely plan things because I don’t know what is going to come to me as a surprise in my email. Or I might have a plan - like tomorrow, I would like to write all my thought of the days for March. But then I’ll wake up in the morning, turn on the computer, and someone will be having a crisis or a blog meltdown, and I have to figure it out for them.

Most of the time I love doing it, don’t get me wrong. But there are days when it gets old fast, when I want to politely suggest that people learn to search the net first and then ask me if they can’t find an answer - because that’s what I do. That’s mostly how I solve their problems - I’m not any kind of genius, I just type their problem into Scroogle and see what comes to me as a surprise.

Don’t be offended by that, people that I host blogs for. Like I say most of the time I love helping you out, but you can imagine that if you solved one problem and were handed another by someone else, and that went on all morning when you had planned to write a month’s worth of blog posts and get shiznit done fast, you’d get frustrated too.

The service I offer is somewhat unique. You don’t get that from most other blog hosts. They install Wordpress for you, and then you’re on your own - people have to sink or swim on their own. I get people swimming pretty quickly, and then they can always ask me if they have issues.

If it is this bad now, with almost 40 blogs that I am hosting for other people - not to mention those I host for myself, and Aussie Bloggers blog and forums - which are crazy busy - and the business blog, and Scam Warning (that Sephy does most of the work for these days because I don’t have the time), and testing plugins for my bloggers, imagine how crazy life will be when it is double that number?

And let me not get into updating all these blogs. The recent upgrade that happened - 2.3.3 - the other half handles the upgrades and he did one file across all the blogs as soon as it was released, because that was security related. That took an hour.

When he went to do the other four files it  took the other half five hours. This is because people had been installing plugins other than what was in the package, and some of them did not react well to 2.3.3, and we had to work out why and then solve that. That’s his spare time - he works full time. So the more blogs I take on, the more time it takes him to upgrade them.
Recently I’ve been given some important volunteer roles in the local community here which will require more of my time and effort.  And I need to do housework. And it might be nice to occasionally get some time to write blog posts like I used to.

I feel the need to slow things down.. if we keep going at this rate, we’ll have double the amount of blogs in 2 months.

So I’ve made a difficult decision - I am limiting myself to one blog a week from now on. If you want me to host a blog for you at some time in the future, you’d better pop over to the blog and put in a contact form, so I can give you the dates when I can do it. If you can’t wait till I can do it, I won’t be able to help you. I’m sorry.

Apologies for any inconvenience, but I’d like to try and get some routine back. And I’d like to put some posts here more often.

So just lately I haven’t had a lot of time for me. As I type this I am in the process of creating at least 5 blogs. And then theres the volunteer work in the community which I put my hand up for a while back. Not to mention the house work.

I do think it is very important to have some time that is just me time, time when I don’t check my email for an hour or so, time when I switch off and relax. I have a pretty strict routine on weekdays otherwise nothing gets done. I always take an hour at lunch time to sit and eat lunch and watch a show. It was The West Wing for a long time there but recently I got season one and two of NYPD Blue. I have been wanting to watch that show in order for a long time now.

I also have been taking some time out in the evenings to check out a few new shows which have turned up on a new channel we have here on Pay TV, a channel called Showcase. There is one show called Dexter. It is twisted but I kinda like it.

Tonight I did something very rare for me. I sat down for two and a half hours to watch a movie I had wanted to see for a long time. In fact I mentioned wanting to see it here on the blog in October of 2006. It was The Departed with Leonardo Di Caprio, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen, as well as many others. This movie did not disappoint. It was fantastic.

It was nice to have a short break from all the work but tomorrow it is get shiznit done fast day. I want to get a lot of work done. So I’m off to bed now.