Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Tag: post (Page 1 of 2)

What if I didn’t?

I have been sitting here for 2 hours barely being productive.  And not being blog productive.

I took yesterday completely off from the computer being Mothers day and all.  Saw my Mom and spent time with my wife.

A good day but no post written for Monday.  I have squandered my queue of Pre Written posts from the challenge, I need to spend a week and crank out 6 or 7.

So I have been closing windows and writing creative challenges and trying to figure out what to post on this blog.  And then I thought, “What if I didn’t post anything today?”  Would it matter?  I recently decided to bag a regular post on Wednesdays so that I could work on my other blog Cantankerous Old Coots, as well as fiction and  ebooks.

And you know what? Wednesday didn’t hurt me very much at all.  I still get a bunch of traffic and it seems ok.  Even on Sunday when I don’t turn on the computer at all until 9 pm or so isn’t doing bad.  So would cutting out Monday be a problem?

Actually I think it would.  Maybe later I can change that but not now.  4 months is not the time to slack off that bad.  I will just have to start writing Mondays post on Saturday!

Anyway, just me ranting today.  I am way too tired for this right now.  Have a good Monday everyone!

-Justin

Please comment, digg or stumble upon below!

A Dream, A Post, A Comment. The New Psychoanalysis.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a strange dream that I had.  At the end, I said, “I am not sure what any of it meant at the time or has to say about my sanity, lack of it, or what can be interpreted by it.”  I also asked for comments.

My new friend Jayne Sherwood (of whom I cannot find a web site or anything but a twitter account of @jayneEsherwood please update me Jayne and I will link it in) Said in a fantastic comment:

It suggests that you will be in receipt of a great amount of something good, which says you are giving much good yourself, the shovel, symbolically may suggest digging up issues you may find difficult to deal with however, this could be supported my a strong feminine presence in the form of a cat! (in the spiritual sense, cats mean strong feminine presence). The old clothes could be that this is not a new situation that is being revisited and that there could be underlying currents that you would like to sort out.The old girlfriend may possibly be where the issue lies and the pet box may be where the strong feminine presence will need to be put and kept out of the way of your moving forward with your great gift. This is not a fact it is merely a suggestion based on spiritual meaning and symbolism.

So here is an interpretation by me of that dream from Jayne’s comment.  The Shovel digging up issues is probably correct.  I have been “digging” up many things from my past and getting rid of them lately.

I have used this business that I am creating to give all of the crap that was dished  up by my parents for the past 35 years the boot.  I am sick and tired of them being able to control me.

Last summer if a psychologist asked me what I felt like my solid answer would have been a 12 year old kid.  I was 34 years old with 3 kids, one with major health problems, 2 cars and a mortgage and I still felt like a 12 year old kid.  Scared to try things, scared to get out and do anything for fear of failure.

I was always told I could do whatever I wanted but I was so scared to fail and disappoint my dad, that I did nothing.  That still continued until I decided that they had no hold on me any more.  I know, that took a long time, but there you are.  Now I am free of my parents, they are Grandparents now, and I am no longer under their control.

I believe the strong female presence of the cat could point to my wife.  She is currently pregnant with our 4th child and I can’t think of anything stronger about a woman than having a child.

Of course I need to get rid of the cat, so that would say strongly that it is not my wife but I would go back to my mother.  The only other females that have anything to do with my life are my daughters, 10 and 4.

So I am going to say my mother would be the cat I need to get rid of, put in a container, and send away.  All for the same reasons I need a shovel.

Old clothes, I thought was just to not ruin something new while disposing of the cat but now it probably means that it is the same old thing that has been going on for 35 years.

As for the old girlfriend, not an issue at all.  I have been married for 12 years and dated my wife for 5 years before that.  All of the old girlfriend stuff is long since gone.  There was never one serious enough to have any residual hangups about.

I can only hope that the great amount of something good relates to my blog and the money that I hope to make from it.  I need the mental presence to keep up with the site and keep it working like it should so it is viable as an income source and I can continue to stay home.

So that was quite the insight into a seemingly silly and inconsequential dream.  I am glad that Jayne found it and left the comment.  Dream interpretations can be very interesting.

I would love to hear what you have to say in the comment section below.  Don’t forget, Saturday Fiction is coming tomorrow!

-Justin

My Blog Is Calling And I Must Go!

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the mountains.  How the mountains were calling me and John Muir. During the course of that post I said that my blog is calling and I must go, paraphrasing John Muir of course.  I had said that it would be a great t-shirt.  It still would be.

Today I wanted to write about commitments.  I know there are posts all over Blogistan about how to divide your time and do everything that you want to.  This is only partially about that.  We all have our commitments to our families, wives, husbands, kids etc.  We have work commitments.  We have housework commitments.  There are church and community commitments.  And, if we want a piece of this wonderful internet pie, there are commitments to our websites and blogs.

My blog is my second mistress.  My laptop is my first mistress and I dearly love the internet.  It is hard to budget the time to sit down and write and read blogs and comment on blogs and take care of the kids and cook dinner and do laundry and mop the floor, and entertain the wife, and on and on and on.  So where do you dig out the time to write?

The answer is wherever you can.  Forgo TV for a night, or a couple of hours.  Forgo watching the kids go to sleep.  Go to bed a bit later or get up earlier.  Ben over at 6aliens.com and James at the infopreneur both talk about this.  Carve out the time for your blog and your website.  There is a lot of time devoted to growing your blog and sometimes the web design gets pushed back.  Hard to read, cluttered sites do not bring back traffic.  Work on your site as well.

Tell your friends, “I can’t.  My Blog is calling and I must go.”  Tell your wife (only once in a while), “My Blog is calling and I must go.”  (Flowers smooth that over if you do it too much).  You can tell your kids the same thing, once in a while.

The hard part is figuring out when it is actually beneficial to just shut the laptop and let your blog call.  Devote everything you possibly can to your site so that it will make you money.  Throw everything you can at it so that you can have more time with your family when it is keeping its own head up.  It will still call to you, but not as loud.

When you are at that point, you can take off and go on fabulous vacations because you will be one of the pros like David Risley, or Darren Rowse, or John Chow even.  Your blog will still be calling, you will still go, but you can go from around the world.  John Chow likes to have all of his stuff online so he can access it from anywhere.  WordPress is like that as well.

My blog is calling and I must go, for I want to be a Pro.  I need the cash.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below:

-Justin

Do you eat the dirty cheese or just post it?

The other day I was cooking hamburgers on the BBQ grill.  Nothing new, I do it all of the time.  I finally get to the end of the process, the time to add cheese.  Me being me, I fumbled one of the pieces of cheese.  I could only stand there and look at that Kraft Single lying there on the ground in front of the grill.  I bent down and picked up the cheese.  As I looked at it, and noticed the bits of dirt and rocks that were on the cheese I had an idea for a blog post.

It is pathetic but I thought “Is it better to just brush off the dirt or go back inside and get a new piece?”  And then, “Hey that would be a good blog post.”  Sad, but I guess it shows my commitment to my blog now.

It didn’t take me very long to toss that piece of cheese and get a new one, but if that was my last piece I would have brushed that sucker off and ate it.

With that mindset I started thinking about blog posts.  If you have a crappy post, do you brush it off and rewrite it or do you scrap it altogether and write a new one.  My thought is that it depends on the post.  I realize that is a cop out but I think there are posts that just need to be scrapped and those that can be resurrected with a good rewrite.

There are posts that all of us have in both categories.  I think that the hardest thing to do is to decide which posts need to be scrapped.  Almost any post can be rewritten and fixed.  I can only hope that any of the posts that I have published up to now are not in that need to be scrapped pile.

What do you all think?  Are there posts in your published file that need to be redone?  I have read many things that advocate revisiting posts that need rewriting, I know I have at least one.  Just don’t change your permalinks.

Any thoughts?  Please comment below!  Also I have started a newsletter!  Please sign up here if you are interested!

Fiction Saturday tomorrow!  Have a great weekend!

Justin

PS the cheeseburgers were fantastic….

« Older posts