Big Weekend Doings

• Clearly I live a very rock-star life; not only am I the mayor of two Dunkin' Donuts locations (on Foursquare), I am now also the mayor of Rite Aid and Norbeck Country Club. You know you wish you were me.
• Mimi had her first real babysitting job last night. I am now the mom of a kid old enough to work. 
• I fixed my hair color. Yes, this is newsworthy because I've been sweating my hair for months now--I've colored it about 10 times in the past 3 months trying to get the orange out. There are some things in life worth spending money on, but for me, hair just isn't one of them. So I'm excited.
• I only had 70 cents in fines at the library.

That's pretty much it. Don't you wish you were me?

Here's a Tip: If you Have to Hire a Mommy Coach, Don't Have Kids

It's been a while since I've seen a really good, amusing Best Parent Ever article. Well, until I saw this one, that is. Where to even begin? Now it's not enough to simply purchase a $350 stroller; you also have to pay a "mommy coach" $150 an hour to research which is the best one? Here's my free tip: if a stroller was dangerous, it wouldn't be on the market--choose one that's easy to fold up with one hand.

And sorry but you know I have to go here:

"Both my husband and I have intense professional jobs," Blair said. "A lot of the things April does you can also do yourself, but it does take a lot of time and we just did not have it. This is a huge industry and you can get sucked into all kinds of things and April gave us advice only on those specific things we needed."

Ok, two things:
1) You don't need to "research" any of this stuff. It is not rocket science and there's a 99.9999% chance nothing you buy will kill or harm your baby, and if it does, no amount of research could have prevented it.
2) If you "just don't have time" to research baby products, how are you going to have time to take care of the actual baby?

Sigh.

Then again, I can't say I'd advocate for going to the opposite extreme and having a do-it-yourself delivery either. What, and miss the beauty of the epidural? Are you kidding?

Why I Blog Redux

I've blogged about this before--the whole why do I blog thing--but if there was a law against blogging about the same thing over and over again, there wouldn't be very many blogs out there, would there be? I'm thinking about this now as a blog post I wrote on my other blog--posted at midnight last night (or do you call midnight "today"?) was picked up by Social Media Today and is getting tons of traffic. Over 2,000 views in a few hours, in fact--which, is traffic I NEVER see on my actual blog. There the same post has gotten 72 views. Why am I rambling about this, over on this blog where we couldn't care less about stuff like this? Because I'm laughing to myself at one of the comments on the Social Media Today version of the post--a very big-name PR/social media person is calling me out for causing panic with my post:

Kudos for suggesting paranoia is necessary, but when was the last time risk management was not undertaken at a business?

I'm laughing because I have no fucking idea what risk management even is and I certainly have no idea when it was or was not undertaken at a business. I wrote my post about Facebook randomly deleting profiles because I am genuinely curious about what the answers are to the questions I pose in that post, and, moreso, because I got to use the phrase "metric shit ton." When do you get to use choice phrases like that in business writing that someone is paying you to do? Approximately never.

So do I blog because I can push phrases like "metric shit ton" out to the masses on occasion? Maybe. I honestly don't know. I've been thinking about why I blog more and more recently, as my posts have started getting picked up by bigger outlets. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I mean, on one hand, it's good, right--why write the stuff if nobody is going to see it, right? But then again, wait a minute. I used to get paid to write articles for people's newsletters. Or copy for their websites. Now I write for free and businesses make money off what I write, but I make nothing.

Not to incur the wrath of BlogHer's CEO again (oh, wait--Echo screwed up my comments so you can't see that last time I posted about Blogher ads one of the co-founders actually left me several comments--thanks Echo comments which used to be free JS-Kit comments but now I had to pay $10 and my old comments disappeared...but I digress) but I have been running Blogher ads on my other blog since last June and this is how much money I've earned so far: ZERO DOLLARS. If I spend an hour painstakingly waiting for my account summary to load in Blogher ad's mind-bogglingly slow revenue-tracking system I can see that I've earned maybe $30, but have yet to receive a check or anything. But anyway--that's on me, not them--last time I blogged about this I got so mad I told them I didn't want to run the ads anymore, but then thought maybe I was being hasty since I get some minimal level of blog traffic from my posts that they frequently feature in their ads so I said never mind. But this is another facet of the "why do I blog" thing--if I'm truly not blogging for money, how do I feel about others making money off my posts but not me? Truthfully, not very great. But I"m the one enabling it to happen--to try to increase my traffic I willingly stick my RSS feed out there wherever possible--but now that my posts are getting picked up more I don't know how much I love it. Or maybe I do love it?

I guess it's all about what you want to get out of blogging. If what I want to get is exposure and fodder for my resume, it's good for me when others pick up or promote my posts. And ultimately this is what's happening--a few years ago I was a stay-home mom with an 8-year gap in my resume and now I'm a "thought leader" because I spend inordinate amounts of my personal time blogging and online in general. What's not to like about that, right? But then again, when I was a stay home mom, I was also a freelance writer and if I wrote something, I got paid for it. Paid a lot per hour. I think where I'm feeling conflicted is that I could conceivably do more freelancing now--and get paid a decent amount to do it. But I'm too busy working full time--AND BLOGGING. So, in other words, I don't want to spend my free time writing for pay and dealing with the stuff that goes along with that--deadlines, criticism, not being able to use phrases like "metric shit ton" if I want, etc. I prefer to spend my free time writing and not getting paid for it.

Huh? I gotta think about this. At least blogging is cheaper than therapy, right?