Month: March 2006

Categories
Blogging Ireland

And The Winners Were…

blog awards
Photo by Ryan of Rymus.net: Colm Bracken (In Fact, Ah); Me; Matt; Ryan.

I’m just now emerging from a dozy haze…no I didn’t overindulge at the Blog Awards on Saturday night, rather I was over at my parent’s house last night and complained that I seemed to be suffering some kind of allergic reaction. My nose was itching like crazy and I was being driven mad. My father offered me one of his anti-histamine tablets and I was so distracted by the itching that I gladly accepted. He assured me as I popped the little white pill that they didn’t make him drowzy, but I might find it hard to get out of bed in the morning. “No change there” I thought and happily swallowed the thing. What I didn’t take into account was, because of the breastfeeding which I’ve only just stopped and the pregnancy before that, I’ve not taken anything stronger than Panadol in about two and a half years. So I got home yesterday evening planning to write an account of the Awards but instead fell fast asleep at about 8:30. I slept the sleep of the deeply drugged until 6am when Eve woke with her usual ear-piercing screech. I positioned her in front of “Ice Age” and fell back into my stupor waking only long enough to press replay on the DVD when it finished. The credits were rolling for the second time when Matt rescued me and I crawled back into bed where I lay unconscious until 2pm. I don’t know what my Dad is made of but it’s of far sterner stuff than I am! Either that or he’s planning a little boost to the pension when the time comes and that first pill was free.

Soooo, since I’m way behind on posting about this I will direct you to the main site for the list of winners. Gingerpixel was not one of the glittering plaque-holders on the night but the Best Photoblog prize went to a very deserving Donncha. I had thought Ryan was going to be a shoo-in for it and he was the firm favourite but there was tough competition in our category. I got to meet so many of my favourite Irish Bloggers and I think I said hi to everyone I had wanted to say hi to. The only two I missed were Damien himself (but he was a very busy man on the night and I would have had to have stuck my ankle out and tripped him up to get to talk to him which I thought might have been rude) and JL Pagano who was standing behind me at one stage and I meant to turn and introduce myself but got distracted and missed him. Ah well, hopefully some other time JL. I’m also hoping that Paige will be coming along to some blog get-togethers in the future only telling us she wasn’t coming at the last minute. I was sorry not to have met you Paige.

It was a great night and Damien deserves all the cyber-love he’s been getting over the past few days and Rick O’Shea was the perfect MC. I will be adding quite a few blogs to me daily reading list now that I know the people behind them. Or in the case of TCAL, the large crowd behind them. Congratulations to That Girl and Sinéad, hard luck to In Fact, Ah and Redmum (at least as a “non-winner” I’m in good company). So many blogs have great round-ups of the evening Irish Blogs is a good place to go to find them all. However, I will direct you to Letter To America, the blog of the hilarious Jett. He has a podcast up and I’m off to listen to that myself. His blog, funny as it is, only does marginal justice to how funny he is in real life so I’m betting his podcast is well worth a listen.

Categories
Blogging Ireland

Irish Blog Awards

Good luck to all the Irish Blog Award nominees tonight. The big event starts at 7pm in The Alexander Hotel in Dublin City Centre. I’ll be there with my glad rags on and am looking forward to meeting everyone.

I’m still debating on whether to bring my camera; with all the talk of anonymity around the various Irish blogs I’ll just end up with a load of photos of people with big blurry circles in front of their faces! Although it would be a good way of avoiding the scary end of the lens myself.

Categories
Eve Photography

It Can’t Be Time For That Yet!

Eve Smile

Eve enjoying the wind in the garden today. We’ve not seen as much of this face as we would like lately which makes me think those so-called terrible twos are here.

It’s not fair…she’s not even one and a half yet.

Categories
Blogging

Blogger’s Block

Paige over at BlankPaige has been supposedly suffering a bout of Blogger’s Block. Although her posts are as hilarious as ever and to her readers’ eyes nothing would seem to be amiss. I do know what she’s talking about though. I’ve been feeling it myself of late; It’s that edge of panic when you realise you’ve not blogged in a couple of days and you can feel what readers you do have trickle away and still nothing is coming to mind. So you think to yourself you’ll just go through your blogroll and see if anything inspires you. Instead the quality of blogging only serves to fuel that inner-critic. The one that vetoes every single potential post that does make it’s way to your brain.

Another factor that I’ve discovered is that more and more people that I know in real life are coming on and reading my blog. I think my mother has taken to telling everyone she meets to come on over and take a look which is great (wave at cousin Lisa and auntie Helen) but it’s having the side-effect of making me really self-conscious. Now instead of just wondering if I shouldn’t post something because it might be a bit rubbish, I also have to think about whether or not it’s going to come back to bite me. It’s like the blogging version of stage-fright.

When I think of the blogs that I love to read, the ones that give me a little smile when I see that they’ve updated and I can’t wait to pull up my chair, grab a drink and enjoy the read, I realise a few things. Firstly I just don’t get excited by one of the most popular of Irish blog subjects: politics. Sure, many of the blogs I love talk about politics and current events but they do so in a way that makes it personal, funny or relevant. The same goes for tech blogs or gadget blogs or knitting blogs or any niche blog. It’s not the subject of the posts that draws me in it’s the voice behind them. Some bloggers could write a post about watching paint dry and it would still be interesting.

So this makes me think that perhaps it’s not what to write I should be worrying so much about, but rather how to write it and if I’m being honest and open. If people connect with you then they’ll stick it out through blogging thicks and thins.

You see now…there’s that voice, the one that’s saying “Ha ha, your brother just read that and is going to give you a right slagging about being all touchy-feely.” Well, I’m posting it anyway.

Categories
Personal

Dear Diary

red case

Recently my mother insisted that my sister and I come over for a clear out. So much of our old junk from when we were growing up is still being stored at our parent’s house in the attic and in our old bedrooms and every now and then we make a half-hearted effort to go through it all. It’s a task worthy of a Greek legend though since we only ever seem to scratch the surface of it all and the pile of old toys, books and keepsakes never gets any smaller. It doesn’t help that it’s very difficult not to get distracted by memories and once the photograph chest gets opened it’s a lost cause.

This last time was no different and so just as I was thinking about getting to the pile of college life drawings under my bed my sister emerged from her own pile of stuff with a small red case in her hand. I recognised it straight away as the case I kept my earliest diaries in. From the age of sixteen I kept a pretty detailed journal. For these early ones I used the old school copy books. A glance at any of the pages would put you in mind of what you might find in a serial killer’s private collection: small writing crammed tightly along every line. In my memory these pages were filled with deep insights into the mind of my younger self; heavy thoughts well-articulated and intelligent beyond my years. As I stood there reading my entries the reality didn’t quite measure up with the memory. Instead I found page after page of such gems as:

Keith keeps threatening to tell everyone about my supposedly belching while we were getting off. I was sick and he isn't exactly brilliant to get off with so it's no wonder my stomach made a very unsatisfactory but quite quiet noise. Still it's embarressing.

Translation of swirly teenage girl writing:
“Keith keeps threatening to tell everyone about my supposedly belching while we were getting off (for any American readers this is Irish teenage-speak for snogging). I was sick and he isn’t exactly brilliant to get off with so it’s no wonder my stomach made a very unsatisfactory but quite quiet noise. Still it’s embarressing.”

Hmmm, charming.

I kept this diary until very recently although for some reason I took a break for the three years I was in college. I guess I was too busy sitting in Bewleys sharing one cup of hot chocolate amongst five of us and talking rubbish to write it down. I’m very glad I was such an obsessive about it though since so much of what I’m reading I had completely forgotten about. Whole chapters of my life and so many people who had disappeared from my memory. I’ve always said that I still feel exactly as I did when I was seventeen but I realise that that’s not true. Sure, there are similarities, but the person that wrote those diaries and the person reading them today are very different people. I’m quite embarrassed by a lot of what I thought and said, particularly when I would go off on the typical teenage rants about my parents, or when I read about some of the things I thought I wanted:

ah the 80's

I believe these eighties nightmares were dress designs I wanted for my debs! Anne Frank eat your heart out.

I kept a diary up until I started this blog. It had become very sporadic as Eve was young and by the day’s end I was too exhausted to think let alone write anything coherent. I may have to start again or so many things will be forgotten but this time I won’t have anything to remind me twenty years from now. Or perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.