(just don’t ask me to do it)
photo courtesy http://www.allthingsworkplace.com/

So, okay…I know I’ve been a little out of the loop recently (but less than two weeks), and I pop in here to kind of catch up on some things that have gone down over the past few weeks and…

What is going on in here, WordPress? I open a new blog window and everything is this institutional blue, and there are all these new “things” on the right hand side, and WTH? I mean, I’d just gotten used to flying through the composition window as I left it last time. It’s so…well, BLUE, for one thing; less responsive, for another; and why doesn’t the preview actually PREVIEW what my site is going to look like once I hit the “publish” button. (Oh, PLEASE, PLEASE tell me that the appearance of my page has been altered, too…) Ok, wait…Oh, I see…the preview doesn’t just open a new tab…It activates a pop up, which my pop up blocker beats down. Oh, wow. Seriously?

I guess it’s what I get for being absent for the vote to change all this. What? There wasn’t a vote? Okay, so my absence wasn’t that crucial.

So on to today’s business…Since I’ve been hit and miss, the most notable (?) occurences:

There was a hurricane. It didn’t come inland, so that was good. We got rain, so that was also good. We didn’t have a lot of wind, which was even better. I could have probably posted something about that in my last entry, but I was sort of too busy being butt hurt over that song that I still really like the melody to. 😉

Our vegetable garden is not impressive. It should have been impressive, though. All those squash plants? 😦 Maybe 8 squash thus far. Yeah, eight. So not impressed. Corn? Four ears to date, and not looking like there are going to be many more. The one eggplant we’ve picked was good, though. And the hot banana peppers and jalapenos are doing well, also, but squash, y’all!

Social networking hiatus: if burnout happened to me, it can happen to you!

Yeah, I know. I didn’t believe it, either, but it’s TRUE…I have successfully avoided Facebook, now, for a WEEK! I didn’t think that it would have lasted this long, but I’m not, apparently, as addicted to it as I thought, initially. As I observed in an earlier entry, sometimes there is over-sharing. Now, I get that there are things that are almost always appropriate for social networking (birthday and anniversary shout-outs, new puppy pictures, tacky e-card images that are really a hoot, etc.), and then other things that aren’t, or are simply so annoying that one thinks, “why would you DO that?” Having said that, I am well aware that this is MY issue, and I did have the ability to remove myself when I realized one of my favorite pastimes was making me want to send my tablet flying across the yard like a Frisbee. But because it IS my blog, I can bitch if I want to. So there. 😉

I love vacation pictures as much as the next person, especially when they are in an album, all together and viewable at once, so I know I don’t have vacation envy, which I never really understood, anyway…But I have to ask: Am I the only one that finds serial posting images from one’s destination every 15-60 minutes throughout the trip annoying? (Here are my feet on the cobblestone path. This is the restaurant I am about to dine in. This is the glass of water the waiter brought to my table. This is dessert, yum! This is the actual street at sunset that my feet were standing on in that other picture. Here is me right after I got up, even before visiting the bathroom.) Honestly? When your trip posts eat up the majority of everyone’s feed? Maybe it’s time to stop, okay? On the flip side? We can control how what you post displays in our account, so that’s pretty much a given, and something I have done in the past.

What else irritates me? Finding out pretty important bits of immediate family-related information (best shared with a phone call, or even a text at the very least) from a friend of a friend, because THEY knew before YOU did, since they saw it on Facebook before you even thought about logging on.  I think (and maybe I am old fashioned this way) that it is in really bad taste to be informed of pregnancies, miscarriages, deaths, divorces and births in one’s IMMEDIATE family from someone outside of the family because they saw it first. I understand that when something major happens, you want the entire world to know about it, especially if it’s a good thing, but doesn’t your immediate family deserve to hear it from YOU first? Again, this bugs the hell out of me, and I know I may be old fashioned, but is it possible that I could very easily be a relic, already? What the hell happened to respect and manners? (OMG, I sound like my mother!)

Body parts and bodily functions online, anyone? Need I say more? Do any of y’all WANT to see that? I mean, things that came out of or off of one’s body should not EVER be photographed for the sole purpose of putting that crap (literally) out on a social networking site. We don’t CARE what the stool was shaped like, okay? Enough, already. And please, do not go on and on about it, post after post. When our feeds start looking like pictures out of a medical reference book? There is a problem. You are either actually believe we all care, or you are a total attention whore. Again, just my $0.02.

The worst part, though, for me (and I have this horrible tendency to be a spelling and grammar Nazi) are the strings of posts from the people hoo chuz to use 2 many abbreviations wen tlkg 2 u. R u that lazy u can’t st8 ur case wid real words? (OMG, just TYPING those last sentences actually hurt my brain and made me cringe.) Seriously, these are not people that are in middle school; they are grown up individuals, so when I stumbled upon the following video, I knew I had to share it. Only not on Facebook, because I’m still avoiding it until I can peek at it and not be annoyed, LOL.

I figure my blog writing friends will enjoy and appreciate this as much as I did:

I have to admit, though, while it was kind of rough over the first couple of days to NOT log in and see what was going on in everyone’s lives, after an entire week without it, I’m finding it kind of liberating and nice.

So, I guess I can say…till next time… 🙂  TGIF!