Back from the blog holiday

Last year I called for a national cell phone holiday! I was great! 1 day no cell phone could we survive? Yikes, it was addicting! I actually drove all over town listening to the radio and paying attention to stop signs. I did have a bit of fidget when I could not use (by self-dictated holiday rules) my cell phone to call home with a question. I had to look for a pay phone, have you tried looking for a pay phone lately? I ended up asking to borrow a stores land line. The clerk looked at me for a full 20 seconds before registering that I wanted to use his phone because I did not have a cell phone. I guess he had never heard that request before and was not sure it was okay. Anyway, cell phone holiday accomplished and a success (the next annual one in Feb watch blog for more) so I decided to do a Blog holiday for a rash two weeks during the kids Christmas break. More than complaining that I am always on the phone they always complain I am always on my lap top blogging. So . . . I took a Blog Holiday over Christmas break! Craziness . . . ensued, cooking, baking, merry-making and I did not miss it a bit — I confess I did a bit of blogging in my head . . . . but my fingers enjoyed the break and my kids loved the attention. My dogs got tired of following me around . . . I was way more active even on crutches! (I tore my miniscus sp? and am off my feet for 8 weeks — two weeks to go) So a successful blog holiday and now I am returned to the blogosphere with more meaningful bloglets to come! I have to say that the blog holiday was hard work and since the kids are in school anyway i am glad to be home . . .

Do we know what we don’t know?

 

We were the first people on our block to get a microwave. My grandmother came over and asked me to show her how to “get the hang of it” so she could tell all her friends. She said it was a mystery to her but she was determined to be the first of her friends to have one.   Having survived the great depression my grandma was not the kind to be afraid of anything but I could tell she was a little wary of the big black box capable of melting down plastic bowls in seconds.  As I was showing her what to do she told me she had showed her own grandmother how to work her TV.  We laughed while we burnt a cheese sandwich to a crisp.  Years later when I had to ask my kids to help me download a James Taylor song onto the iPod I received for Christmas I realized I was losing ground.  My kids laughed at me for not knowing how to download and it made me feel better to smirk at them for not knowing who James Taylor was.  Smirking was not enough, I felt like the world, indeed the World Wide Web was passing me by.

I could blame being an overwhelmed hard-working mother of 4 dogs, 3 kids, 2 birds and a cat for one of the reasons I wasn’t up on terms like Social Media, Live Web, and Widgets but there are a few women with the same description above perhaps with a few less pets who make millions of dollars every year knowing all the above.  That’s right millions.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not some deep dark mysterious secret that you need a key or a brilliant brain to unlock, though some of the articles you have seen may seem to be written in another language, it’s simply a lot of new information and new information when you already have a lot on your plate can be overwhelming.

If you secretly wonder what a blog is then you are not alone.  My good friend Kristen Lamb, co-founder of Planetary Streams International, a Social Media and Marketing company likes to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know!”  Like my grandma and the microwave, her grandma and the TV and me and my iPod, we won’t know until we ask for help. The people brave enough to admit they have no idea what a blog or ping or any of the above in the title are the people who get to reap the rewards.    More on this at www.powerstrategies.TV  Kim Power Stilson