My friend Mrs. Lisa, the Hippie Spelunker, who just recently treated herself to a new domain Hippie Spelunker.com after being a blogspot blogger for quite some time generously tagged me for this meme started at JohnCow.com. It’s taken me a few days but I’ve found some people to tag who haven’t already had the pleasure, that I can see.

The idea is simple: You want readers and you want link backs too because that’s all us bloggers want, it’s more precious than milk for some

So how does it work?

Simple! You just copy the list down below on your blog, hence creating link backs for your blogging friends and then click the RSS feed link to subscribe to all of them. Then you add yourself and up to 5 other bloggers and their feeds to the list before you publish it on your own blog. Show your friends some link love

Just imagine if just 10 people would do this and then 10 more after them. That would get your blog 100 extra link backs and 100 extra feed subscribers!

The Original List:

• Subscribe to JohnCowdotCom
• Subscribe to BobmeetsWorld
• Subscribe to LifeisRisky
• Subscribe to TheKingKongBlog
• Subscribe to My New Hustle
• Subscribe to GadgetTastic
• Subscribe to Life of Browie
• Subscribe to Disregard Me
• Subscribe to Everybody Go To
• Subscribe to Brian Vaughan
• Subscribe to Fuery
• Subscribe to Sam Breadstone
• Subscribe to TheInternetExperiment
• Subscribe to BloggingFingers
• Subscribe to Confessions of a Housewife
• Subscribe to HomeBizBlogger
• Subscribe to OneMansGoal
• Subscribe to There’sABlogInMySoup
• Subscribe to Bloggers R Us
• Subscribe to My Thoughts
• Subscribe to WordpressReworked
• Subscribe to TechTraction
• Subscribe to Footprints on the Moon
• Subscribe to Bucket O Bulletz
• Subscribe to Simple Kind of Life
• Subscribe to Whatever I Feel Like
• Subscribe to Hippie Spelunker
• Subscribe to Scale Whore
• Subscribe to Gadget Girl Accessories
• Subscribe to Ami-chan.net
• Subscribe to Whatever I Feel Like
• Subscribe to Devilish Southern Belle
• Subscribe to The Sassy Southerner

EXTENDED LIST

Subscribe to Look Beyond Mirrors

Subscribe to Gothic Peach.

#END COPY HERE#

I will add some people to this in a bit; I’m still trying to work out who has feed and who hasn’t been tagged and so on. I just don’t want to not post it up any longer. I’ve had it saved to draft for two days now.

Yesterday was more than a little strange. I guess it just didn’t feel like a birthday. When you’re small everything is all about you and as you get older it becomes more and more just a day.
It probably would have been better had my day not started out with a 5 a.m. wake up call to change the munchkin’s bed because he removed his diaper and peed all over.
At least it wasn’t poop.

We ate Applebees take out and I got a couple of slices of cheesecake from Publix and we chilled out watching the last two episodes of ‘Drive’ until my husband went to work then I worked on layouts and tried to find something WP theme wise that I can use for beyondmirrors.net.

The day before was the real birthday thing. My friend’s cooked food and made a brownie cake for me with nifty sparkly and black and white candles and we hung out and I ran a D&D game for everyone which is so far doing a lot better than my previous attempts at doing a game.

I’m watching “Ocean’s Twelve” at the moment because I don’t want to see “Ocean’s Thirteen” without having seen that one given I have seen “Ocean’s Eleven”.

I’ve been given the “Never Winter Nights” game for the computer; this will be interesting to see and play when I have some time. Right now I’m debating taking the munchkin into town to look for 360 games so I can stock up on things before my husband’s birthday.

I’m hoping to get a picture up for Self Portrait Sunday but whether it will be today or tomorrow I’m not sure.
I have the excuse that my camera’s batteries are dead and I am waiting for them to recharge, and also the excuse that I was distracted with karaoke. Yes, I’ve been doing that, playing Karaoke Revolution volume 2 to be more accurate. We were playing the game at a friend’s house last night after we got bored playing Wii’s Big Brain Academy and Wii Play and I enjoyed it so much I’ve been loaned four discs of it.
After the munchkin and I got back from the store today and he went for his nap I’ve been playing the first disc, well the second volume; our friend’s copy of the first disc was badly scratched so her boyfriend is going to try and buff it out and then we may wind up with that one as well. It’s great fun, though, I’d forgotten how good it was for singing. I used to be in choir but I haven’t really sung other than along with the radio in the car since we moved. I’m really enjoying myself. We’ll have to get DDR now too so that I can exercise more!

Something from “Ergo Writing” blog which was written on March 23rd 2007:

When I first heard about fanfiction I thought it was a travesty and that I would never do something like that, but then I realized growing up most of what I wrote was fanfiction and bad Mary-Sue fanfiction at that. I was eleven and had written a story about me being the long lost half-sister of Brain from ‘Thunderbirds’ and falling madly in love with Virgil, the second eldest brother. What was that if not fanfiction? I’m glad that story has been lost in the transatlantic move and will never see the light of day again because it was, I’m sure, absolutely horrendous.

Several years later I wrote a story about someone who turned out to be Clark Kent’s sister. My idea on the origin of ‘Supergirl’ given I hadn’t read or seen much about it, and I was watching ‘Lois and Clark’ obsessively. I wrote something else around the same time about the Red Dwarf crew finding another hologram on an abandoned ship and she and Rimmer falling in love.

More bad Mary-Sue-ing.

Yet, when I was in college and someone told me about Fanfiction.net I freaked, and spat and hissed and thought it was the most horrible thing ever created. Now I have an account there and semi-regularly update it with random things. I’m not overly popular but I have a few ‘hardcore’ fans there. I think the problem is that the one thing I generally steer away from is romance in my stories, and romantic stories are by far the most popular there. I think I’m afraid I will have a Mary-Sue relapse, and no one wants that.

I’ve come to realize though that writing fanfiction is a good exercise. At least for me. It helps me to come up with things that I can use for ‘plot bunnies’ in other things I write. It helps me to just write random fun things that I won’t necessarily put into anything so I can get them out of my system and move on to better fictitious pieces, and sometimes you just get these whacky ideas when you’re watching a show. I treat writing fanfiction like the writing exercises I used to do in primary school. The sort where the teacher would write a paragraph up on the blackboard and have you finish it in a two page story.

The major thing it’s helping me with is ending things. I have such a hard time with ending stories, and they shouldn’t drag on forever that’s the worst thing possible. All the stories I have are beginnings and middles without ends. Hopefully now that I’ve seen even if I make things several chapters, with regards to a fanfic I can in fact end it, this will help me to find the ends to my own works, and the important step after that: finding a publisher.

I also have some things published on fanlib.com and the specialty site PGSM Fanfiction. Thus are the way your outlook changes. I have written anything fiction or non-fiction for a few weeks now. Since before we moved I’ve had a problem where things are sticking in my head and refusing to come out even if I have the idea and it seems good.

I’ve come across something which may be useful for those relatives of ours who are looking to travel. We have a new grandchild in the family; my cousin in England had a baby girl a few days ago, and she and her fiance are getting married next year, so trips over there are rising up as potential thick and fast; aside from the fact that we haven’t been over there since 2001, or at least I haven’t, and there’s a grandchild here too that people haven’t seen.
Into this fray comes a travel site, and while they’re often popping up I like to look them over and test them out to see which one is going to come up roses for us when we need it Easy to Book is very easy to browse they have some excellent deals on London Hotels which is always nice. If we were going to go back I would have to show my husband and son the capital; we can choose a variety of ratings, and there’s no booking fee which is nice. Hopefully they would get some hotels a little further North in England so that we don’t have to impose on relatives and stay with them. I see hotels in Dublin but that would be a bit of a commute ^_~.

I had a lot of really creative suggestions for what it was that my husband had got me for my birthday. Lisa from My Thoughts Ideas and Ramblings was close with the suggestion of a ‘headset for my phone’ but Patrick of Patrick Says hit the nail on the head by identifying it as a Bluetooth; but then he’s definitely a geek like me, so perhaps he has one of his own?

Here it is from the picture I cropped down:

And here I am showing off my Borg-ish geekiness:

I’m really loving this little “roach” as my husband calls it. I’ve pointed them out to him before at the stores and done my little girl pout about them, and been teased because he doesn’t like the look; but it must be love because he got me it. He called me up after he got done with a deposition he went to and said, “Happy Birthday. I’m getting you a Bluetooth,” there was a pause while I stuttered for a moment because I figured he was probably just teasing me and then he went, “No, seriously. I’m right here…uh…which one do I get? The one that looks more sci-fi?”

I was joking to him that I’m now free to turn into a Cyberman now. (If you don’t watch Doctor Who you might not get that one) and begin my plot for world domination. He said he’s going to start calling me Ami of Borg…

Oh, and in case you’re curious. My actual birthday is on Monday. I’ll be 27. O.o

As I’ve mentioned a few times on here before, but primarily on my livejournal; I have fibromyalgia, the illness primarily affects my knees but sometimes also my wrists and ankles. I look around quite a bit and have friends and family members also who will put me on to various new ideas for things which might help when I have flares. I even had one whose ‘pet’ massage therapist mixed a special blend of essential oils in the hopes that I could get a massage and have that help, but especially with really bad flares just someone brushing my skin sends me into twitch fits, so there’s no way I would tolerate a deep tissue massage

I’ve been prescribed various things including something which is basically a triple strength version of an OTC pain reliever, and I’ve tried heat patches and warming creams before to little avail, which was odd because to me the fact that cold is what often causes flares should mean that warm would help…but one of the things about fibromyalgia is that the way it affects your body is more than a little nonsensical at times, and that often sufferers will have varying symptoms and triggers.

I was sent some free samples of Freeze It to try and figured I may as well. I used them the last few days on my knees and was pleasantly surprised by the results after I got over the “OMG this stuff is GREEN!” moment. But despite it being such a bright green coming out of the packet it absorbed into my skin very quickly, and I’ve had no problems with color or overpowering scent lingering around. The only problem I really had was the munchkin thinking that I must have some kind of new and wonderful food I wasn’t sharing and trying to glomp on to me and eat my legs.

My pain didn’t go away completely, but it definitely eased up a lot within a very short time of applying the gel. This was evidenced by the fact that I could get around the house without limping or looking like I was crippled. I’ve started doing some working out this past week and in times past this meant that I would be hobbling around for days and unable to work out more than once a week. Considering I have a toddler to race around after as well that’s just not acceptable. The sample packs have run out but I was gratified to see that my favorite local store, Target, carries the over the counter sizes of the gel so now I have a big pack to use.

My husband has a problem remembering important days, so he tends to do things for them when he knows they’re coming up. So that he doesn’t miss the day. This means I tend to get things early quite a bit. A few days before Valentine’s day one year he brought me a purse filled with a pocket knife and bars of chocolate.

This year…well, I’m going to take a leaf out of Skeet’s book and give you a tease and see if you can guess what he brought me.

So, what is it? The winner will, of course, get linky love from my PR-3 self.

We passed! Not that I really think you can fail these things, but what I mean is good news all round.

The munchkin is now 32 inches tall and 27lbs 1 oz in weight which means he’s in the 75-90th percentile for both. This seems to be average for him.

There is nothing wrong with his legs. This was one of my on-off fears. I would think to myself “Oh, it’s fine it’s just the diaper,” and then someone would say something, and I’d start to freak out, OMG maybe there is SOMETHING wrong, but no, he is not bow-legged. It is just him having to walk with a diaper on.
The doc did say there is ever such a slight sign that there’s a little bit of strain on his ankles which is probably being caused from him sleeping curled up on his belly, so if he does that we should just straighten his legs out.

Developmentally, verbally and all the rest of it he is fine. In fact reading the charts he’s just a little above on that for the average age. Median for kids of 15 months is to have three words aside from “Mama” and “Dada” and names of any pets you might have.
He’s had “Okay” “Yeah” “What?” for a couple of months now, and he’s recently mastered “bah-bah” (bye!) occasionally we also get “Thankoo” “Wuh-tah” (water) “What dis?” “What dat?” “Ta” and he’s was actually say “Cah” (car) while we were in the doctor’s office pointing to the cars on the walls, and then to the trucks and going, “Wah dat?”
So, yeah…STOP BEING WORRIED. Right?

He was very, very angry about his shots today. At one point he wrestled one foot away from my grip and was trying to push the nurse away, but we got them done. I had taken one of his “biter biscuits” with us as a post-shot treat and as soon as he got that the meltdown stopped and he was all smiles again.

The doc has given me a prescription for chewable vitamins and also some extra potent diaper rash cream as he’s had a rash on off for a little bit now that we just can’t seem to shake. It will clear up for a day or so and then come back worse than ever.

We’ve found a new doctor for ourselves, hopefully. They turn out to be affiliated with my old doctor; the one I went to before I was married, but only a few minutes away from us.

Today is the munchkin’s 15 month check-up, even though he doesn’t technically turn 15 months until tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure he got in given the Medicaid properly expires in August, and I have to re-apply to Kid Care this week, among everything else. They said our application would stay on file but given our address and phone and everything has changed I may just reapply from scratch.

He gets shots today so that’s going to be fun.

I also need to remember to find out what my hubbie did with our digital camera. He borrowed it for work over the weekend and then wound up not actually using it because the person didn’t show up to testify and has now refused to do so, but I can’t find the camera anywhere in the house or in his car. Mrrrrgh.