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Archives for 2013

Staycation

December 31, 2013 by Jen

Grange jetty.

The summer school holidays here last for six weeks. That’s a long time for the lad to be in vacation care – not that it’s even open for two of those six weeks. I’ve been lucky enough since he’s been at school to have the christmas/new year week, and a bit longer, off work. This year I decided to take three weeks off.

When I tell people that’s what’s happening they always ask if we’re going away. Like you’re supposed to go away if you’re not at work. I suppose I’m a culprit of this question to other people as well.

No, we’re not going away, we’re hanging at home. Apart from a night away here and there that is.

We’re a week and a bit into the holidays and now that the christmas hoo-ha is out the way I’m starting to relax. It’s new year’s eve today and I was awake and up just after 7am. It’s going to be quite warm so I wanted to get the dog’s walk out the way. I’d done that, come home, fed the dog, watered the garden and put a load of washing on by 8am.

We’ve had something on every day and the moments we do get at home I potter around doing the bare minimum and JJ is playing an Xbox game he bought with christmas money.

The dog follows me around and seems to have found a spot he likes under the kitchen table. I’ve got to be careful not to go out and leave him under there.

Birds in the sky.

The other day JJ invited a friend over and we went to Grange beach – a beach I don’t normally go to. While they spent over an hour in the water I setup on the beach and just watched the world go by. Some people sat down right in front of me spoiling my view so I moved! There was plenty of room to sit elsewhere and they had a bloody chair as well.

Once I got the boys out the water we found a fish and chip shop, bought some food and drove until we found a park to sit in and eat. We found a wetlands with heaps of birds and tried to ignore all the bird shit on the table we sat at. Lucky we had a plate in the form of the paper wrapped around the chips.

The boys played on the playground and I even joined in pushing them on a big swing thing and got them to push me around on it as well. Playgrounds have changed heaps since I was a girl. For a start they are a lot more colourful and the equipment is quite different. Except for the swings. I think there will always be swings. Just the seat has changed from a wooden seat to a rubber seat.

It’s days like this that I like about having a staycation. We did something we don’t normally do, well not at those particular locations. It didn’t matter what time we got home as there were no major commitments for the next day. And the weather was perfect.

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Cinema etiquette – or lack thereof

December 21, 2013 by Jen

Flower phone

I enjoy going to the movies. There’s something about the big screen and the surround sound that’s very enjoyable. Enjoyable, that is, apart from other movie goers.

Most people are pretty good. They know the cinema etiquette, but some don’t. Or they’re just SO important that nobody else matters.

I think there are two main things that you don’t do at the movies. One is talk. A quiet whisper here and there is fine, but not continual chat. The second one is not using your phone. I’ve had two lots of different people break these rules recently.

A few weeks ago The Surfer and I went to see Enough Said. We sat about two thirds of the way back in a relatively quiet cinema on a Friday morning. Two women sat a bit further back from us and talked. And talked. And kept on talking. I’ll give people a few chances then I’ll usually say something. As it was quite distracting I turned around and asked them to please be quiet. They were. Then they left about half an hour later. They probably went to a coffee shop to continue their conversation which is where they should have started it in the first place.

We watched the rest of the movie in peace.

Yesterday I took JJ to see Frozen. It’s just been released. It’s school holidays so the cinema was pretty packed. There was a group of boys a few rows behind us and they didn’t have any adults with them. No, it wasn’t them I’m going to talk about. They were pretty good apart from one boy groaning every time a song started in the movie. I didn’t realise it was a musical movie. It wasn’t too musical, just a few songs here and there.

It wasn’t the three year old girl near us who kept standing up and moving around because she was obviously too young to be there in the first place. No, it was her father who kept getting his phone out and texting. He did it once. He did it again. And when he did it again I leaned over JJ, who was sitting between us and who’d also expressed his disdain for this behaviour, and asked him to please put his phone away as it was distracting. The man asked who it was distracting. Doh! I told him it was distracting my son and I. He said, ‘sorry champ’ to JJ. And as he was putting his phone away he said, ‘how rude’. At first I thought he meant that he realised he was being rude and saying it in a passive aggressive manner but later I thought he may have meant that I was being rude.

I don’t know and I don’t really care as he didn’t do it again. Not too long afterwards he picked up his three year old daughter, the one who was moving around and complaining a bit, and took her out not to come back.

Does anyone else encounter these problems at the movies? Surely it’s not just me.

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Busy bee

November 26, 2013 by Jen

Busy bees

I had an insanely busy weekend, so busy that I lost sleep on Thursday night stressing about it. Stupid I know.

I had to work on Friday then come home and get ready to go out. I don’t know where the second wind comes from. Where I’d normally sit around home and relax I was out until 2am the next morning. My night involved lots of standing on my feet, dancing, and karaoke. I’m a karaoke convert. I love it.

It helps that I’ve had singing lessons and had a couple of songs that I’d kind of pre-prepared but I sang a lot more than these couple of songs. It helps that the large group of people I was out with were into it – really into it. Dancing and singing along to every song that was sung – into it.

I didn’t sing alone as there were three microphones people would join in and that was fine. I hope I wasn’t too much of a microphone hog but it’s not like I barged in to grab a mike for every song, I did let others have a go too.

I felt tired on Saturday but not so tired I couldn’t do some domestic chores, and then we went out again on Saturday night. It was a great night for a friend’s birthday at his house. It was another dressup thing. Lucky I’ve got an extensive wardrobe to call upon – in this case – a crochet outfit.

Sunday morning I was super baseball mum. Even more super because I had to score for the game. I never knew until JJ started playing baseball that scoring the game isn’t just ticking a box when they get a run. No. You pretty much keep a running sheet of where all players are at any one time for both teams. It’s complicated and it was my first time doing it. And the other team’s scorer was brand new as well. Luckily I had a helper to call upon otherwise it would have been a shamozal.

I think when they finished the game I resumed breathing normally. But I felt pleased with myself that I made it through.

I was able to relax on Sunday afternoon at a friend’s place having a couple of drinks. It was a good catch up with a few friends. I’ve got amazing friends.

I was in bed at 9pm on Sunday and had a really really good sleep.

This little busy bee needed it.

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Digital content roundup – November 2013

November 26, 2013 by Jen

Rounding up

I want to share some useful and interesting reading I’ve come across this month. Note, some of the links are from further back but still relevant. There’s a strong content strategy theme here.

Repurposing content

It takes a lot of effort to create great content so try to repurpose the content you do create. This article shows different methods of repurposing content, the process, and different content types.

Create Great Content? How to Get More From It Through Repurposing

How to create a content strategy

There’s 652 steps in this ‘how to’ guide for creating a content strategy. Don’t let that put you off. It’s broken down into four major steps.

How to Create a Content Strategy (In Only 652 Steps)

Crafting a killer content strategy

Notes from a conference outlining seven key points to creating a content marketing strategy.

7 Tips and Tools to Craft a Killer Content Marketing Strategy #SESCHI

How to create a social media content strategy

There are 26 tactics here to strengthen your social media content strategy and you could give each one of them a go one at a time so it’s not so overwhelming. There are some good tips here though. For example, replicating your brand across platforms.

26 Tips to Create a Strong Social Media Content Strategy

A content strategy case study

I would love to combine my love of fashion with a job in content strategy. Here’s how Modcloth have done it. I’ve bought from Modcloth and one of the things I like about their site is their user content. People buy their products and then go back to the site and review them, and some upload images of themselves wearing their purchases. User-created content. It seems to really work for Modcloth. I wonder if they’re opening up in Australia?

How Modcloth Tries to Be a Fashion Friend and (Amazingly) Succeeds

Have you got any useful links to share?

 

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Animated gifs – yay or nay?

November 21, 2013 by Jen

If you had asked me 15 years ago if using animated gifs was a good idea I would have said an emphatic NO!

If you weren’t using the web that long ago, here’s a reminder of how they looked back then.

Remember the ‘Under construction’, and the famous dancing baby?

construction dancingbaby

Best forgotten. They were pretty primitive – although the dancing baby was kinda interesting. Another overused animated gif was the flashing *NEW* for when you added new content.

Here’s a page full of them just in case you need to see more.

Here’s the history of the animated gif.

If you watched the video you’ll already know that the animated gif made a resurgence in the last few years, especially on Tumblr, and more tools were available to create animated gifs.

Arty animated gif

Courtesy of Ozneo Tumblr.

If you want to create your own animated gif then there’s heaps of mobile and desktop apps.

I love the animated gif to make a point about a tv show or movie that isn’t as easy to get across in a still photo. It might be a series of animated gifs, or just one. Or they’ve become a bit of an artform as in the one above. Do you know the TV show it’s referencing?

Don’t forget if you add an animated gif into your website, like all images, add alt text for web accessibility purposes. But think about the purpose of it in the first place. The gif above is starting to do my head in so for me it would really depend on the type of content I’m posting, and the message I’m trying to convey.

But to the pronunciation of gif, ie jif and gif? I’m a gif girl (with the hard g sound). How about you?

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Maybe this is temporarily a dog blog

November 18, 2013 by Jen

Love and devotion.

How could you resist this? He doesn’t jump but he does sit and put his paw on me to get my attention.

But when I was sitting down this time I was a captive audience. How could I not love him?

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Behaviour training

November 17, 2013 by Jen

Onkaparinga River.

Was a great day on the beach the other morning for the dogs. There was nobody else there so they had free rein to run and run and run some more.

Dogs on beach.

Phoenix is settling into his life with us. However, there’s a couple of things we have to sort out.

One – he gets car sick for just about any trip longer than 20 minutes. I’ve cleaned up three car vomits so far. I’m hoping it’s something he grows out of but for now I’ve bought him some insanely expensive carsick medication.

The other thing is how he reacts to other dogs. He obviously gets on well with his mate in these two photos, and he gets on well with my sister’s dog. He’s also met another friend’s dog and they had a great time.

However, he’s not very predictable when it comes to unknown dogs. So I have to leave him on the lead when there’s other dogs around. There’s been a few times when he’s been fine and then there’s been times when he’ll meet another dog on lead, it will be fine to start, then Phoenix will have a go.

I’ve organised some private training. I need to be confident to take him out and about without stressing and I want him to feel confident too. I think his reaction stems from fear and/or anxiety so with some proper training I think he can get around it.

This is the only downside to not really knowing his history. Apparently he wasn’t socialised much, if at all, with other dogs before he was surrendered and that’s what’s made the difference with him. Hopefully I have positive things to report as time goes on. I’m sure I will.

Dogs on beach

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