Socializing — Page 5 — You are in My World Now

I’ve got to get myself into a boat!

August 10, 2007 by Tricia

I’m still trying to find a way to go boating this year. We’ve been invited to a friends house tomorrow night and they live out in the middle of no where … I think on a lake. If I’m lucky maybe I’ll find myself in a canoe tomorrow evening or Saturday morning.

I just adore canoing and I’m so upset that I haven’t gone for a few years. I swear I was born in a canoe. There’s photos of me in canoes and boats when I was so young that I have no memory of it. That’s why I say I must have been born in a canoe because there’s certainly photographic evidence that I’ve been enjoying them most of my life!

Well if I don’t get to go boating this weekend I know that on September first I’ll be on a boat. A cruise boat! My brother made reservations for our whole family to go on a Toronto dinner boat cruise on September first. That should be fun. It’s not a canoe but it’ll be fun. Dinner, drinks, getting together with my family – and a boat. Yeahhh.

Blogging – getting organized and Schmoozing

July 20, 2007 by Tricia

As many of you likely know I have a number of blogs.

The majority of my blogs are well over a year old – so don’t be thinking I created my blogs to make money. No, I created them to divide up the various topics that I was interested in talking about regularly into blogs of their own.

When I first did that, and every time that I mention that I did that people think I might have cut my readership down by spreading out my blogs. I haven’t. I’ve increased readership all round because those that are only interested in particular topics can focus on the blogs that I created about those niche topics rather than digging from one or two main blogs that talk about ALL the things I enjoy or that I’m passionate about.

As my blogs have gained in readership I’ve been spending more time developing the sites and interacting with those who leave comments. This has actually taken time away from blogging and has made it harder for me to post in some of the blogs on a regular basis.

When I wasn’t quite as busy I’d take the time to write up a few extra draft posts on each site that I could use whenever I needed or set in advance to auto-publish so that the blogs always had at least one post a day.

I was to get organized and start doing that again. It really helps!

If this sounds like a good idea to you, I think what those of us with multiple blogs need to do is set aside at least one or two hours each day to write up a couple of extra posts on a few of our blogs. In no time at all you’ll have a stalk of draft posts just waiting to be published.

When most of your blogs have some drafts backed up you can then take a bit more time to get out and visit other bloggers sites or spend some time promoting your sites on directories.

One of my blogging friends, RennyBA recently gave me a Schmoozing Award the other day. I don’t think he gave it to me because I buzz around promoting my sites. I think it was more because I try to build communities with my blogrolls and make posts like this every once in a while with the aim of helping others with their blogging. Now if he’d given me this award last year it would have been for commenting because I think I regularly visited about 200 sites a day leaving comments on most!

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Help your self with posting and organizing your time by writing up some extra posts that you can save as drafts when you either have the time or when you are in a writing mode. Believe me, it will give you more time to schmooze and promote your site … or simply to relax!

My Niece’ first successful sleep over

July 20, 2007 by Tricia

This past weekend my brother in law, sister in law and their young daughter dropped in for a visit and ended up staying overnight.

I wasn’t super thrilled to have unexpected house guests but I did end up having a nice time. I was actually able to spend quite a bit of quality time with my young niece.

I didn’t know this, but she’s been getting scared lately when she’s gone to friends houses for sleep overs. The week before she’d even ended up calling her mom at 3 in the morning to come pick her up.

Not being aware of her fear of sleeping in strange places I’d made up one of our spare bedrooms with kids bedding and made it all nice for her. When I told her mom what I’d prepared she didn’t think that my niece would end up sleeping alone but to everyones surprise she did.

It could be that she was in a relatives house or the fact that I’d taken the time to make sure the room was made up nice for her … either way it was her first time sleeping on her own in our house and she felt so proud of herself when she got up in the morning.

It made me feel proud too to have helped her through a phase. Well I hope she did, maybe she’ll have more success on her next sleep over at a friends.

Planning our family reunion

July 17, 2007 by Tricia

I’m helping to plan our family get together that’s set for the end of August and I spent about two hours last night trying to find Dinner Theaters in Toronto. Surprisingly there aren’t as many as I would have thought there would be.

My brothers and sister, their kids, kids spouses and or dates are all getting together for at least four days of jam packed fun! The three of us that are in the Toronto area are working together to plan all the things we’ll be doing. Along with going to a Blue Jays baseball game, we’ll be going to a dinner theater, on a dinner boat cruise and having a huge barbecue.

It should be a fun time!

We’ve got 6 people coming from Vancouver … well they’ll actually be coming from their Orlando rental home because they will be vacationing in Florida the week before our get together, then I think there’s 4 from Ottawa, 4 from Barrie and 12 from the Toronto area. That’s 26 people! I hope we can get some group discounts for some of the events we’re planning! That’d be cool.

Do you have a family reunion this year? Are you looking forward to it?

The worst border we ever had

July 13, 2007 by Tricia

Last year about this time we lost faith in our Korean border. She’d been living with us for a few weeks when she decided to take the weekend trip to New York that the English as a Second language school she was attending offered.

Trouble was – she went to New York as planned, but didn’t come home on the Monday when we expected her to return. We were upset. We were scared for her!

Did she ever make it to the meeting area in Toronto? Did she get on the bus? Did something happen in New York? We called the school and the agency that had matched us up and no one new where she was. The guy at the agency said “she’s a young girl, she’s probably just out having fun”. Yeah, but the contract we signed with the agency made us responsible for her so if something happened …

We finally found out – when she called us on the Tuesday evening while still in New York, that she’d contacted a new york ticket broker on her own and got there by her own means and met friends who were visiting the US.

We were mad. She’d worried us and lied to us. She had told us all the week before that she was taking the trip with the school. Even that Friday morning as she left she told me she was meeting the other students for the bus to New York at a particular time.

After that it was all lies. She broke things and didn’t tell us, lied to us daily and even tried to steal food when she thought we weren’t looking. It’s not like we weren’t feeding her well already …

She pretty much finished us with our foreign border experiment. I know most people have good experiences but she was a head case. She even told one of our neighbors that she was was very rich and had body guards here in Canada … uh, no. No you didn’t.

I still get shivers just thinking of what she put us through.