The Results Are (Finally) In!

Who will get this mug???

Several (ahem,) weeks ago, I started a contest for the best spam comments. I was going to post the contest winner forever ago, but as long as I can blame the snow we’ve recently received, I will. It’s not often that it snows so bad that it sends the universities into full closure; and I get to milk this excuse along for quite some time.

The spam has been especially strong amongst the blogger-types as of late; it seems as if all the spam-bots of Twitter have decided to take a completely different approach, and move platforms.

Today alone, I rejected some interesting spam comments of my own:

“This paragraph is in fact a fastidious one it assists new the web people,

who are wishing in favor of blogging. Visit my page for cheap Oakleys.”

I think that’s the first time anyone has called me fastidious. And:

“When thesе trоubles ѕtart

to ѕet in, men will сome aсross themselves going tο the wаshroom a number of occаsions a night, getting couple of

reѕtful nightѕ of sleep, anԁ typically

locate themselνes гeаlly fгustrated oг embaгrassed.”

I think the last one was supposed to be some type of poem, although I can’t be sure… That being said, no comment yet has beat the hermit crab saga of a few weeks ago.

Several of you submitted comments of your own for the contest, and they were awesome! After a week, I asked my two judges (yes, we had a panel) Josh and Lance (check out his blog AND his new book) to help me weigh in on the best comment submitted.

So, without further ado, our honorable mention goes to: The Six-Fingered Monkey! His spam comment attempted to lure him with potential ways to block further spam comments.

And, our winner is…. Alex from Late Enough! Her spam submission involved a rather impressive level of insult before being directed to a website for cheap Nikes. Congratulations, Alex! Go ahead and hit me up via email (on my Contact page) and I’ll grab the information I need to send you your “Best Spam Comments’ coffee/tea mug.

Of course, if you would like your own mug, you can check out my Zazzle store over here à. I even have a pin us moms can wear for when we temporarily go on strike. I figured it’s much easier to wear a pin than it is to carry a picket sign…

I want to send a big thank you to everyone who played along! I know we talk of this time and again, but the fact remains… I have made amazing friends through the blogging community that I would have otherwise not made. Even when the spam and stupidity starts to weigh me down, I can remember just how much fun and inspiration the interwebs delivers to us each and every day.

On Non-Resolutions and #OneHourforMe

Image Source

This year, I started joking around on Twitter that I planned to only make resolutions about things I know I can do. Well, I was only half joking. I’ve actually been doing this for years, and privately I call them non-resolutions.

I’ve often despised the true resolutions—especially New Year’s resolutions. There’s nothing like making a slightly drunk statement of all the grandiose things you plan to accomplish in the coming year in the presence of those friends and family who will take occasion to remember and mock you for not living up to your own magnificent expectations.

In other words, I think failure is written all over such things. And I know from personal experience. There was the great ‘stop smoking’ for New Year’s experiment for J and I and 2001, and that lasted about eleven hell-filled hours. Want to know what made me stop smoking in 2002? Morning sickness. Now that’s an incentive, folks. The turn of a calendar is just not incentive enough for most people. This blog was a New Year’s non-resolution, however, and it’s lasted nearly three years. I know that making a non-resolution, not on New Year’s Eve—but at the start of the New Year itself—is a much better way to go.

What is a non-resolution, you may ask? That’s complicated. Enter irrational Sarah-logic, stage right. For me, it means that instead of changing a bad behavior or breaking a habit (which, I think, is much easier to accomplish some other time during the year—like the summer, when things are slower and less people are watching you, and there are more things to distract you), you choose to take something that you’ve been relatively successful at and make it better.

That’s a non-resolution. When I started this blog, I had been writing, privately, for years. I took something I already did with some level of success (as in, I can often string sentences together, more often than not), and tried to make it better. And, you see, it worked. I’m certain that if you can follow this train of thought, you can make it work for you, too. Kindred spirits and all that.

So, my non-resolution this year (and I have given this quite a bit of thought) is to make sure I spend some time on me (who ISN’T good at that), but with the added bit of not feeling guilty about it. That’s going to be the important piece.

I’ve been working for quite a bit on spending more of my time on me. It’s easy for me (and for others, to be certain) to spend every waking moment on getting kids to school and practices and appointments, working 9 or 9 and a half hours straight at work, and then coming home and doing dinner, dishes, laundry, homework, grading, and all that… until you either fall asleep on the couch or crash into bed. So, it was important for me to make the decision to spend a bit of time doing something good for me—exercising, watching The Walking Dead, jumping on Twitter, writing, etc., and I’ve been able to make that happen, for the most part.

Now, I’m going to make it better. I am going to dedicate one hour of each day to me. I can do whatever strikes me. I can write. I can paint my toes. I can exercise. I can crash on the couch and watch television (and GOODNESS, there’s going to be so much good TV to watch this spring—I almost need a TV Guide, but that’s another post). I can do whatever strikes me in the moment. AND… I am not going to let the guilt creep in. I am not going to entertain thoughts of what I could be doing, how I could be more productive (answering emails, wiping down counters, you name it), what that one hour each day may ‘cost’ me later on. Let’s face it, there’s always more crap to be done. I’m never going to have a moment where I think to myself, “Well, everything’s done. I can relax now.” That just doesn’t happen.

But I can have that moment where I tell myself, “Take a break. Everything’s under control for the moment.” That’s something that I can make happen. And then I can take my hour of me-time, guilt-free.

What about you? Do you have trouble with resolutions? What would your non-resolution be? What do you do well, but could make better? Would you like to participate in #OneHourforMe?

A Year in Review

2012 has provided us with one helluva wild ride. Then again, I don’t know that there’s been a single year of our lives—since J and were together, at least—that hasn’t been a wild ride.  That being said, the reason I started this blog nearly three years ago was to reflect on our lives—to find the positive and remember it through the hard times. I lost that once, and I never want to travel through that darkness again.

So, let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights of 2012—as featured on this blog or not—and then I’ll be ready to start thinking about 2013… although, if you caught me on Twitter last night, you know that I’ll only be making resolutions I know I can keep. Like spending more time on Pinterest.

In January, I mentally powered through an minor PA relapse. Writing about it gave me the chance to connect with other individuals who suffer from RA, PA, and Lupus. We traded notes on meds, exercises, shortcuts and foods.  I’ve been med free for quite some time now (since July 2009), and I can attribute most of it to J’s enforcement of a positive attitude and exercising Every. Damn. Day. Which, at first, made me feel like I was going to die. I hate freaking exercise.

In February, J and I took a weekend trip to KC and I started writing for Sprocket Ink! My favorite posts to write in the last year certainly had to be about the Hunger Games Haters and the Zombie Apocalypse. Also, last February, I began to take a stand against the teacher who was making Ant’s life a living hell.

In March, I first starting preaching the benefits of finding your Twitter tribe, and wrote an SI article that started the phrase ‘Hooker Powers’ amongst my friends. It was awesome.

April brought a declaration from J that I need to write about him more often, and Alex from Late Enough and I shared a mutual hatred of birds.  Also? The Bloggess released the funniest book ever.

May marked the one year anniversary of the tornado which devastated my hometown in 2011. Steph from Musings of a Sarcastic Mind  started #OperationPlayMore and I joined in. J was still on me to write more about him.

June brought vacation. Because there’s no better time to go to Disney World than when there’s a tropical storm. No lie! The rain keeps the temperatures down and the lines away. It was fantastic to know that it was 83 degrees in Florida while it was 106 in Missouri. Plus? We totally got to see a rocket launch and Atlantis make its way home. Also, there was the broken shower incident of 2012… I still hold Mike Holmes responsible…

July was hot. And unbearable. And tried to kill me, since June didn’t get the job done.

In August, I spent a week in Chicago sans-guys. Granted, it was for work, but it was awesome. Good food. My first official train ride.  

In September, which is one of the busiest months of the year for me (I know, I know… I say it about almost every month) we openly admitted to K’s OCD diagnosis—which had been a summer-long process, and to make me feel better, the Twitter gave me a vacuum. Again, this is why the Twitter is awesome! Okay, maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way, but close enough. Oh, and I totally copped to believing in ghostesses, and started a group with like-minded women who want to travel to ghosty places, learn to ghost-hunt, and drink. Mostly the traveling and drinking bit, I bet. Then Noa from Oh, Noa told me she wanted to come and investigate my house (she totally was a ghost hunter before) and I didn’t find it creepy at all.

October and November both are kind of a blur. I spent most of my time writing the grant. I also had some funny moments (well, funny for J, not for me) and Jesse took pity on me and sent me some Rock Star Wine! 

  

In December… well, I officially admitted I have let myself go (although I’ve been able to rectify a bit of that over the last week of vacation—I even gave myself a manicure on Saturday—a manicure!) and then… well, I think it was hard for many of us to get in the Christmas spirit this year—especially if we had elementary-aged children.  Each year, the four of us do something or make something to remind us of the Christmas spirit. This year, I’m happy to say we participated in #28ActsofKindness.

Why 28? Because there were 28 victims that day, at least in my mind. I don’t believe in monsters, but I do believe we have a massive gap in mental health care services in our nation today. I also told you that I am (still) waiting in the Common Ground.

And there you have it. Not an exceptional year, per se, but an adventure, nonetheless. Every day with these three guys (and Super-Sophie) is an adventure, to be sure!  I’m looking forward to 2013… but I suppose that’s fodder for a post tomorrow. 

What is(are) the highlight(s) from your 2012? And what are you looking forward to in 2013? 

We’re Not Going to Count this as My Official 300th Post…

Yes, I am still alive. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the month of October has not been the greatest month for blog-writing, because I’m inundated in many other aspects of my life right now. No worries, though. Things are good, even if they are so busy I literally collapsed on the floor last night because I was so freaking tired, and fell asleep there. For nearly two hours. While my husband enjoyed the comedic scene.

Asshole. He watched me pull a Sims, and did nothing to help me out…

This is me. Just not as a man, dressed in a tux.

 I did want to share one of the funnier Ant stories of recent days, and it says a lot about how I’m spending what little free time I have.

It was debate night. It was debate time. I had my beer, my Reeses Peanut Butter cups, and my phone with the Twitter pulled up. Since J had the remote (as usual) I casually told him to change it from whatever SyFy thing he and Ant were watching to PBS for the debate.

Which is when And said, “Oh no! Not this again!”

Ant has been learning a lot about the state of Missouri in 4^th grade. They’re currently discussing the Missouri Compromise, Missouri as a slave state, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln (sadly, not as a vampire hunter). So J tried to convince him debate-watching was cool because presidential debates really took off with the Lincoln-Douglass debates.

That didn’t help, as it turns out.

Ant replied, “It’s not the debates that bother me. It’s the yelling! She yells at the zombies when they’re on TV. She yells at the baseball players when they’re on the TV. And she yells at the presidential candidates when they’re on the TV. I can’t take any more of the yelling! I have to watch it in the other room!”

For a moment I felt chagrined by all my ‘yelling’. And then I realized I was right there, in the same very room, where the two of them were critically analyzing my TV viewing habits…

What does this mean?