this woman’s work

I’m very busy. Very very very very very busy busy busy. Kinda busier than I have been in weeks. It’s good busy (lots of paid work) but my head seriously might just get so wrought up with busy that it might fly right off my neck. Yes, I’m being literal. My head may literally pop off of my neck due to sheer busyness. I am that busy.

Last night Brett and I were discussing this busyness. (Well, I was thrumming with exhausted energy and he was trying to soothe me with his calm, calm voice.) And we are both happy about it because we hope that Brett’s foray back into the work world is temporary unless he loves it (or at least loves getting our benefits for cheap again — new glasses here I come!) and if it’s working schedule-wise, then he’ll stay. But we still feel like our default choice is two at-home/working parents when we can swing it.

Brett got this new budgeting software that puts everything in buckets. It’s like the envelope budget system (a system that both sets of grandparents swear by plus Abby’s husband and everyone knows he’s a genius) only with buckets so that we can say, “You’re still doing envelopes? Totally old school. Everyone knows that BUCKETS are where it’s at!” Because we like to be the coolest middle-aged people at our potlucks. Anyway, he got this new budgeting software and when we’re not watching hulu.com, we’re staring at our virtual buckets and gleefully rubbing our hands together as we anticipate the invoices I will send.

It takes so little to make us happy.

Oh and our air conditioner went out (although with fabulous timing however seeing as how it’s pretty cool right now and will be for awhile yet) so we’re even more motivated to fill that “house maintenance” bucket up to a certain amount.

So forgive me the lousy blogging today. I’m really too busy to give you a suitable and scintillating blog and this will have to do.

Oh and the money bucket software? Moneywell. Mac only.

You may not know this but Columbus is a major blogging city. It’s true — according to Scarborough Research, we’re number eight on the list (a list topped by not-surprising entrants like Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle) sharing with those cities a tech-friendly environment and lots of internet access. Likely we skew higher, too, because OSU is the largest university in the country, which means we have lots of young adults with the blogging and the twittering and the myspace-ing around here.

The local marketing world has been paying attention (as have I, note: Open Book Strategies) and the other night the good folks at Experience Columbus invited the central Ohio blogosphere to check out their new ad campaign.

Now just like you probably didn’t know that Columbus is so bloggy, there’s probably a whole lot of other stuff you don’t know about us like we’re artsy as hell and incredibly gay-friendly (I’ve been told we’re the San Fransisco of the midwest) and pretty darn diverse. We’re a nice city (minus the humidity) — affordable, great housing, low traffic — and lately lots of different powerful folks have been wrestling around trying to figure out how to make sure you all know that. I’ve been in on a number of different talks about it lately and everyone has their own take. It’ll be very interesting to see where we are in ten years.

(Mind you, I’ve lived here for 25 years (moved here when I was eight, five years in Portland, OR — a city that really knows how to work their brand) and I’ve heard this noise before. I think sometimes the newcomers with the unbridled enthusiasm about our fair city don’t know the fatigue of living through the AmeriFlora debacle or being the subject of a critical documentary on gentrification. Sometimes the recently relocated aren’t so patient with us but they gotta appreciate our caution.)

There is much to love here but sometimes it seems like the powers that be are the last to know it. No wonder Columbus Ohio ends up being an insider joke on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (One of the writers hailing from Columbus brings his folks in for a tour. When they meet D. L. Hughley the mother stumbles, “We love Sidney Poitier.” Because we don’t have black people in Columbus. Right.)

So the Experience Columbus planners have their work cut out for them. How to get past our mundane, farm-centric, cowpoke reputation? Especially when what’s unique about us somehow doesn’t seem bold enough to grab attention? (We do have some great attention-grabbing stuff though, most notably the Short North, one of our few attractions that isn’t beholden to a big corporation. And we’re also well known in the gay community as a terrific city having been touted in gay magazines since at least the early eighties.)

Their answer was to start a campaign about what we don’t have. Like we don’t have the Eiffel Tower or mermaids or mountains. There’s a really terrible youtube channel — the vidoes will evoke snickers in those of us who live in Columbus and get the joke but aren’t funny enough to forward (and also don’t tell us what is here, which is the flip side the campaign needs to emphasize). And a myspace, which weirdly is run by an imaginary 22-year old male although the target audience of this campaign is ostensibly conference planners. Ok, maybe it’s a real 22-year old intern. Happily the campaign does boast some pretty awesome t-shirts.

So I’m not crazy about the campaign although I think it could grow legs with a little tweaking (I do love the t-shirts — full disclosure, they gave us coupons to get one free) only I’m confused about why they brought the bloggers along.

It makes sense for them to get us to blog the campaign because it’ll likely be controversial to the folks who love Columbus and are already pretty dang defensive what with the Aaron Sorkin types who dismiss us. Maybe those people won’t get the joke so good thing to bring on the bloggers, ply us with the goodness that is Jeni’s ice cream (seriously, that salty caramel? If you haven’t had it, you haven’t lived) and then set us loose in a sugar-infused haze to blog it.

But then what? The campaign doesn’t have a lot of social media around it. They haven’t really come up with many ways to let people grab it and run. Jennifer Laycock has given ‘em a ton of free ideas that could help things along a lot but there we all were, sitting with our twitter accounts and blogs and they didn’t really figure out a good way to use us.

We’re talking about the campaign but we’re not really a part of it. If they grab Jennifer Laycock’s list, they could bring us on board a little more. There’s a lot of central Ohio pride among Columbus bloggers and some of us walk around with our cameras around our necks all the time (Kristen!) and our iPods ready to twitter (umm, me) and a bunch of us have tons of readers NOT in Columbus. You know, that target market of people not here who maybe want to come here. People like Kristen (just check out her gorgeous ComFest pictures), who genuinely love and celebrate Columbus can do a lot to change people’s mindset about it. Rather than invite her to a campaign about NOT in Columbus, I’d invite her to one to give her insider view about what IS Columbus. And then ask her to share.

In short (ha!) lots of bloggers already are changing people’s point of view about what’s here — use us for good instead of snark.

• Madison has a loose tooth. I know! She’s only four! Not even four and a half! But she has a loose tooth any old way because apparently she missed that chapter in her training manual. (I have a text in to Pennie to see if she lost her teeth early, too.)
• Speaking of Pennie, she and her fabulous boyfriend broke up. I haven’t wanted to write it here because I had this Parent Trap fantasy of it all being a bad dream. But it’s a good break up because they still spend time together and support each other. We went and saw Pennie’s new apartment last night and she’s a good decorator.
• And while we were there Pennie was going to show us an empty apartment next door so she opened the door and scared the bejesus out of a guy who had just moved in. He in turn scared the bejesus out of us by yelling when we opened the door. When we were back in her apartment she and I started going, “That’s YOUR fault because…” “No it was YOUR fault because…” And Madison said, “I know it’s not MY fault!” She was disgusted with us both.
• Madison’s name is Tess Tyler today. Last week it was Sarah. For awhile before that it was Clonda and Laura but of course it was Wanda that started it all. She gets pretty mad when we forget but she changes it so often that we forget an awful lot.
• Noah got a haircut! And he is darling! Not that he wasn’t before but it’s nice to see those big blue eyes again!
• And I fixed my archives — thanks Rebekah! (A sharp-eyed reader who wandered over from Cecily’s!)
• Speaking of Cecily, she likes me! She really really likes me!

I got this theme because I like the tabs in my sister’s new theme up at the top in the sidebar. Problem is, if you have blogher ads, they want their ads above the fold at the top of the menu, which means that I had to put the tabs down at the bottom of the sidebar and the theme didn’t like that. I couldn’t get the tabs to play nice. So here I changed out my theme to get the tabs and then had to scrap it because of the tabs. Such is the blogging life.

But the sidebars are so much cleaner than my last theme that I’m going to leave them. And I like the social bookmarking bar at the bottom.

My archives seem to have gone missing and two different plugins haven’t fixed it so I put a drop-down menu (both categories and dated archives) over in the sidebar. And I put my About Me page back up (with a pic of the kids and Brett from a few years ago). I’d like to have a more recent one but my “no faces” criteria is making it tricky. And my camera won’t upload or something so I can’t get a new one at the moment. Eventually. Meanwhile looking at the Destin shores is not a bad thing.

I love wordpress themes. I wish I could play with them all the dang time.

I haven’t worked out in a long time — my lung capacity, rather on the large size and bad attitude will attest to that. I was remembering that the last time I was in killer shape (for me — my killer shape looks different than I once hoped in my blasted teen years) started when Noah was about four. Four seems to be when I quit thinking of my kids as babies and start thinking of them as kids. 3-year olds still look awfully small and vulnerable and needy and parent-centric to me.

Anyway! I’m going to go back on the squeaky, thumping, broken elliptical trainer. If I keep waiting for the perfect situation to get fit I’ll never find it so the squeaky, thumping, broken elliptical trainer it will be. At least I have one (that’s what I tell myself). So I did that while Madison performed feats of greatness on her mini-trampoline. (Just for kicks, I’m going to upload a picture of her getting xmas morning when she was one going on two. She was cute and fuzzy!)

Remember when I got up to an hour on the trainer? Yeah. Well. Twenty minutes this time around folks. I must have patience!

Wow — endorphins are AWESOME!