Tired woman returns. Briefly

I know. I've been missing in action. I've explained why here. I am so, so, so tired. But I feel duty bound to pop in and say hello to you lovely blogging people and sorry that I've been negligent in my commenting efforts.

I know I have news. I'm sure I have much to tell you. I'm sure that it's hilarious and wonderful stuff. But it's currently having a nap in a dark corner of my brain.

The only thing I can remember with any clarity about the last few days is this delightful conversation with my 3 year old yesterday, in which we discussed the merits of healthy eating. I was trying to explain why being too fat (I was going to say overweight for sake of political correctness but he's three and understands thin and fat, big and small, round and square - i.e. words with a single syllable) isn't very good for your health.

And he pipes up: "You mean fat like you mummy?"

So that was nice. Kinda sums up how things have been.

Kiss kiss

Bigging up blogs

Blogging is exhausting. It all starts out so simply. A few words bashed out to make some space in your brain. Before you know it, you're replying to comments, making comments, adding blogrolls, linking, meme-ing, reading, reading, reading....often laughing so hard you have a small accident thanks to a non-existent pelvic floor. And sometimes you cry about things that are happening to other people who you don't know at all but can feel their pain from a thousand miles off.

What I love about it is that the people you meet in the blogosphere share real stuff. The kind of stuff that seldom gets discussed at the school gate or coffee mornings. Not even the kind of stuff you share with close real life friends (except after several bottles of wine and you don't really recall any of it in the morning anyway). And even if you did discuss these things in real life, you could never say it quite so eloquently. Blogs are often human poetry.

Take the list of great contributions at the latest Blog Carnival over at Thames Valley Mums. It's a fabulous array of reads that will knock the socks off most TV shows, magazines or even books (then again the books I read most often these days are Chip and Biff books).

It is remarkable how small the world is and how similar we all are. Some people say that blogging and social networking reduce our social skills and our ability to interact with people. That might be true in some regard, but I think it gives many people the chance to be more human. More real. More true to themselves than they ever might be in real life. And I don't see how that can be a bad thing.

Now, I've got some more reading to do...

Cue trumpet fanfare - the new blog is unveiled

Thanks to the efforts of the lovely Tasha and my colleague Helen, I now have a brand spanking new blog that will track my countdown to my sailing adventure.

It is www.moretolifethanlaundry.com. It's still a work in progress and I've yet to add everyone to my blogroll but I'm too excited about it to not post the link. I will hopefully have a little logo thingy that anyone who wants to help promote the blog can have for their blog - otherwise please just add the link to your blogroll and spread it around so that I get lots of people going to it, which will hopefully convince me to get more corporate sponsors signing up.

And of course if you fancy sponsoring me, but all means feel free to click the Paypal donate button and let me know if it works!

Hopefully I can still keep this blog up to date too but the focus for the next while is going to be on Moretolifethanlaundry. I will hopefully have a subscribe button on it soon too.

Ironically, I must now sign off to go do a vast pile of laundry. Go figure.

Squashed zebras. I'm at blogging crossroads.

I appear to have arrived at something of a blogging crossroads. In my head it looks like one of those very confusing intersections that you get in the US where there are pedestrians crossings going in every direction, like a herd of squashed and bewildered zebras.

You see, this blog was meant to be my musings on everyday life. It's my outlet for when my brain feels like a pressure cooker with steam fizzing out of my ears. It was meant to be anonymous so that I could be cuttingly honest, revealing my deep thoughts that I don't really want to tell anyone in person but need to air them - sort of like the pensieve in the Harry Potter books, where Dumbledore uses a magic wand to syphon out memories (and yes, I am a very sad Harry Potter addict).

But it's not anonymous anymore. It's linked all over the place and people who read it largely know who I am. They most likely already think I'm barking for doing it the first place. And now I find myself at a point where I really, really need to write something deeply personal. I have an issue. A big issue. An issue that would make fabulous blog material and would ease the chatter in my head. An issue that other bloggers probably blog about, get a book contract and make millions from. But I can't blog it. Not without risking an awful lot. Not without airing dirty laundry for all to see. And so I stand at my zebra crossing muddle and wonder if I step off the pavement in the wrong direction, will I get struck by a large bus.

The answer is probably yes. So I won't. I shall simply stew. Or call my sisters. Although one's in New Zealand and probably won't appreciate being woken up at 6am for this and the other is on holiday somewhere hopefully having a more relaxing time that I did.

I shall instead leave you intrigued. That way I come across as mysterious and enigmatic, which isn't something someone in tracky pants and marmite smeared on her top from a small child's hands is normally described as. But there you go.