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Thanking the Academy, Part Two

It turns out, I was nominated for not just one but TWO awards by the amazing Sheila of ThisOneBody. This is my chance to thank her and to recognize some other great bloggers out there.

The rules of this nomination are:

Nominees, in order to accept this award you must:
-Thank and link back to the person who awarded you
-Write seven random things about yourself.
-Award seven other awesome and inspiring bloggers.

Without further ado, here are seven random things about me:

  1. I have made a career out of writing and teaching writing, but English was NOT my highest ACT score (college application test).
  2. So what did I score highest in? In fact, I scored a 29 out of 30 in this category. It was Science.
  3. Most summers, my parents and I would load up our camper and travel around the country visiting relatives including my older siblings. We would return back home in time for me to start school in the fall.
  4. This means I have been to almost every state in our nation by car, which is a great way to travel and see the country. Although, I probably spent more of this traveling time with my nose in a book than my mother would have liked me to.
  5. I have two brothers and two sisters who are 11, 13, 14 and 15 years older than me. As a result, I became an aunt when I was only 5.5 years old.
  6. When she began talking, I refused to acknowledge anything my niece said unless she called me AUNT Linda. It worked, and when I was a teenager, I couldn’t get her to undo it.
  7. When I was a kid, my bedroom was an attic room. I would refuse to go into my room until my mom could go upstairs with before me and turn on a light for me. This continued until I was in my early teens (12, 13, 14). And not about me but a testament to what a great mom I have, she would do this for me EVERY night.

And the bloggers I want to award are the following:

Kiwords

Kirida

AttentionDeficitWhatever

Buckeyes in the Sun

AngelaGilesKlocke

LifeWithBoys

TiredMama

VanishingVixen

(And yes, I realize this is 8 blogs and not 7. I’m an English major; you do the math, next time.)

Category: Life with Linda, Weblogs  Tags: ,  Comments off

Thanking The Academy

Versatile: ver-sa-tile [vur-suh-tl] or, especially British, [vur-suh-tahyl]: capable of, or adapted for, turning easily from one to another various tasks, fields of endeavor, etc.: a versatile writer.
Word information source: www.dictionary.com
Here is how the award works:
1. You thank the person who presented you with the award.
2. You tell 7 things about yourself.
3. You award 15 other newly discovered bloggers.

I want to thank Sheila at ThisOneBody for nominating me for this award. I first *discovered* Sheila on the discussion boards at VerticalSleeveTalk.com, and I quickly began reading her blog as well. I love her posts, and since she is a year out, she is such an inspiration to me. Plus, she has posted a couple of great recipes that I’ve enjoyed trying and sharing with all of you (like the protein-packed iced coffee).

Here are seven random things about me that you may not already know:

  1. I am the mother of four children. Before I was able to give birth to any of them, I had the misfortune of having three miscarriages. They were blighted ovums and pretty devastating emotionally. Before miscarrying, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a mom let alone the mother of four. Now, I don’t know what I’d do without these four.
  2. I started dating my husband when I was a senior in high school. He was a junior. We’ve been together since March 4, 1989. We aren’t typical high school sweethearts because we didn’t attend the same school.
  3. I was a cheerleader for six years (sixth grade through high school), and I loved it. I also once tried coaching high school cheerleaders and didn’t love it. It made me give even more credit to my favorite coach, Wendy.
  4. I started taking ballet, jazz and tap when I was 8 years old. I loved it, and I think it really influenced how I carry myself posture-wise.
  5. I have driven hundreds of miles to meet in person people I previously knew only online including some of my closest friends. In fact, when I met one friend I couldn’t even prove who I was because I’d left my wallet at my brother’s house. Despite being ID-less, I still talked the hotel into letting me into her room when she wasn’t there.  (I showed my car registration.)
  6. Growing up, I was a picker like American Pickers. My dad was morbidly obese, so I was his legs. He taught me about antiques and belongings. We’d go to flea markets, auctions and yard sales. It was my job to scout the area and then report back to him. Sometimes, he would direct me to the object from the car. Other times, I’d go off on my own and find things to report back. He would then go directly to the booth that had the items I told him about. As a result, I know a lot about antiques and collectibles as well as negotiating.
  7. Another skill I learned because of my dad’s interests was how to pack lots of stuff in a little space. We’d frequently load things up to set up at auctions and flea markets. Or we’d go out to yard sales and buy things, and it’d be my job to get it into the vehicle. When I was about 15, I made the mistake of telling my dad he couldn’t buy anything else because the car was full. He bought a trunk. It took me a half hour to unload the vehicle and load it all back in, but I did get everything in although there was only a tiny bit of space left for me to sit uncomfortably on the way home.

And the 15 blogs I nominate for this award are the following:

You Can Get There From Here

30 before 30

Amanda’s Waning

Bariatric Meri

Cheese and Sunkist

If Only She Were Thinner

MrsFatAss

My Journey to Fit

Something Something Something Fat Chick

VSGMom

Skinny Jeans Dreams

Ordinary Girl

Back Off I’m Starving

Tummy Like a Banana

Slice of Healthy, Please! (This was one of the first WLS blogs I found.)

Category: Weblogs  Tags: , ,  Comments off

Messy, Messy, Messy

I realized this morning that my online life was very very messy. It took a phone call from my website’s abuse department, which was a scary phone call before 9 a.m. (although this phone call would be scary at any time).

Apparently, someone took advantage of my messy online life and created some very authentic looking web pages in order to phish account information from unsuspecting people. The pages appeared on my web site. They wanted to know if I could please delete the offending files. They were actually pretty nice about it, and the default setting wasn’t “You are guilty” but “You are a victim too.” Whew.

The suggestion was that if I was hosting a blog, my blog application was out of date, which would make my site vulnerable. I immediately logged into my blog and confirmed that I was using the latest application.

It wasn’t until I opened up the screenshot sent to me as well as my FTP that I realized it wasn’t my current blog that was the problem. It was one that I still had that was now just a redirect to the current blog. I hadn’t logged into that blog account since I combined all of my blogs into one spot and changed the name to Digital Rhetoric. And that meant that blog’s software wasn’t updated to the latest and greatest.

When I first did the redirect, I deleted all of my FTP and photo and teaching blog stuff, which left a messy “file not found” problem for the pages within those blogs. And that is when I realized I could just use a redirect, so that is what I did for my lindasherwood.com blog. And it was the lindasherwood.com blog that phishers used to create the fake pages.

The first email notifying me of the problem was sent to me at 11 a.m. yesterday. Of course, I hadn’t read my email yet. If I hadn’t got the phone call this morning, I’m not sure I would have realized it today. Or more likely, I wouldn’t have realized it until after I left the house and didn’t have the means to fix it until I returned home later today.

And as I was going through my various files for lindasherwood.com, I realized that the background stuff of my web site is very very messy. I installed WordPress in 2009, and I made my site function using blog software then. Before that, I had a regular web site with lots of pages, and you can still see some of those pages by typing the URL directly: www.lindasherwood.com/portfolio.html I had forgotten that web site version was even still available! And most of the links still work.

So, in an effort to clean up my website, I have deleted a bunch of files this morning. And in doing so, I made my main page, lindasherwood.com not work. I’ll fix it later. The important part is that I also got rid of the phishing pages.

This is also why my site’s main page: lindasherwood.com isn’t working right now.

And here is a couple of links about phishing that was sent to me by my hosting site’s abuse department:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
http://www.antiphishing.org/

Have you cleaned up your website lately?

Category: Freelance Writing Tips, Web/Tech, Weblogs  Tags: , ,  Comments off

Costly Mistake

I just realized today that when I was switching all of my financial information, I neglected to switch the information with my web site hosting, and I lost the hosting to my blog, Fat Man’s Daughter. Everything was deleted, and I didn’t have it backed up. I might find some of it, but I am not sure.

I should have known better!

At this point, I am not going to do anything. I think I am ready for a new blog design, and I might look into that this next week. I also want to rethink what I am doing. Right now, I have about four different blogs, and I have been neglecting all of them. I may try to switch to just one blog with various categories that covers everything. First, though, I have to find a new blog design that I like.

Category: Weblogs  Tags: ,  Comments off

Oh Noes! She DID the math!

Math is evil, and as an English major, you would think I could avoid it. But, alas, I can’t. It seems numbers keep popping up all over the place. I have those horrible numbers on my bathroom scale, the number of wrinkles around my eyes when I smile, the number of birthdays my children continue to celebrate (today Justin turns 11!), and then there is the checkbook and the paycheck and the monthly bills and well, you get the idea that even as an English major, I find it hard to avoid numbers.

But that doesn’t mean I willingly go off and chase them down. Oh no! For that, I have Lani (even if she did temporarily for writing purposes only change her name to Lucy).

She did the math. In 516 days, Lani will turn 40. And Lani is a member of Club 32, and it just seems impossible to me that anyone in Club 32 will be 40 in 516 days. And I’m not sure I agree with her assessment that she is almost 40 because if I did that then by default, Club 32 is “staring down the barrelhead of forty.” Not because she is wrong but because I don’t wanna!

And. And. She is delusional. She claims she will blog every day for 516 days. She who disappears for months! And this isn’t me being mean. She admits her faults herself.

AND just maybe that is what I really object to — the idea that it might be time that I wake up and realize that here in my brain I am no longer 32 (or as she says 24). That maybe the way I have been doing things is wrong, and I might want to think about changing. That maybe the real me in my head and the me presented to the world (all nooks and crannies of my world(s)) should match. Possibly.

What is Club 32? Well, it is a bunch of women who were and/or are members of Momwriters (hopefully that one is self-explanatory) who all turned 32 in the same year and who pretty much started blogging that year as well.

There were a LOT of us, and I hesitate to name them all for fear that I might miss someone, but here goes: Lani, Shelley, Kira, Kim H, Cate, Lisa and me. There were also unofficial members (they who weren’t turning 32 that year) like AGK, Barb Huff, and Kim W.

I do NOT even want to start counting how long it has been since we were 32, and for that matter, I’m not ready to count the days until I turn 40. It is NOT this year. It is NOT next year. I don’t care what Lani and her math say — I have at LEAST two years!
40-38=2. This is all I need to know. We will NOT do algebra and figure out the whole, 2x-y if x=365 and y is (365 x 2)-z where z is the number of days that have passed from Aug. 19 to current day.

And YES that formula will work, but I do not want to figure it out. I never said I could NOT do math. I just don’t wanna!

But most of all — I am just happy that one of my favorite writers (and someone I call a friend) will be writing more often, so I can read her words. She plans to write differently, more deeply about the real her instead of the public her, and I hope I learn how to do the same from her brave example.

But mostly, new daily reading material! Yay me!

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