Blow, baby, blow!

If only babies could blow their own noses. I know I'm not the first parent to wish this and I certainly won't be the last.

My poor little cutie one has a blocked honker. Her nose is stuffed up, so she can't breathe, so she blows out her binky at night so she can breathe. Then she's sad because she doesn't have her binky. So then you give it back to her, which calms her down. But then, her nose is stuffed up ...

So after doing this little dance at 5:00am for a while, I bit the bullet and took her downstairs for the dreaded nose sucking. That bulb-syringe they send home with you from the hospital? It's the Best. Thing. Ever. Only try telling that to your baby. She doesn't even like to have her nose wiped after this weekend.

Let me just say: many tissues were used before the green bulb syringe came out of storage.

At least I'm not writing 2007 on my checks any more, but ...

Are we really this deep into 2008 and I haven't posted anything? Yeah, I guess it's true. Of course, I'm the mom who wrote all her holiday cards after Christmas and then left them in my scrapbook room. They're addressed. They'll be mailed ... but just when, exactly? I went to all the trouble of making them, even dressing my darling daughters in matching outfits for the photo, and have addressed them by hand. By hand!! Not even labels!! I'm telling you, I was doing it all right.
And then ... sigh. The not-mailing of them.

Of course, I have a built-in excuse ... several of them, in fact.
1. I have a baby daughter (she's 7 months old now, so I guess I have 5 months left of this one)
2. I work full-time
3. My house looks like an interior tornado rages weekly (EF-3 on the Fujita Scale, I SWEAR!) and someone's got to make sure we don't get gangrene from the debris!
4. Fill in the blank

I have the stamps. There's really no excuse. I think I'll do it this weekend before the 100 stamps I bought at Costco are obsolete thanks to the U.S. Postal Service raising rates. Again!

Backing Up

Have you noticed that when you're backing out of a parking space -- having first looked both ways to make sure no one's coming -- and you're halfway out, some car will zoom from out of nowhere. But instead of stopping, since you're halfway out of your space, they cut past you? There you are, slamming on the brakes, tossing the kiddies around the interior of the car (okay, kidding, they're strapped into their space-age car seats) just so some rude person can save 1 or 2 seconds?

Didn't people use to wait for people to back out? Didn't we stop, knowing the way past that car was mostly blocked, and that we'd be free to move on after they were done?

It happens everywhere. At Target, at the mall, at church. This morning, it happened to me again at Biscuitville. I was 3/4ths of the way out of the space, narrowly avoiding the lengthy drive thru line, when some car cut IN BETWEEN my car and the drive thru line, while talking on a cell phone.

I have one of those cars with the spare mounted on the rear, and I'm tempted to just keep on going and bump them with my spare. Who has the right of way?

And here's just one more example, pardon my venting, but occasionally I pass a school on a two lane road -- one lane in each direction -- and if I slow down or heaven forbid, stop, to allow a parent who is dropping off a child to enter the school's parking lot, I get cars behind me zooming past and not allowing that turn in. How wrong is that?

ConvergeSouth Saturday, Part 2

The social networking panel was interesting, mostly because it seemed while people liked the idea of Facebook, it doesn't exactly work for professionals. And LinkedIn doesn't seem to be quite as social as Facebook.

There was some good discussion regarding managing your online identity, with the consensus being it's better for you to manage your own brand than to allow others to manage it for you. I was intrigued when Elisa Camahort made the observation that in about 10 years all the kids who have party pictures of themselves on Facebook and MySpace will be the bosses and they might think it's weird if their future employees DON'T have an online presence.

What was really interesting about today's audience for ConvergeSouth was its age. Most of the people in the audience looked like they were 30-35 and up. Now some of it could be because the 20-somethings were all sleeping. After all, it did start at 9am. But what I'm wondering is if they all are so busy doing it that they don't need to come to conferences to learn about and discuss it.

The afternoon discussion around better blogging was really a great conversation led by Ed Cone and James Portzman -- running the gamut from creating a nice-looking blog without hiring a web designer or being one, to finding the topic you're interested in, to having a conversation with your readers. Loved Ed's basic advice:

Have a take, and don't suck.

ConvergeSouth

Just had a great keynote speaker, Elisa Camahort of BlogHer! Really great stories of how bloggers, mainly women, are connecting, sharing, making a living, making a difference and creating a community.

Next panel is social networking -- which I'm interested in as a novice Facebooker.

Tea ... For Me?

I'm the luckiest girl! I have a new coworker who custom blends teas. That's pretty cool, you're thinking. Neat to have a hobby, right?

But she blends serious tea! Custom tea for Hugh Grant! Custom tea for Oscar gift bags! I had read about her new venture in our local media years ago, but now I'm working with her. And she brought me some of her stuff. It smelled like heaven. It's black tea with vanilla, cranberry, orange and cinnamon. She labeled it Stephanie's Blend. She even brought me a thermal tumbler with a loose leaf infuser so I could properly sample the tea.

My mom had picked up the girls, so I brought the tea over to her house. We brewed three tumblers full, poured it into teapots and had the best tea party ever. Now, we drink our tea with milk. It HAS to have milk. Many a mug or cup of our tea has been discarded or abandoned when we go to the fridge and find no milk. Occasionally, when suffering in an office building, we have sprinkled a little powdered creamer in there, but it just about ruins it for us. This tea was so good, it didn't NEED milk. We could have had just the tea alone, and that NEVER happens.

My mom considers me "fancy" because I drink Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast or French Vanilla, while she drinks Lipton but I think the tea from Artisan's Cup may change her mind forever. This stuff was so good, we skipped dinner.

You can drink Stephanie's Blend from Artisan's Cup too. Only it's usually called Carolina Spice. But that can be our little secret.