Tales of one woman stumbling her way through motherhood.
I send my husband and my car to you for one short weekend, so he could attend a little convention for work, and this is what I get in return:
Where’s the love, NYC? You’re totally off my Valentine’s Day card list.
Signed,
An Ohioan who is thankful our parking lots aren’t full service and employing blind armless monkeys to move cars.
Trying to describe what happens at a blog conference is always so hard. There are so many moments that are touching, strange, funny, frustrating, and inspiring, but they’re all jumbled together and generally are better in person than on screen. It doesn’t matter the conference – all of them share certain aspects. So I’ll try to describe Blissdom without rambling too much about great moments that you’ll read and just scratch your head, asking “What’s the big deal?”
I wanted to do a post yesterday, but spent most of the day staring at this:
Yeah, see, I told you all blog cons have things in common. This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered hotels that didn’t realize that a conference full of bloggers really will need internet access for nearly everyone.
Thankfully the hotel did get more wifi access.
Dinner last night was at the hotel, and featured the Incredibly Enormous Salad:
In true southern cooking fashion, asking for a little mayo for my sandwich resulted in enough mayo to make a potato salad for 10.
This morning, we were treated to a sneak peak at the new Yanni DVD Voices. Everyone danced in their seats to the Latin-flavored music and drooled over the guy on the DVD I affectionately named “Frilly ponytail matador vam-pirate guy” – you have to see the DVD to understand. But then, just as we all came down from our salsa-dancing high, we shot back up again when they announced that two of the singers from Voices were here to answer questions. And yes, one of them was “Frilly ponytail matador vam-pirate guy”. After the Q&A, autographs and photo ops were provided.
The sessions today were packed with more information than I can share in one post, so I’ll have to come back to them later.
Chris Mann provided late-afternoon entertainment with his excellent music. Gotta love a musician who is also Twitter-savvy.
Dinner was at the most amazing restaurant in Nashville. The New Orleans Mansion House is a beautiful, elegant old mansion, but the staff were funny and extremely accommodating, and they knew how to actually make a real drink. (Sorry, the hotel drinks were little more than juice and water.) The food? Incredible.
The evening had to end with a bang, and if it wasn’t going to be drunken antics, how about a group of bloggers stuck in a hotel elevator for 40 minutes? I just got word they were freed minutes ago. Had Baby Jessica fallen down the well with a smart phone and Twitter in the 80’s, she would have been rescued a lot faster, I think.
Finally, I have to add that the hit of the weekend seems to have been my new itty-bitty Dell Mini. It’s a 9″ laptop with only the stuff you need for a conference, and it’s so lightweight. I wish I was getting commission for all of the Dell Minis that will be purchased from the Dell Outlet this week – I’m sure a few will be finding new homes with these bloggers.
Small-fry
Two days of blog fun
in Nashville, then breakfast at
The Pancake Pantry
I’m really excited to be heading to a blog conference this weekend. Heather picked me up as she drove down from Cleveland, and tonight we’re staying with Shannan before grabbing Amy and continuing the roadtrip tomorrow. BlogHer rocks, but only once a year is not often enough. Blissdom will give me the chance to reconnect with old friends, see others I’ve never met in person yet, and meet new PR folks to work with. It’s technically work, but feels more like a vacation.
To play along for Haiku Friday, follow these steps:
1. Write your own haiku on your blog. You can do one or many, all following a theme or just random. What’s a haiku, you ask? Click here.
2. Sign the Mister Linky below with your name and the link to your haiku post (the specific post URL, not your main blog URL). DON’T sign unless you have a haiku this week. If you need help with this, please let me know.
3. Pick up a Haiku Friday button to display on the post or in your sidebar by clicking the button at the top.
REMEMBER: Do not post your link unless you have a haiku this week! I will delete any links without haiku!
I’d like to welcome everyone who is visiting me from CNN today. And for my regular readers, go check out the CNN article – it’s got useful information for nearly anyone who isn’t self-employed. Of course, I thought that someday I might be featured on CNN for something I’d accomplished, and not because I have no health insurance. But hey, gotta gobble up those 15 minutes of fame somehow, and it’s better than being that guy on TV in his undershirt, holding a beer and talking about how the tornado tossed his trailer around like a tin can.
As a follow-up to that article, I’ll add that we tried to buy private health insurance when Aaron began his contract job in November. I researched, got advice from those who buy their own insurance, and then settled on a provider. After filling out the mile-long application, where I had to list every stuffy nose we’ve ever had, including full dates of illness and symptom, we then endured weeks of back-and-forth with the insurance company.
They insisted on bloodwork for Aaron because it had been too long since his last routine tests. The CNN article recommends not having tests run when you have a limited time on insurance, because it could hurt your chances of getting private insurance. However, I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t matter – they’ll get the information one way or another.
Apparently they found something in his tests, but wouldn’t give us the details. (Nice, right? You’d think we have the right to know about our own health.) Instead, we were told that he was denied any prescription drug coverage. He takes no prescription meds currently, and only took one for a short time in the 11 years I’ve known him. There were also several “pre-existing conditions” based on everything we reported to them, none of which were covered for the first six months. Seeing how I was planning to need this insurance for a year at the absolute most, I thought paying that much for next to nothing wasn’t worth it.
So at the moment our family has no health insurance, and unless we can find another job by the end of the month, we’ll be unemployed again. I’ve been saving anything we can spare from each paycheck to help us pay bills the next few months. Cordy and Mira can go back onto the SCHIP health insurance plan next month, too. I graduate from nursing school in June and will hopefully find a job with full benefits quickly. Then we’ll be back to where we were before Aaron was laid off last June. I can’t wait for that point – I’ve never been without health insurance before this, and this has been one of the most stressful times in my life.
I hope the layoffs across the nation begin to slow soon. No one should have to go through this stress, and no one should be without basic access to health insurance in this country.
One benefit of having two children of the same gender is reusing clothing for the second child. Yes, Mira will someday hate me for making over half of her wardrobe Cordy’s old clothing, but for now she doesn’t care. And I especially love it because of the wash of memories and emotions I get when pulling out one of Cordy’s old outfits that I loved so much.
Yesterday, I dressed Mira in one of my particular favorites, and after seeing her fully dressed, I had to take a picture, and then compare it to one of Cordy:
That’s Mira on the left, and Cordy on the right. I should also point out that in these two photos, Mira is 5 months older than her Amazon sister – Cordy was only 15 months old and wearing 24 mo. clothing.
What’s amazing to me is seeing the differences between my two girls. They have some similar features, but staring at each photo, I can practically feel the different spirits of each child coming from each image.
Mira is, and has always been, the analytical one. She watches everything around her carefully, taking it all in and not tipping her hand as to how she’s feeling until she’s fully taken it all in. She is cool in all she does, and often holds everything inside until she bursts. It’s only when there are no cameras or strangers around that she fully relaxes into the goofy girl we know.
Cordy, on the other hand, holds nothing back. A complete open book. Every photo of her at that age shows a child smiling at the camera (or looking rather angry if that was how she was feeling). Not a neutral face could be found, because her heart was always firmly planted on her sleeve.
And just because I can’t go digging through my photo archives and post only one photo of Cordy as a toddler, I’ll add in this one, too.
Sometimes I wish I could stop time for a little while.
PS – Go visit my reviews blog today for a sweet Valentine’s giveaway. Let’s just say it’s a little something to help bring back the romance in your life!
Tech geek, wife, mom of two, Disney fanatic, woman with ADD, and a complete domestic zero. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but that's not so bad when you get to keep trying new things, right?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
