THE (yes, THE) Blogger Calendar HAS LANDED!
December 9, 2011 By 11 Comments
You know when you’re chatting to a mate and you come up with a WICKED idea, and you’re all “YEAHHHH!!!!! RAWWWRRR!!! AWESOMMMMME!!!!!!”
Well that’s exactly what Tara “Sticky Fingers” Cain and I did at the start of this year. We talked a bit about the blogs we’d found and liked to read, and wondered about “collecting” them all into one place, and finding the faces behind the blogs.
Thus, THE (yes, THE) Blogger Calendar was born.
Tara and I ran round like crazy people, trying to get everyone in the right place for their photos while the conference continued. Tara told people of for turning up at the wrong time, while I told people off for pulling faces at the camera and pointing the wrong way (I can see you when you stick your tongue out or hold a moustache to your face, y’know…). Then Tara liaised her PR skills and gained the support of online photo service Snapfish (www.snapfish.co.uk) by HP who very generously offered to make the calendars for us and print 100 to distribute, while I edited people’s faces to make them look very silly, collected the best of the worst photos into my secret blackmail folder, and feverishly set about editing the “real” photos for the calendar.
Oh how I laughed.
By the way, Snapfish are the world’s largest online photo service with 85 million members, offering quality prints and unlimited photo sharing and storage. Which is pretty cool. (And they didn’t pay me to say that.)
AND NOW HERE IS THE CALENDAR AND HOW TO GET ONE!!!! It’s easy.
First: post a photo of your blog’s inspiration. So, your baby/babies, where you live, your vegetable patch, your novel, your native flag, your phone – whatever you feel is the main subject of your blog.Whatever, it’s entirely up to you.
Second: Post a basic blog CV. In a fashion, it could describe why you chose the photo you did. Explain your blog, the who, the what, the why – your call.
Third: YAYYYY it’s a Linky. You need to do is add your post to the Linky below, either here or over at Sticky’s, and the first 100 in the Linky before 16th December will get themselves a calendar (postage is £1.99. Because you know, give a little, get a little). And you don’t even NEED to have appeared in the calendar to apply for one – it’s open to all! Awesome, yes?
Well it doesn’t end there. Snapfish are also offering you 50% (FIFTY PERCENT) off any of their calendars (excluding post and packaging) for readers of mocha beanie mummy and Sticky Fingers.
Head on over to the Snapfish site, design your calendar with their online tools, and then use the code TARAJAY at the checkout. Hurry up though, the offer is only valid until December 18, 2011. So go now. Go. Go!!
Shut Down
December 7, 2011 By 10 Comments
On Friday, I went to see Trevor. It’s been a long time coming and, quite frankly, I’m running out of options. I’m tired of being so fucking ill all the time, and even when things are seemingly going well, I’m tired of it bubbling under the surface.
Any way, he only went and stirred up a whole ton of shit and remember that stuff I wrote a while back about “noise“? Well fuck me in the eye, it’s so fucking noisy up in here right now I swear I might actually scream until I explode.
Of course, he stirred shit up in a good way; I appreciate that. There’s a whole ton of stuff from years gone by which needed fixing. I’m trying to fix it. WE’RE fixing it. I can’t do it on my own.
Now, the deadline for JMP Christmas orders was Monday just gone. Admittedly, I’ve been all laid back, thinking no one would really order anything. Or, if people did order stuff, it wouldn’t be much. Maybe 20 prints, tops, all orders totalled up. Instead, I’m powering (hah! Powering. That’s a fucking laugh) through about 500 prints, 3 storybooks and an album. Of course, with the usual lashings of really whiny children who have had colds for a month (A MONTH) and are desperately clingy, and then people assuming I have all the time in the world thinking I do nothing but sit around and chat shit all day, and then my shitty little neglected blog, in which I want to write stuff but everything I want to say just seems a load of bollocks.
I am physically shutting down.
I can feel it.
I can feel my senses going numb, giving in to the pressure of trying to absorb everything at top speed (why can’t they just absorb some of the stuff? Why ALL of the stuff?) and feeling like I’m a lifting crane with one bolt that’s just a fraction too loose.
I promised myself I wasn’t going to lose it this year. I said to myself, goddammit, I cannot, CANNOT cope with having yet another Christmas kick my fucking ass. ENOUGH.
This frigging noise which just will not stop is driving me MENTAL. Trevor gave me an MP3 to listen to in the same way I do with Thinking Slimmer (I’ve already listened once – holy crap I’ve never had someone’s voice put me in a subconscious trance so bloody fast) and that’s already becoming my lifeline to sanity.
Whatever the hell that is.
I don’t know if this feeling is shroud-like. I don’t think it is. Though, at the same time, I could just go find a corner, in an abyss of blackness and curl up, letting it absorb me. I would absorb it. Become nothing. Stop functioning, stop time, stop everything.
I really want to shut down.
So why don’t I? Why can’t I? Am I just going through the usual motions? Same old shit? “Yeah, all moms do that, everyone has been where you are, we’ve all felt it…”
Really? Have you? Really? If the option to cease existing (I don’t mean “die”, I just mean literally STOP) was presented to me on a platter for me to have, I think I would take it. Selfish? Yeah ok. Call me what you like, I really don’t care. It makes no difference to me. Personally, I don’t think it’s selfish to want to use any means possible to stop the endless screaming noise in my head.
What’s the opposite of “euphoria”? Is there an opposite? Only, it’s not excitement and happiness, it’s stone cold deadness; the extreme feeling of having the most highest state of nothingness wash over you. Some kind of blankness that pretty much seeps into your every pore, over every inch of you, and consumes you until all that’s left is a living, breathing, blank faced, staring corpse.
That’s what it feels like, I think. The state my body and mind seems to want to escape to. I feel it, washing over me in waves.
I guess that’s a kind of shutting down. I wonder if that’s how I’ll ever get to shut down. Maybe.
In Search of Perfection
December 1, 2011 By 8 Comments
I’m a sap. Despite my colourful mouth and sometimes hard as nails attitude (that’s my defence mechanism, I swear to God), I’m actually quite a sap. It comes from wearing that bastard heart of mine on my sleeve.
I wish I would’t, it becomes a right pain in the, er, heart.
A while ago I posted about becoming good friends with people, and searching for the right friend, and other soppy hit like that. Over the last 4 years or so, I’ve made plenty of new friends, which is wonderful. I’ve made some awesome friends, people who I think, quite frankly, are totally kick-ass. I’ve also lost friends, which has made me really sad. Drifted apart, changed circles (damn you social media networking bastarding shit), fallen out…it’s all taught me a lot of things.
Annoyingly, it’s mostly taught me stuff about myself. I hate the sort of friend I am. I jump in with both feet first, far too much enthusiasm, full of beans…and all that shit. I don’t expect it in return, that’s for sure. I know I’m a freak when it comes to things like this. But I do wish I’d stop it. I wish I’d stop trying to be perfect for people, stop trying to find that perfection in myself. Because it’s breaking my heart.
I very often wish I would stop getting so close to people; I wish I’d stop baring my soul directly and just leave it to the outpourings of crap here on this blog. Sometimes I wonder if my blatant (and sometimes terrifying) honesty would just piss off, and I could become the world’s most awesome liar. I wish I could be blazé; not really give quite so much of a shit.
I wish I could stop being so damn clingy. Stop being so fussy.
I always envy those who have laid back friendships, much as I envy those who can have such intense friendships and not feel guilty. How do they do that? How do they have (a) friend(s) whom they’ve known for eons and forever remain close without so much as a blip? Every time I find myself getting close to someone, I want to run, because I know it’s only a matter of time before I do something to make it all go hideously wrong.
Bah. Maybe one day I’ll win the lottery and just buy all my friends. I’m sure that would be easier on the soul.
And then Gordon Ramsay came along and made everything horny again.
November 29, 2011 By 4 Comments
You know how I wrote a while back about the beauty of the John Lewis ad? Well…
Gordon Ramsay did a spoof version. And it’s hilarious. I’d say Google It, but unfortunately I can only find this:
Damn you Channel 4.
Now, anyone who has known me long enough, knows of my stalker addiction knicker wetting love of admiration of cookery skills for mild love of Gordon Ramsay. I absolutely LOVE this advert, I found it fucking hilarious. The Mr and I were all confused when it first started, wondering if John Lewis had tried to out-do themselves by creating a sequel (please don’t, John Lewis, I can tell you now it would not be a good idea).
I, personally, would love to have Gordon Ramsay boss me around in the kitchen (maybe while I flounder around with a big piece of meat Christmas ham), and obviously, I started tweeting about it.
And then this happened.
To say I damn near wet myself is an understatement. But yes, there may have been a moment or two taken to refresh my knickers.
Obviously.
The Mr and I both have crushes on Mr Ramsay; he, a healthy man-crush; me, a dirty, fuck-me-sideways, say-my-name-and-make-me-call-you-daddy, I-want-to-hump-you-senseless kind of girl crush. In a pair of FMBs.
I still stand my ground about what I said, re Gordon Ramsay. “He’s going to make sure he does the job properly. And then will want to do it again, just to be sure. And then, probably again, just to prove a point.” You know it’s true, right?
And then, as if to prove my point, the fucking awesome Kat of 3 Bedroom Bungalow tweeted this.
As if I wasn’t laughing hard enough, The Mr then suggested I “slap him with a piece of bacon”. Cue “laughing til I nearly puked” and The Mr reduced to hiccups.
Needless to say, Mr Ramsay hasn’t tweeted me yet (mind you, the real heckling hasn’t started yet, though I’m hoping to not go down the same route as #TweetMeStephenFry). Maybe I should tweet him while wearing an awesome push-up bra, super cleavage and maybe a photo of my arse.
Win.
