Snoskred – Life in the Country

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.

Some of you have noticed that I have only been posting one post per day for the last few days. I’ve got the evil flu which the other half had a couple of weeks ago. I started feeling a bit unwell on Friday, had a terrible sleep on Saturday night but it was Sunday that brought the straw which put me flat on my back for the last 3 days. Sunday, a bush hike, and some happy hikers who told us we might see some whales.

And see whales we did, even though the winds were ferocious we were so captivated we could not leave and when we did leave we tried to chase the whales to the next high point, taking a 1km hike and turning it into about a 4km hike, some of it through terrifyingly tiny paths which made me freak out quite a bit. There seemed to be several different pods of whales and they were all doing a jumping out of the water. I have many more photos, but I do not have the energy right now. When I’m feeling better I promise to share.

We also found a baby Echidna. I have no idea why it was showing us its feet. Anyway I am not 100% better yet and really only managing short amounts of time out of bed. Apologies for not dropping by everyone’s blogs. As soon as I am better I’ll be by.

Some of you may have noticed a distinct lack of Snoskred in the blogOsphere over the past few days. I apologise – I have over 1,000 unread posts in my Google Reader and I have about 24 hours to read them all so you might not get a comment from me on your posts this week. But why have I been missing in action?

The Other Half

For the last couple of months The Other Half has been getting a few colds and flu. This week he has the worst one yet. I have never seen him this sick actually and we’ve been together almost 9 years. Several nights this week he has had zero sleep and this also means I have had less sleep than usual even though he tried to sleep sitting upright in his recliner a couple of nights rather than the bed.

It’s Not All Bad

The good thing about his being sick this week has meant we have discovered the local doctors surgery. It is within a 5 minute walk (great if he is at work and I need to go there) and extremely acceptable – and it has a female doctor as well as a male doctor. I’ve got an appointment for next week to have a couple of moles looked at by the female doctor (yes I was inspired when I saw a post from someone who had them removed but I forget who now?) and The Other Half has been there twice this week. He has severe tonsilitis, he has had a terrible sinus, bad ears, fever and the sweats since Wednesday and there seems to be no end in sight even though he is taking antibiotics.

Parts Of It Are Very Bad

My routine has been thrown completely out of whack this week. No checklists completed. Only some daily tasks getting finished. Laundry and dishes are on the increase – I’ve washed the bedsheets and quilt cover daily. One very miserable person lurking around the house so unwell he doesn’t want to watch tv, read, use his computer or anything yet he can’t sleep, doesn’t feel like eating much. He’s mostly been trying to nap on the futon in his room. I keep checking on him, which is not good time management, but very necessary to make sure he’s ok.

Parts Of It Are Very Good

On Thursday it was like someone had given The Other Half a dose of speed or something. It may have been pure sleep deprivation. However for about two hours he was like an insane robot. Sephy and I had been talking about the possibility of moving the scam email blogs to WordPress and I had mentioned it to The Other Half. We have a domain which we’d bought for a scam warning website and we figured it would be worthwhile using and getting away from Blogger which had always caused us major problems. The Other Half set up the new blog for us and just as he finished it the burst of energy ran out, and he retreated to the couch for an afternoon of just falling asleep to be woken up again by not being able to breathe.

Since Then

The insane robot baton was passed over to me and Sephy. We have been working flat out to try and get this up and running by Monday at the latest. We have a lot of content which we need to put on the site as the “base” before we can open the doors, but as soon as we do I’ll let ya’all know so you can see it – and hopefully link to it, because it’s for a good cause.

Scam Emails?

The four sites we already have up and running are -

• 419 Letter Repository
• Job Scam Repository
• Lotto Scam Repository
• Miscellaneous Scam Repository

These sites get some serious traffic – up to 20,000 hits a month, and we’re only able to post approximately 50 scam emails a day. The new site will have upwards of 200 scam emails a day being posted. We won’t be putting any advertising onto the site but we would love to get a sponsor willing to pay the site costs. We may also need volunteers to answer the potentially large amount of contact me forms we may get.

Chicken Soup Time

I make a mean chicken and sweetcorn soup and I’m going to make another fresh one shortly. I’ll take pics and write up the recipe for one day next week.

Back Soon!

I will be back to my normal around the blogOsphere self soon. I mean, this flu can’t go on forever, right? RIGHT? Please tell me I’m right! I crave my routine..