Category Archives: Blogging

Great Buddy Award

I am so proud. Kathy at Oklahoma Booklady has given me the “Great Buddy Award.” I appreciate it very much. If you haven’t aleady check out her site. It is on my blogroll so if she is posting I’m reading and she never disappoints me.

As part of this award I get to pass it on. I have given this much thought and I’ve decided to award the following bloggers:

Baloney of That’s Baloney – Baloney is the one who inspired me to think about blogging so if you want to blame somebody for me polluting the blogoshere talk to her. She is to blame. She has a great sense of humor and her blog can be the funniest I’ve ever read but she has an amazing talent to communicate deep emotion, caring, and feeling on many subjects especially her two sons. So she can make me laugh and make me cry. I think of her blog as a blogging ministry. Plus for many months I think she, Sweetie, and my sister were the only readers I had, I think.

Dawn of Dawn’s Diversions – Dawn is like the friendliest and most expressive blogger on the internet. She just popped onto my blog one day to say hi and I’ve been following her ever since. I love the design of her blog and her profile picture is the best I’ve ever seen. Plus how many other women will put their age right there for everybody to see? She is very generous in her comments and also has a wonderful sense of humor. Also, her photographs show a lot of talent and skill. The sense of community that she has created with her blog is a great example for all of us. She is even organizing a physical get together for all her Oklahoma readers. (All except for one that is.)

As honored Awardees they both get to pass the award on to others of their choosing.

Hello, is anybody out there?

I’m still trying to figure this blogging thing out. I’ve been at it for several months now and I really like it. Not only writing my own posts but reading those of others. I have come to find out that there are lots of really good writers out there who are worth reading. I have also come to know a lot of very nice, generous, and helpful people.

Two of the questions I have had is “How do people find my blog? And how can I make it easier for people to find?” I mean quality of writing and creative composition and hilarious jokes are fine, but how do you get people to your site? If your blog is lame then they will leave but the challenge is to get them there in the first place.

One good source I found is Michael Hyatt’s Blog, From Where I Sit. Mr. Hyatt is CEO of Thomas Nelson Books, a Christian Book Publisher. He has a lot to say about various things plus he gives out free copies of his companies books to blogger in exchange for reviews. One of his emphases is what authors can do to help themselves in the online world. As far as I am concerned all bloggers are authors, right? He had a series of posts on online marketing in November. The one I found most helpful is this.

Basically he talks about services that will analyze your blog for you, for free. This is a lot of fun. When you realize that you can submit blogs besides yours for analysis its even more fun! The site he uses is WebsiteGrader.com. This site analyzes your (or a friend of yours) blog and gives several metrics to evaluate your blog.

Mine turned out like this:

Website Grade 48
Google Page Rank 2
Google Indexed Pages 145
Traffic Rank Not Ranked
Blog Rank 870,402
Inbound Links 190
del.icio.us Bookmarks 0

The site describes what all this stuff means.

If you like run your blog through the evaluation. Let us know what the results are.

Twilight Something

I feel left out. Half the posts in the blogosphere since late last week have Twilight in the title. Twilight dreams, Twilight this, Twilight that. To add to it all Sweetie decided to go see the Twilight movie with some other ladies Sunday night. She said that she and I couldn’t go together sometime because “I hadn’t read the book so I wouldn’t understand.”

Enough already, there is no law that says that I have to have read the book or go see the movie in order to have a blog post that says “Twilight” in it.

SuperPizzaBoy decided to go have a burger while Sweetie was watching the movie. So we head off to Fuddruckers. It is not one of our usual spots but its close to the house. We both ordered burgers and SPB ordered a shake. They shook him up on the shake by bringing a glass with the shake and the “extra” in the steel blender. He told the guy that there was a mistake.

Poor kid had never run into that before but he got used to it very quickly.

Afterward he played with the “King” for a little bit.


Then we went home. Don’t want to miss Sunday night football.

A Sunday Walk

Sunday the Yogi Family went for a walk around Jewell Lake in East Tulsa. Its a water supply lake with a very nice, flat, wide, path around it about 3 miles long. Just right for SuperPizzaBoy to ride his Triton ( a very cool heavy duty tricycle steered with the rear wheels.)

Of course, there was a geocache there so I peeled off and found it. Its underneath the tin in the picture below. Don’t tell anybody though. Geocachers don’t like hints. It hadn’t been found since June. I like finding the ones that hadn’t been found in a while.

Then I went back. I was way behind as you can see. It was a very pretty, sunny, cool, windy day. I loved it.

I caught up with them. I have a very cool video of Sweetie almost crashing riding the Triton down a ramp at the spillway. I have been forbidden to post it. Maybe, if my one or two readers asked she would relent.

Blog Ministry

I haven’t blogged in a few days. I hadn’t really felt like it. Last Friday night I received a registered letter from the state (is it just me or does no good news ever come by registered letter?) that informed by that I was losing my dweeb certification, oops, I mean Professional Engineer’s License because I had not passed an audit on my continuing education hours.

I was dumbfounded. I had sat through numerous seminars hearing about the poetry of subcooled reflux, the music of advanced feedforward control systems, and art of molecular sieve regeneration, all for the only purpose of grabbing the little CE certificates that they pass out at the end of the seminars. I had saved those certificates, and made copies just in case I lost the originals and scanned those and saved on two separate computers. Because you have to have those for the random audits the state performs. I was about the only person I knew that had not been audited yet so I knew it was coming and I WAS READY, BRING IT ON!

They did. I got a registered letter this past summer telling me that I was being audited and what I needed to do. So I put my stuff together, gathered up all my certificates and even included little notes on the certificates indicating what CE log entries they corresponded to. I sent it off to them and didn’t give it a second thought until last Friday.

Then Friday the shock. I don’t really understand why they didn’t take the stuff but I’ll deal with it. I couldn’t do anything right then because I had to take SuperPizzaBoy down to Southeast OK to meet up with Sweetie and her Mom, (SPB’s “Nana”).

Saturday, wasn’t a great day either. I’ll just leave it at that.

We drove back home Saturday night. Sunday morning, we had an issue with SuperPizzaBoy. Not a real big deal but he kind of escalated it by not taking responsibility for what he did. That didn’t help the outlook. Then the poor child said he wanted a friend to come over, we told him that we had a lot of stuff to do and that maybe he could help. Then he said that he wasn’t going to do “woman’s work.” That got everything going again!

So then I did my morning routine, used to be I made the coffee and opened up the paper. Now, the paper can wait, I read Baloney’s blog and then play her daily trivia quiz. Sunday she had a few kind words to say about me. Of course as self centered as I am that made my day. The other stuff is still there but things brightened up for me with her comments. We all like scratched behind the ears every now and then, right? Baloney is kind of like that I think. She just passes out electronic noogies left and right, brightening up everybody’s day so I’m beginning to think of her blog as a blog ministry.

She might need counseling in the area of appropriate photography in bathrooms, bathtubs, and dressing rooms, her love of “bad photos” and the use pictures of naked and practically naked people on the internet but we all have our challenges. Plus I’m still kind of confused by the slacks underneath dresses type fashion phase she went through but as Sweetie would tell me, those who live in glass houses…”

Anyway, her few words brightened up my day and I was able to even get through Dallas losing to the Redskins without breaking anything.

She had awarded me one of seven awards to other bloggers. So I get to proudly display the accompanying logo. I don’t really know 7 bloggers, so I am going to award one and hold the other six and dole them out as time goes by.

The rules of this award are:

1. The winner can (and should, really) put the logo on their blog.
2. The winner must link to the person from whom they received their award.
3. The winner must nominate at least 7 other blogs for an award.
4. The winner must place links to those blogs on their own blog.
5. The winner must leave a message on the blogs of the people they’ve nominated.

Drum roll please.

I make my one award to my niece Dana who is living and working down in Australia. She doesn’t post very much (hint to you Dana) but what she does say is very interesting to me. She is one of my top three nieces and the oldest as well as being one smart cookie. Dana and her two sisters, Mary, and Jillian are all smart as whips and are sweet as can be, most of the time, at least when they are around their dweeby uncle. Of course I’m prejudiced, but I’m also right.