Wow. Okay. “Oh Thesaurus The Great” gave me “redress” to work with today. Your guess is as good as mine where this is going…
As a verb, a few of the synonyms are adjust, correct, rectify, and repair. I suppose in blogging terms we redress our posts in that we edit them (if we’re perfectionists or even semi-perfectionists) all the time. Typos abound in my posts; if I didn’t edit them you wouldn’t be able to read half of them. But even that doesn’t seem quite right (as a definition of the word) since some of the other synonyms seem full of regret: make amends for, mend, and repay for instance. So is it fair to say that if I regret not editing my post I am full of redress? Let’s see what it means as a noun.
Atonement, indemnification, (there’s a mouthful) quittance, reparation, and restitution among others.
And here I was expecting to talk about trying on new clothes… 😉
For a long time I sat on the fence, wondering whether or not to switch my account from “.wordpress.com” to a “.com” site. In fact, I paid for my own domain long before I actually switched over. I had a few concerns, but my main one was whether or not the links I already had out on the web would lead back to my site after I changed the address. As it turns out, they do. I can still ask people to drop by lindaghill.wordpress.com and they’ll show up here at lindaghill.com. Which is wonderful! But… (There had to be a “but” in there, right?)
When I was doing research for my article about dying before scheduled posts are published, entitled “Blogging from the Grave,” I asked in the forums whether my site would still exist if I failed to pay for it, i.e. if I die. The answer was yes. All of my content will just revert back to my old lindaghill.wordpress.com address and will be here forever as long as no one deletes my account. However, all the links I leave behind which lack the “.wordpress.com” will either go nowhere or they will go to whomever buys the domain after I allow my payments to lapse.
My point is this: if you own your own WordPress domain and you want your links to last forever, don’t leave off the extra part of the address! Just a little thing you might have missed when you paid…
Edit: Now that’s interesting – I added the “.wordpress.com” to my link for the “Blogging from the Grave” post and I didn’t get a pingback on it. Could that explain the mystery of why sometimes pingbacks don’t work? (This edit is also an experiment.)
Edit2: YES! The pingback worked that time. Double the advice in one post – pingbacks don’t work if the address isn’t precise!
I opened my thesaurus to the word “quash” and actually said out loud, “oooh quash!” What a great word! It’s like the lazy person’s way of saying “squash” – who needs that pesky extra letter when you can just leave it off? And bonus – it means the same thing! Unless you’re talking about the vegetable… wait, is a squash a vegetable? You’ve gotta be careful about that sort of thing. You remember what happened with the avocado, right? (Click the link for a story.)
There are so many great words associated with quash too! Words like crush, hush up, overthrow, quell, rescind, and squelch. The word “squelch” always makes me think of walking in the pouring rain when I’ve forgotten my umbrella. It’s the feeling my feet get when they’re sodden inside my shoes and socks. There’s a feeling I’d rather quash.
It starts with a speck, a mere morsel, an element of thought in the vast space that is the universe of the mind. It’s a whiff, a spore at first – hardly a niggle like the frustratingly fading emotion that was a dream that’s just out of reach. A word on the tip of the tongue that can’t be read, even if it’s stuck out agonizingly far enough to see with eyes crossed, brows twisted to the point that even the scalp strains to pluck it off.
But then it begins to grow. Like a jigsaw puzzle made of sky on which the clouds roll in, the wind giving direction. Hues of gray and white and silver – yes! Is that a silver lining?
Bigger and bigger it fills the spaces until all else is blotted out… bits and pieces get lost in the shuffle of what is this and what is that. Hearing strains inward instead of out and nothing nothing nothing else begins to matter but that which started as a speck and has now grown, fills life and limb and thought and sky in the most amazing double rainbow!
As in packin’ it in. I’ve decided, pretty much, that I’m not going to. So this is what’s up with my blog:
I’ve spent the better part of this week contemplating the idea of going private for a month. At first I thought it would be the ideal solution to staying away, but then I started thinking about SoCS, and One-Liner Wednesday, and the fact that I don’t want to take a break from either. I think I’ve come up with a compromise.
I’ll post twice a week for the month of May. Once will be One-Liner Wednesday, which is pretty easy for me as far as the amount of work that goes into it. The second time will be the SoCS prompt. I won’t participate but I will spend the week reading other people’s entries. That way I’m not trying to cram in all the hours, happy as those hours are when I’m stress free (haha), that it takes to reply to comments and post. I will try to get caught up on my comments from older posts however. Anything that I absolutely must write during the time I’m “away” I’ll save as a draft and publish in June.
Anyway, I’ll give it a whirl for the first week of May at least – that’s the best I can promise – and as long as I don’t find myself being drawn back in, I’ll continue that way until June.
I was just thinking about how this post really didn’t have much to do with the word “pack” until I looked at the synonyms in my thesaurus. As a verb, “pack” can be used to mean burden and overload. As much as I don’t want to say my blog has become a burden, the importance of the other things I need to do off-screen have pushed this place lower on my list of things-to-do than ever before. And it’s causing an overload in the stress department. I hope I can finish out April…
Thanks to all for putting up with my waffling for the past little while. I’ll try to make my posts more upbeat for the remainder of the month – it is after all in my nature to be optimistic.
Once upon a time there was a girl who spent most of her time alone. She lived with her parents; their best friends–a childless couple–lived next door. On weekends there were parties. Parties with all adults. The girl would go to the parties until an acceptable time which was bedtime and then she would go upstairs and read in her room, or colour, or play with her dolls. Occasionally one of the adults would come and say hello, but for the most part she spent her time making up stories in her head. In her imagination she had a life with many friends of her own. They would have parties most weekends and they would laugh and have serious discussions.
The girl didn’t mind being alone because even when she was with people, she would usually observe, listen, and let her imagination wander. She was a little jealous of her friends–her real friends–who had siblings, but she couldn’t really picture what it would be like never to be alone.
As she grew up she found that she liked people well enough. In high school she had a wonderful group of friends with whom she used to party. They’d sometimes skip school and drive to Niagara Falls just for fun.
But what comes around…
Now the girl is older and has a family of her own. She still has one of her old high school friends who she sees every day. She sits in her room and reads and imagines worlds in which people have parties with lots of friends, but now she has a computer on which she records her imaginings full of colourful adventures and happy endings. Stories that begin with “Once upon a time.”
It’s Friday; time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt! For those of us participating in the A-Z Challenge, the letter of the day for tomorrow is “P.” To potentially make our Saturday blogging experience easier, your prompt will again start with that letter. Remember, the prompt word is really just a take-off point to get you started. As long as your post is stream of consciousness writing and somehow contains the prompt, your post qualifies for SoCS. Here we go!
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “piece/peace.” Make one or both your theme or just include them somehow in your post. Enjoy!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
Merciful is how I strive to live my life. When I consider the synonyms: Compassionate, forgiving, generous, kind and sympathetic among others, it just makes sense to me to try to be these things.
I’m not a Christian of any particular kind. I’m not even sure I believe in God, though I’m not adverse to the idea that there is more than we can see in the universe that is plain to our mortal senses. I don’t believe in the concept of karma as it relates to an eye for an eye. I believe in existence. I believe that it’s something we all have, whether we’re of this race or that, whether we’re human, animal, insect or herb. We are all equal in the fact that we live – we, all of us, affect one another in at least some small way. I also believe that we have choices in this life in how we exist. The sick can be happy – the healthy miserable. We can make the best of what we have to deal with, no matter what it is. Or we can dwell on that which is not ideal.
But what can we do for each other? If we all strove to ease one another’s existence, how wonderful would the world be? Yes, there would still be challenges; existence cannot be free of pain. Sometimes a smile, a helping hand, or a compassionate ear for someone who needs to talk things out can make all the difference.
I don’t need a God to tell me these things. I don’t need a proscribed belief system at all. I just need to be and to recognize that so does everyone else. Equally.
What is the key to writing a successful blog? I had a comment on my Priorities post of Saturday which asked, Why do good bloggers always contemplate leaving.. (thank you Celona’s Blog). The truth is, I’m not really sure what it is that makes a “good blogger”.
Although one might argue that a blog is made up of its content, I don’t believe that’s all it is. I think it’s the amount of caring that goes into it. The grammar and spelling could be fair rather than excellent, the photos could be mediocre instead of professional, and the artwork may be less than fantastic, but if there is an abundance of passion, knowledge and love for whatever it is that a blogger does, others can see it.
The secret to producing a great blog is also the communication that goes on between the blogger and his or her audience. The very translation between the blogger’s life and how it relates to the experiences of the reader can make or break the connection that keeps the reader coming back.
As a noun, some of the synonyms of “key” are code, cue, interpretation, and solution. “Cue” is also an important answer to having a successful blog. When we cue responses we keep our readers engaged.
As an adjective we have influential, and leading. How do we influence and lead? With passion and caring.
Do you feel as though you have these things covered on your blog?
Today has once again proven the theory that impermanence is something we can count on. In case you missed it, Doobster–he of proper grammar, eloquent blogging, Oxford comma insisting, and badge-maker extraordinaire–has gone private. His final post said pretty much nothing except that he’s taking a break and that he may or may not be back. He also said that there are things in his life that need his undivided attention.
I have to say his words hit close to home. I spend an awful lot of time here in front of my screen. The fact that real life demands more of my time on a daily basis is evident in that I have only just enough time to post. I’m behind on my comments, and I have little opportunity to visit the posts that are pinged back to my prompts, let alone all of the other blogs I really want to visit.
And so after the April A-Z challenge is finished I’m considering doing the same, perhaps just for a month. I need to get my novel finished – I haven’t touched it in weeks and before that it was weeks and before that… If I ever want to get it finished, if I ever want to sell my mother’s condo which has been sitting empty for over a year (and I’m still paying the mortgage on it), if I ever want to move forward I need to stop stagnating here. Yes, I realize that I’m keeping in practice – I’ll probably keep my fiction blog going for that purpose. It takes up minutes of my day rather than hours.
I sincerely hope that Doobster returns, but I can understand fully where he’s coming from. WordPress isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. At least it shouldn’t be.
I’ll keep you up to date with my decision. I promise not to just disappear.
lindaghill.com 