January 2008

What’s in Your Closet?

My sister gave my mother one of those Hallmark books designed to hold the family’s history, as recorded by the grandmother. It was pretty and contained a lot of questions that the author was supposed to answer about his/her childhood, including the music, films, books, etc. that were popular then.

My mother didn’t think too much of the idea, apparently. When we were cleaning out my parents’ house after she moved into an assisted living environment, we found it.

You guessed it. Blank. Each and every page was as clean, unwrinkled and utterly devoid of any notations as on the Mother’s Day when my sister presented the book to her.

I have written previously about the austere circumstances of my parents’ upbringing during the Great Depression. Although she never said it aloud, I know what my mother was thinking. “We didn’t have time to worry about movies and music. We had to work. We were trying to eke out a living.” To her, that book was frivolous, superfluous. Unlike her daughter, my mother was not a writer. Oh, she was intelligent, articulate and extremely insightful. But her hands never touched a keyboard. They were too busy cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening and, in her later years, crocheting. My parents told us what they wanted us to know.

And yet . . .

Imagine our shock when we found a scrapbook we had never seen before. A scrapbook full of my mother’s memories of an extremely difficult time in their lives: World War II. (That photo was taken on Washington Street right here in Lodi in 1943 when my father was stationed at Sharpe Army Depot in Stockton and my mother came from South Dakota for a visit.)

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Appetizer

How many times per day do you usually laugh?

Well, it depends upon the day, of course. But on average, I’d say dozens. In my profession, you learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Otherwise, you end up crying a lot.

Soup

What do your sunglasses look like?

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Have you generated traffic to your site and/or gained new readers/subscribers by participating at a particular social media networking or bookmarking site? Or have you wondered what all the discussion about social media sites is all above, finding yourself completely confused by all the various sites and the many blogs where articles are generated about social marketing each and every day?

Announcing a group writing project that will be of interest to and benefit all bloggers!

InspirationBit is sponsoring / coordinating the Social Media Mega Project. Participating bloggers will share their experiences with and tips/tricks/suggestions for successfully using some of the biggest social media sites.

Individual sites will focus their attention upon specific social media sites. The discussion on each site can take the form of a published article by the site owner or Guest Author, comments or e-mails to the host.

Timeline:

• Start Date: Monday, January 21, 2008
• End Date: Friday, February 22, 2008
• Result Publication Date: Monday, February 25, 2008
• Final Collaborative Results Publication Date: Friday, February 29, 2008 at Inspiration Bit

Guidelines:

1. Write an article on your blog and share with your readers how you integrate Sk*rt or Blogging Zoom into your online experiences. Have your experiences with those sites been negative or positive? With regard to driving traffic to your site, how does their effectiveness compare with other social networking sites? What benefits, if any, have you derived from using those services? Share with readers any tips, tricks or warnings that you have discovered.

2. Click here to provide me with your name, email address and the permalink to your article. If you prefer, you may be a Guest Author here at Colloquium.

3. After I receive links or articles from all participants and publish them here, you may write another article and link to some or all of the other articles contributed to this project.

4. You may contribute only one article per project per participating site, but you are invited and encouraged to visit all of the participating host sites, each of which is focusing on different social media sites, and take part by submitting articles to those sites about the social networking sites featured there.

Participating Sites / Focus:

• Aaron Stroud from On Financial Success: del.icio.us.
• Ina from Inspiring Wear: Facebook
• Brian Auer from Epic Edits: Flickr & Zooomr
• Isabella Mori from Change Therapy: Twitter
• Isabella Mori from Alphablogs: LinkedIn
• Karen Zara from a1-fan-fun: StumbleUpon, YouTube, MySpace
• Simonne from All Tips And Tricks: Sphinn
• Dandellion from Living in the Metaverse: Second Life
• Pearl from Fresh Perspectives: Mixx, Propeller, Squidoo
• Vivien from InspirationBit:digg, reddit
• Monica from Me Like the Interweb: Technorati
• JHS here at Colloquium: Sk*rt and Blogging Zoom

Prizes:

The project organizers are eligible to win a prize. Vivien of InspirationBit is donating the $100 prize she won from Daily Blog Tips, along with the $25 she won from All Tips And Tricks, and awarding five $25 prizes to the top five bloggers whose projects are the most successful as judged by the number and quality of entries.

I would really like Colloquium to be named one of the top five participating blog and, toward that end, invite you to actively participate and help make this project a success!

If Colloquium is named one of the top five participating blogs, I will ask readers to vote for their favorite article submitted about Sk*rt and/or Blogging Zoom. The winning author will receive the $25 award provided by Vivien — and I will match that prize twice over by making a donation in the same amount to the charity of the winner’s choice, along with a $25 donation to the American Cancer Society in honor of my sister, a colon cancer survivor. That’s a total prize package of $75.

So what are you waiting for? Start writing about Sk*rt and Blogging Zoom! I look forward to reading and learning from your articles!

What is Your Legacy?

An entry in The Seventh Day: Fifth Edition Blog Carnival at On the Horizon; the Carnival of Family Life hosted at Confessions of a Novice; and Just Write Blog Carnival at Incurable Disease of Writing

Yesterday, as I was blog-hopping, I happened upon a site named Andrew Olmsted where the words “Final Post” caught my attention. The post begins:

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits. And so, . . . I must say here what I would much prefer to say in person. I want to thank hilzoy for putting it up for me. It’s not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn’t hesitate to accept the charge. As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose. Perhaps I take that further than most, I don’t know. I hope so. It’s frightening to think there are many people as neurotic as I am in the world. In any case, since I won’t get another chance to say what I think, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity. Such as it is.

What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed in my life. So if you’re up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can’t laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

His words are also posted at Obsidian Wings, a site maintained by one of his friends.

You see, Andrew Olmsted was also known as Major Olmstead. He was killed in Iraq on January 3, 2008, the victim of a sniper. He was trying to talk three insurgents into surrendering when he was struck down. Last July, after he was deployed, he finalized his thoughts and entrusted his final message to his friend, with instructions to post it if he were to be killed while serving the United States.

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