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You Are Here

Here we are:

Finding building number 4 on the map
Finding building number 4 on the map

Thea told me that I would love four. She was right. Four is agreeable, four is slightly more detailed conversation, four is slightly less dramatic and exhausting. Four is Fun.

Saturday the kids and I went made it to Conner Prairie, and had the best.day.ever.

DSCN6136
Pear, anyone?
And she turned the general store into a pet shop.
And she turned the general store into a pet shop.

We started our visit at the indoor play area, where there was a pioneer kitchen, a play farm (complete with a cow to milk), a general store and a giant train table. I think they would have stayed there forever if there wasn’t the promise of real live animals out in the barns. We saw animals, MAM petted said animals, Jr. roared at all of them. We rode the Tram (very exciting! It’s like a train, Mama, but it’s on the road!), and each time we saw the map, MAM stopped and found where we were, and where we were going. She retraced our entire route, each time she saw a map.

We played in a 19th century school house, walked through a covered bridge, saw a carpenter making the cross-bar of a window frame and played with the wood shavings. We smelled drying herbs, and saw the world’s largest hot air balloon.

We are here. And here is gooood.

Montessori Schmontessori, MAM sat right down with her primer and slate!
Montessori Schmontessori, MAM sat right down with her primer and slate!
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How to Get a New Fridge in Three Easy Steps

This is the freezer, sans frozen grapes for our road trip, the frozen meals I take to work, and my adventure in babyfood making.
This is the freezer, sans frozen grapes for our road trip, the frozen meals I take to work, and my adventure in babyfood making.

1) Buy too much for your munchkin sized freezer, so that every time your husband opens it, weird things fall all over the place. All the food in this picture? Fit in a cooler that would hold 18 cans. That’s how small this freezer was.

These are the beer drawers. Also home to wilted produce, rice flour and other oddities..
These are the beer drawers. Also home to wilted produce, rice flour and other oddities..

2) Put his favorite items in the back of the fridge, requiring him to send out a search party for queso, since the light hasn’t worked since 2008. Also, put the beer in the opaque drawers on the bottom of the fridge. You know–the drawers where everything drips into, and the drawers where wilted cilantro goes to die.

3) Eventually, just refuse to go grocery shopping until a new fridge arrives. I announced this last night at dinner.

We have more condiment bottles than anything else right now. Each one has about 1/2 inch of product left in the bottom.
We have more condiment bottles than anything else right now. Each one has about 1/2 inch of product left in the bottom.

This afternoon, this arrived. If you need me, I’ll be alphabetizing my condiments and making little beds for my produce in my new food hotel.

It is so shiny and new, it reflects!
It is so shiny and new, it reflects!
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Blog Indiana: or my first Blog conference

Yesterday morning I managed to find some clean clothes, make myself presentable and get downtown by 8:30am to attend BlogIndiana. BlogIndiana is a local blogging/social media/tech conference with a very local focus. It’s actually a three day affair, but our vacation overlapped it this year, and it’s sort of pricey to go for all three days. I was able to snag a nicely discounted one-day pass though, and we made it home from our trip east just in time for me to attend Saturday’s Social Media Summit.

The format for the day was panels–a business panel, a foodie panel,  a women’s blogging pane, and a tech panel. There was also an “un-conference” upstairs–people could gather to network, chat or cover topics that hadn’t been addressed yet.

I don’t know what the make up of the crowd was for Thursday and Friday, but Saturday women were definitely in the minority. As the women’s blogging panel started, the room was noticeably empty. Casey, Heather, Briana , Jen and Stephanie (live via Skype,don’t you love technology?) started anyway, and it was a very interesting conversation.

Joanna of Keeping Feet did an excellent job of summarizing what she took away from the afternoon, and I had a very similar experience.

Women use technology and social media to connect. To find that person online who is either at the same point you are, has been there, or is going there. To read stories that, to quote Ray Romano, make you,”laugh because it’s funny, and cry because it’s true.”

When that panel was over, there was a short break. At that time, most of the women left the room, and most of the men came downstairs from the meeting rooms upstairs.

The women found a spot in the lobby, and eight of us continued the conversation from the panel–talking a little bit about blogging platforms, domain names, and a little bit about maintaining privacy, where lines are drawn, and then some. Clearly we were all techy enough to want to come to BlogIndiana, but not interested enough to sit through a formal panel on tech.

I think the men and women (or at least the social/personal bloggers) were at BlogIndiana for different reasons. To put it in WordPress blogging terms:  Some people (not me) want to create plugins. Other people (me) just want to use them. Which is fine by me, because the world needs both.

(And? I got to see some great bloggers I’ve met before, and meet new ones, which, really, was one of the reasons why I wanted to go in the first place….)