A place called Here
I’ve always thought of my blog as a little home. Maybe a second home, but not a physical home. So naturally I get a bit sad (just a little teeny weeny bit) when I see that I don’t blog as regularly as I used to. The reasons for this aren’t just that I’m busy, but it’s that there hasn’t been much to write about. I blogged earlier in the week, and of course I realised I hadn’t done Fashion Friday like I’d been trying to, so there goes two weeks without it. Hopefully I can pull up a post this week. :)
I actually took some time off the internet this week. I know I work on the internet, but it started with me feeling ill (physically) and crap (emotionally), which led me to being antisocial. I’m not very social in the first place, but I kicked one thing out of my life for five days: Twitter. People have said I’m addicted, or continually comment on how I reply insanely fast. I follow a lot of people on Twitter who I don’t see much of in real life, or at all, and Twitter is a good, quick way to see what people are up to. I’ll be honest, I don’t go around reading everyone’s updates all day long, but I liked Twitter enough to check it on the train, and it was good to see when my favourite musicians would be next having a gig…
Well, five days, I didn’t eat for at least half that time because I wasn’t feeling well at all, with the thought of food making me want to retch. I must say, being without Twitter was like I was missing out on something, but I clearly was not, because I didn’t really miss Twitter. It was easy to step away from it, and just ignore it - after the initial “I wonder what so-and-so is doing”. That made me realise who I was actually eyeing on Twitter, and who I really care about (or stalk). Either way, me not tweeting meant that no one felt any reason to mention me or message me. I wasn’t missed, and I wasn’t missing anything.
Upon my return, I realised Twitter was exactly the same as when I’d left it. People were the same - tweeting about the same things, sharing the same things, tweeting at the same frequency. Despite this, I was looking at Twitter with a fresh and entirely different vision. Twitter was pretty freakin’ boring - as it had always been.
I spent a couple of days without internet - or at least, with a connection not stable enough to tolerate - and it felt a bit relieving to just be away from it. When you put it into perspective, you don’t really need the internet. I hesitated before calling our service provider, because they usually tell me to do the same thing over and over. I’m glad I called them this time: they did a check on our phone line and found out that it had far too many devices on it. After unplugging a spare phone and our fax machine1, resetting our router a couple of times, and setting it up again, everything seemed to be swell.
I’m still feeling pretty ill, and my appetite has returned, but it’s returned in such a drastic way that I ate two bowls of spaghetti for dinner and the other day I ate nearly a whole block of chocolate. It’s not my weight I’m concerned about; it’s my health. I haven’t been taking my vitamins either, because I’ve been stupidly forgetting (which is no excuse). I now have really bad insomnia and I’m sleeping between the hours of 3am to 6am, and I’m not sure if I feel 100% crap - but I don’t feel 100% great, either. I’m sleeping late, but I’m still getting to work alright, and my mood isn’t as horrible as it was a week ago. I just feel physically bummed. Right now I have a sore throat that I felt develop throughout the day, and it hurts to swallow. I’m positive this happened not too long ago, and I hope it goes away pronto.
I have actually been enjoying myself at work learning some new things - I have been encouraged to implement microdata schema into my blog, and update my fanlisting HTML to HTML5, and optimise all my favicons/icons across multiple browsers and systems. It’s nothing really visual, but I’m loving it because I adore working with code, and putting more effort into my code and making it rich makes me feel good. It gives me the same feeling as when I created this theme, making it crazy-responsive. Now that Internet Explorer 10 is forgivable, I looked into scanning my webpage and fixed up my code to give myself perfect results. It made me sooooo happy to see this in the results:
We’ve found that this webpage is using responsive web design practices to support many browsing devices. This helps your users get the better site experience on devices like Apple iPad, Microsoft Surface, Amazon Kindle, XBOX 360, and other modern browsers on smaller or larger screens.
No further action is suggested.
I’ve still been posting on Project Simplify Georgie every time I ditch something from my life - mostly technological, but there’s the odd “I emptied my bin” kind of post. What I’m most excited about lately, though, is moving my entire fanlisting collective (currently at Eyethief.com) to a new location (a subdomain, at love.georgie.nu). As I’m moving the fanlistings over I’m updating their HTML and CSS to make it lovely and neat, and updating layouts where needed. It feels good because at the end of it, I’ll be letting eyethief.com expire, which means one less domain to deal with.
Here are the fanlistings I’ve moved so far, in order… so these are the first three fanlistings I ever owned. :)
- Guitar picks/plectrums
- Armor For Sleep
- Poets of the Fall
Thank you for all the lovely comments you’ve been leaving. It honestly means a lot. I probably visited one blog in this past week… but I’m pulling myself together. I hope you’ve all been well.
- Please don’t laugh about the fax machine thing. I don’t use it, but my parents need it sometimes. ↩