Blogging for blogging's sake, part two

I'm trying to decide if I want to give up blogging or at least give up NaBloPoMo. It was gads of fun while I had friends doing it with me and we read and commented on each other's blogs. But part of the reason my blog title says, "comments optional" is because when I first started blogging outside of Myspace, I found that there were lots of bloggers who seem to be people who need lots of attention and comments on their blogs are practically required and they snub you if you don't play along. Wow...that was a long run-on sentence, but I guess it's ok.
 I did not know at first that there was etiquette involved in the whole comments thing. I usually did my reading of blogs while lying in bed before falling asleep and because I usually had my laptop up on it's end, reading it while I laid on my side, it was very difficult to comment. Commenting required sitting up and typing and then lying back down. I only commented on those blogs which really made me think or struck a nerve. I was blissfully unaware that I was breaking any rules or etiquette.
That first year in NaBloPoMo I was surrounded by a bunch of "mommy bloggers" that all thought they were the cleverest, funniest, smartest mommy bloggers around. Many of them were quite caught up with themselves and my question was always the same....where are your kids. Those delightful kids that you write about everyday are obviously not sitting on your lap while you are spending hours on the computer making the perfect blog. And I started to feel quite disdainful toward these perfect strangers who somehow while running a house and family found time to write blogs and comment on blogs and live, breathe and eat blogs. Were they all hoping to make money? or? I never knew because I eventually distanced myself from them. I got tired of seeing their pictures that were starting to seem contrived and having them beg for votes for this or that and then I got really annoyed when they started showing pictures of the mess the children made while they were blogging their lives away. I was a stay-at-home mom while my kids were growing up and I'm not sure I would have ever had the time to blog while my children were babies and toddlers.  I barely had time to myself to go to the bathroom. I did pursue some artistic things, but after the kids were fast asleep in bed.
Over the years I have continued to blog, mostly because I like to write and it's good typing practice, writing practice, grammar practice and hopefully will keep my brain nimble and free from dementia as I grow older. I  don't really write for others and I say I still don't care about comments, but I do think that comments at least let you know that someone is reading your writing. But then do I care that someone is or isn't reading my blog? I often think I don't care, but sometimes I find I do care. So I have no idea what I want to do now with my blog. Do I want to try and start reading other people's blogs again and commenting in an effort to make myself "known" and therefore generate a reader base, or at least an occasional reader base? Will that put me in that same category of the bloggers that annoy me with their needy ways? Do I want to change to just journaling for journaling's sake and leave the reader base out of it all together? I don't know. But I do wonder if this will be my last NaBloPoMo. They have moved to Blogher, which at first I thought was a great idea. Now, I'm not so sure. I don't think I like Blogher. It is way too much stuff on the page with way to many ads and I really have a hard time knowing what to do when I get there. It just seems all jumbled up to me. I have tried several times to go there and make sense of it, but it is much like reading a catalog to me and I've never been able to really read a catalog. They just make my head hurt. I have to look for a specific item if I want the catalog to make sense. And, in the case of Blogher, I have no idea where to start. None. So that is my blogging for blogging's sake tonight. Do I really want to continue with NaBloPoMo? It's just not as much fun as it used to be.

Let's all read some books.

Becky tagged me for this and so I will celebrate my last day of NaBloPoMo with it. I am not going to tag anyone, but feel free to participate if you like.

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

Ok...so that's the meme.

Let me start out by saying that I read mostly non-fiction. I have always preferred it to fiction, although I love John Steinbeck, have read all of his works, and own many of them. I also have read all of the "Bunnicula" series by James Howe, and thoroughly enjoy an occasional cat murder mystery by Lillian Jackson Braun.

I love biographies and history books, such as "The Habsburgs", by Dorothy Gies McGuigan. (Doubleday, 1966). I just really love non-fiction. I do attempt to read fiction, though. I even have a list of things I want to read. I try to remember to look them up so I can get them, but I always forget. Maybe I will join a book club this next year.

So here we go...let's see how many I've read. I know it won't be as many as Becky or Chris.


1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Seriously...I faked reading this for school. Didn't care for it at all.

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
Haven't even read one!

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible
When I got my first Bible, I read it cover to cover. The only frustrating part for me at the time was that there were mentions in the Old Testament to other books, which were not available to me. (or anyone?)

7. Wuthering Heights
I started this book so many times. The movie was a little better, but again...not my style.

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Gosh, I never even heard of this one.

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
I went through a Charles Dickens phase in which I read several of his books. I even enjoyed most of them.

11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
And "Little Men" and "Eight Cousins" which I have also.

12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
I own a copy of the "Complete Works of Shakespeare". It was published in 1890. It is one of my collection of old books. I haven't read it because the pages are brittle and I don't want them to break. Maybe I will do another blog on some more of my old books.

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19. The Time Travelers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
It's on my to-do list.

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby -- F Scott Fitzgerald
I don't know why I never finish this book.

23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Darryl finished it. I didn't.

25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
On my list.

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Also on my list.

27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31. Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy
On my list.

32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
My kids have all read this, why haven't I?

34. Emma – Jane Austen

35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim Golden
I really want to read this one.

40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
It took me years, but I finally read this one.

42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47. Far from the Madding Crowd -- Thomas Hardy

48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martell

52. Dune – Frank Herbert

53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60. Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac

67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72. Dracula – Bram Stoker

73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson

74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson

75. Ulysses - James Joyce

76. The Bell Jar - Sylivia Plath

77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78. Germinal – Emile Zola

79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82. Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell

83. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87. Charlotte's Web - EB White

88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90. The Faraway Tree collection - Enid blyton

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery

93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


I think my count is 27. Not too bad. Maybe I will make a new list for myself.
I have to admit there are several on here that I didn't even know existed, so I will have to go check them out and see what I can find.
,
And with that...
NOVEMBER is OVER! NABLOPOMO is complete! Yay!

It's November!

I can't believe it's November already! Time just flies these days and sometimes it makes me just a little queasy. Pretty soon it will be 2011 and another year will be gone. I remember being a kid and thinking that 2000 was soooooooooooo far away. 2000 was supposed to be in the way future with spaceships being a common form of travel. We were supposed to be living on the moon and other planets. Life was supposed to be way different than life as we knew it in the fifties and early sixties.

I suppose life is really quite different in a lot of ways. We aren't traveling by space-ship, but we are doing a lot of traveling by computer. You can see almost anything in the world on the computer and find almost any little piece of information about almost any subject. It's amazing really. News is available 24/7.

When I was young the only news on video was what we got at the movie theater. There were newsreels before the movies and they covered the most exciting or interesting stories of the week or month. Television changed all that and the major networks each had a news team and nightly newscasts to keep us informed of things happening around the world and at home. You could find out important news on the same day or nearly the same day. That's changed again with the invention and improvement of the home computer and the speeds at which we can access the internet now. Broadband means most computers are on all or most of the time and news travels pretty fast these days. Something can happen here in Tacoma and if it's important enough it can be around the world before the reporters for the newspapers even get back to their desks.

Computers weren't common in the home even when my kids were little and certainly not when I was young. We didn't even have television until I was about 9 or 10. In those days television was pretty much controlled by the adults in the household. Most households only had one television in those days. Children never had television in their rooms. These days you can even get television on your computer, completely eliminating the need for a separate television set. I imagine in the next few years that will result in a nice hybrid between televisions and computers and eventually eliminate the need for having both. I know they are talking about it already. It will be interesting to see the changes in the computing and information highways in the next few years. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when my grandchildren get to be the age I am now. I notice they aren't making any movies about it yet. Maybe mid-century they will come out with a "3001-Space Odyssey". Maybe we will really be traveling in space by then. Or maybe we will still just be traveling over the wires, completely eliminating the need for face to face contact and everyday conversation. Maybe the "talkies" will go back to being silent. Who knows?

Best.

I like this theme but I have no idea what to do with it. I could post my best pictures, best blogs, best recipes or best whatevers. Of course they would be completely subjective choices made by the person who produced them so does that really qualify them as "best". ??

It could be the best efforts I've made (and then failed at the goal) or the best way to avoid things I don't want to do. There are so many directions a person could take with this theme. I'm still thinking about it.

In the meantime I want to figure out how to clean out my blog files at Myspace. I want to make a collection of some of what I consider to be my "best" blogs and I also want to have easy access by cataloging them somehow. For now I have to just pick a date and run forward or backward through them to find what I want. I'm thinking that was probably the idea behind tags, but I didn't get the whole "tag" thing for a long time. I just didn't pay attention to its usefulness.

For today I will leave you with the very FIRST blog I ever wrote. Things have changed a lot since I wrote this one. I am no longer on graveyard. I am really beginning to hate my job. Well, let me qualify that. I love my work. I enjoy very much the actual work of what I do. I'm just really hating the place in which I do it. ARGGGHHH.

So here you go. The very first blog I wrote. Not my best. Not my worst.

Trying out the blog - The Invisible Mo's MySpace Blog | Mo's Blog


P.S.
I made my own NaBloPoMo badge for my blog. I didn't know how to change the text color, but I'm still happy with it.