Monthly Archives: February 2008

How does your comment policy affect your blog?

I am a firm believer that it is personality that is important in this modern age of Web 2.0, distributed communications and mediated, online societies. I have always felt that blogging is about making connections between people. Easier said than done, but possible. The blogs I enjoy reading are the blogs where the authors are clearly identifiable. They have personalities and opinions and voices that I do (and don’t) enjoy reading.

As Mia has pointed out, blogs from a “personal” standpoint as opposed to an official view are rare in corporate environments. This is not to say that they can’t be done and done well, but these are the exception rather than the rule. I think that people need a ‘face’ to relate to. The Net is a hyper-crowded market place and you need to make full use of any hook you can develop to bring the customers in. One of the reasons I keep coming back to Innocent smoothies, despite their high price, is that they are just so fun and approachable as a brand.

How does this relate to blogging and in particular the “personal” blogging that I practice?

I used to joke that Bright Meadow was a small community of people, more than just me, made up of everyone who reads and comments. I have also said time over time that I couldn’t do it without y’all. I would still be writing and blogging without the regular input of readers, but for damn straight it wouldn’t be the same. It was brought home to me recently that this jest has actually become the reality. In my latest moment of blogging angst (yes, even the best of us have our moments of insecurity) several people stepped up to the plate and flat out told me that I had created a great community around the site.

And that chuffed me to bits.

I am also chuffed to bits by the fact that I have had just three – yes, three – trollish comments in the five years I have been blogging. And the people responsible for two of those came back to me, apologised, and now contribute to the wider BM community.

What has perhaps chuffed me to bits the most is the welcome my guest writers have received. I know it was/is a big thing for both of them so my heart is always in my mouth when they post (not because I don’t like to let anyone loose on my baby, but because what if the readers are rude?!) but I should know better. Somehow there has developed a unique group of people who hang around Bright Meadow and I can trust them (you) to treat the space and everyone in it with respect.

How have I done this? I am not exactly sure, but I think it is something to do with my personal policy on comments. I do have a comment policy, but as you can see it is fairly basic: no spam; no meanness; and I reserve the right to remove/edit obscene or inflammatory comments. My unofficial comment policy is that I leave no comment un-answered, even if it is just a “hello”. All first time commenters get a “welcome to Bright Meadow and thank you for commenting” and as much of a personal response as possible. Even if the comment left is rude I much prefer to respond in a reasoned fashion and try to engage the person in dialogue than just summarily delete it.

I think it makes a difference. I know it has worked on the trolls because one of them flat out emailed me, said mea culpa, and now joins in the fun.

I know when I comment on other sites and don’t get a response, something that happens all too often, I feel unwanted by the blogger. Quite frankly, I find it rude. If you don’t want to join in the conversation, don’t have a comments field. I am a reluctant commenter at the best of times because I am shy and hate to be rebuffed. I can’t be the only one who puzzles for an age over the simplest comment and who more often than note clicks on from the page leaving her contribution unsaid. It is a big thing for someone to leave a comment. Acknowledge it!

This policy, I think, has directly led to readers getting involved with Bright Meadow; makes them want to come back and contribute again and again. It has got to the point where whole conversations and debates happen in the comments between readers. We even had our first duel a few months back! I can’t express what this means to me. It means I have succeeded. And it makes me think other bloggers should do the same. Without our readers we are just one more self-obsessed geek pouring our hears out to the disinterested Net. People read our words, especially on personal blogs, because they want to make a connection. It is unpardonably rude to ignore them.

Where did this thinking stem from? I am not totally sure. It certainly has something to do with my background in customer service, where more often than not a smile, an anecdote and a personal connection with a customer got me that machine sale, and more importantly for my manger, repeat sales. I wouldn’t be surprised if my first introduction to the web being on gaming communities where all the posts contributed to an ongoing story doesn’t have something to do with it. But it is also the inescapable conclusions my research over the past few years have led me to draw. I am not the only one. Neko is finding it hard at the moment to get this personal approach into her research and I can understand her frustration *. There are currently certain arenas where it is not deemed appropriate to bring the personal voice (scientific research being one of them) but blogging is categorically not one of those arenas!

So how has my comment policy affected by blog? It has made my blog! It is not an after thought, but something integral to the site. Just as I will not tolerate spam or meanness, I will not tolerate ignored comments. If I ever ignore a comment you make, feel free to take me task.

And now we perhaps come to the best bit and what keeps me sitting at the computer, typing away despite the RSI in my wrists. Here, as always, is where you all get to say your stuff. How did the welcome make you feel? What are your thoughts on commenting? Am I totally talking out of my hat?

And can you help me update the Usual Suspects page? I really want to get it up-to-date and to include as many of you as want to be included, but I don’t want to miss anyone! If you want in on the page, pipe up in the comments or shoot me an email. Requirements are a name and a short bio (no bigger than 50 words if poss). If you want to include a link to your own site, then even better 🙂

* Yes, I did read it sweetheart, I just needed to think things through.

Sunday Roast: Mutant Ninja Walrus

This week we have a Moose flavoured roast for your delight. The reason? Cas felt like taking a break so last week she asked me to take over for a couple of weeks. She then tried to take it back, but I refused. The roast is mine, all mine! Mwah, ha, ha, ha! Anyhoo, I’ve been a busy little beaver all week collecting titbits for your amusement. You’ll notice a distinct difference – I don’t do tech stuff. Twitter is something little birdies do as far as I am concerned. You’ll also notice that most of my stories come from the BBC. I know I should try and get a more varied view on life, but meh.

In a couple of months time it will be one of my favourite events of the year – the Eurovision Song Contest. A time when we get to mock our European cousins for their taste in music and fashion, as they mock us for ours. Apparently, the Irish have chosen a puppet called Dustin the Turkey for their entry this year.

The Vatican is going to make it harder to become a saint. I’m curious, if the criteria changes what happens to all the current saints? Do they become saintlets?

British and American scientists have uncovered the fossil of a giant frog in Madagascar. They have named it the frog from hell, which I personally feel is a bit mean. How do they know it was a nasty frog? Just because it shares some similarities with the modern day horned toad, doesn’t mean it acted like one. It might have been a gentle giant. I think they may be jumping to conclusions based on it’s size, which is discrimination. I’d report this to the Commission for Froggy Rights (CFR), if we had one.

But while we don’t have a CFR, we do have a British Toilet Association. Is any other country in the world as obsessed with public toilets as we are? The government is currently proposing a scheme where businesses allow non-customers to use their toilets, to help with the shortfall of public facilities. There’s no real point to linking to this story, I just like that we have a British Toilet Association, and that the scheme in Westminster is called ‘SatLav’.

A little game to test your geography. This has had me enthralled for the past week. I can find most of the European ones, don’t do too badly on the Americas (except for the Caribbean), need a bit of work on Asia, but am completely useless when it comes to Africa.

Tate & Lyle, a major British company, is switching all it’s sugar production to Fairtrade over the next few years.

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, has made a bit of a booboo. He referred to the UK government sponsoring students to go to Auschwitz on educational trips as a gimmick. Silly boy. Such a rookie mistake. Everyone knows that you can’t criticise something to do with the learning about the Holocaust without major (justified) backlash.

Argentinian teenager gives brith to triplets, again. She’s 16 years old and now has 7 children in total. Wow.

Especially for Abi, as many trailers as I could find.
Indy IV – I can’t believe Cas didn’t link to this last week!
CJ7 – like Flubber with hair.
The Happening – the lastest from M. Night whatisface. Looks good, as his trailers usually do. Warning for Firefox users, this kept crashing my browser. Could just be me, but I can only view it in IE.
Smart People – oh those crazy messed up academics, eh.
Redbelt – not something I would normally go for, but it does have Chiwetel Ejiofor who is a very good actor, and not bad eye candy either.
Street Kings – one word, Keanu.

And finally, a plea to the Great British public – please, please stop voting for Greg and Linda on Dancing on Ice! They are not up to the standard and shouldn’t be in the competition any more. Thank you.

Sunday Roast: how very 1967 of you

I have noticed a distressing tendency of mine to start Roasts with “So…” I could make this into a motif, a signature of my blogging, but I won’t. I want to be able to keep you all guessing as to how I will start each week. This particular Sunday sees me sitting at the computer, bundled up in a scarf and wooly socks as I prepare the post for your delectation. I could put the heating on but the stubborn streak in my refuses to give in. Perhaps I’m just too enamored with imagining myself as a struggling writer in a freezing garret in bohemian London or something. Or I’m just too much of a cheap-skate to have the heating on during the day. Take your pick.

How has this week gone? Much of a much-ness really. Lots of going to the gym (damn it, but I genuinely enjoy going now); a very rock’n’roll evening spent in the pub with illyna and Moose drinking… cups of tea; a Saturday made special with pancakes and a late afternoon nap; and now a Sunday I expect will be spent primarily curled up watching TV.

Dear god I need to get me a life to write about! No wonder I’ve not felt the urge to write much lately, or that y’all are getting bored commenting!

I am toying with the idea of having a holiday at the end of February/start of March however. Somehow I still have two weeks of leave to take before the end of March and I could do with a break from the chaos that is the office – another couple of weeks like the last few will have me wreaking havoc with some form of deadly weapon. Or handing in my resignation a few months early! The thought of two whole weeks of lie-ins, pampering and time to write feels like a sheer decadence I greatly deserve. The only thing stopping me is that we have yet another office move looming large on the horizon and the thought of the horrors which I will come back to if I am not around to organise it… At least I have got the seating plan pretty much settled. I would have enjoyed the power if there wasn’t so much politics flying through the air. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? I did get to tell the uber-boss-boss that this summer would see my departure. Oh, the look on his face still gives me the warm-fuzzies. And telling the RLO to be a man (using those exact words) was another highlight of the week. You’ve got to take your fun where you can find it I guess. On the upside, the new office is just across the road from the gym. I can see me getting very fit as I take the opportunity to dash out each lunch break and vent my frustrations on the machines!

And now I have vented far more than I meant to, let us get on with the reason I am sitting shivering fit to make my teeth chatter. A note about the NYT articles – NYT have started putting a lot more of their articles behind a registration firewall and I’ve not yet worked out the rhyme or reason to which articles are or aren’t. I’ve got a registration so I rarely notice, but apologies if any of the links cause you to stumble.

HarperCollins is going to release versions of books free on the web. Groovy. It sucks they’re not downloadable or anything else (I think this is a misstep personally), but it is a step in the right direction. I am one of those people who likes to taste my books before I buy them, and I am actually more likely to buy a print copy of a book once I have read an e-version than not.

Continuing a theme, Random House is testing selling books on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I know this works for music where a single track from an album can also stand alone, but a chapter of a book that is designed to be part of a coherent whole? Then again, cooking books, travel books, short story collections – those could work I guess.

Ever copy/pasted one of those little blog-quizes that spread like so much viral wildfire? Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea

I like Twitter – it gives me a quick and easy way to update about the little stuff. It has integrated rather well into my life, though I need to work on a better solution for responding to people who reply to me (as yet, I only receive updates online, so when people respond to a mobile tweet, I don’t know till I get back home). Sometimes though, it’s not the solution you think it might be

Licencing people to smoke? Interesting idea.

I remember the oral section of my GSCE German and French to be a bit of a sneak – so long as you could memorise your speech fairly well, you’d do ok. What it wasn’t, was stressful – and before you think I’m just a swot, foreign languages did not come easy to me. The whole exam process was stressful, rather than just the oral component. Which is why I think it’s ridiculous they’re talking of dropping the oral component of language GSCEs. How else are they going to see if you can speak the language? A wider argument definitely needs to be made on the validity of the exam process as a whole (how can one stress-inducing exam that is just a snapshot accurately assess my ability in any subject?) but just dropping one segment because it’s too hard?! Pah! Pah, I say!

Yes, I’m on an e-book kick in my thinking at the moment. Could you have guessed? I bring you the ever-sensible Jeremy on the relevance of paid-for digital products in the era of the ‘free’ internet. What really jived with me in the article he links to is the idea that authority and personalization are what increases value.

Turns out I’m a bit of a Twitter minority when it comes to my follower/following ratio. I’d like to follow more, but I just can’t keep up with everyone! (If you follow me but I don’t follow you back, please don’t be offended. And in keeping with the Twitter Stats thing, here are mine (I love that the most tweets seem to come from the end of the work-day when I’m waiting at the bus stop!)

Sometimes it’s just nice to know you’re not the only one

We are all living in the world that Google Search built to a greater or lesser degree. I’m not naive enough to think that people couldn’t find out far more information than I wanted them too if they cared to look beyond the first page of a google search, but to see my house? As Fred rightly says, it is the scale of the streetmap programme which has the potential to get really creepy.

As close as I get to archaeology these days. If you are ever in/around York, I can highly recommend the DIG centre for any budding Indiana Jones’ in your family. The centre is really well thought out and executed. I had the privilege to visit after closing with a group of similarly hard-to-impress professional archaeologists and we all loved it. If only more museums had been like this when I was a child!

Playing with author tag clouds sounds like great fun. Might be time to get me a CueCat and scan my library (my old spreadsheet is woefully out of date – and yes, I did once upon a time track all my books on a spreadsheet. I am a geek. Live with it)

Priceless. A trail quite ruined by gravelly voice-over-man, but this still looks really funny.

I’m going to end this week with a call – my RSS feed list has remained remarkably stagnant for the past six months or so and I think it is time that I mixed it up a little and read some new stuff, so I need you to suggest sites and things you find interesting. What forms part of your weekly travels through the internet? What floats your boat? Which writers rock your world? Who is the one blogger who knocks your socks off? Big, little, screwball or straight, I don’t care. I’ll give everyone a chance, so hook me up with some link-love people 🙂

(Just a warning: if you drop links in the comments, you will get snagged in moderation I’m afraid, but I’ll rescue you real quick, I promise. I’d like to do away with moderation totally, but I got greeted with 50 spam comments that slipped past various spam filters, godlike Akismet included, into the moderation net last night alone, so it is necessary unfortunately. One of the downsides of popularity!)

Small Hurdles

I was lying on the treatment table yesterday whilst a nice lady called Maya did cruel and unusual things with some thread in order to tame my eyebrows, and it struck me that when I move I’ll be screwed. The problem is not the big things, but rather the little things.

It has taken me four years of living in Southampton to find a hairdresser I trust to do funky but liveable-with things to my hair (and not cost a fortune). The same goes for a beauty parlour where I can trust them to work magic with my caterpillar brows, my favourite deli, coffee shop, skate shop, tattoo parlour, jewellery stores…

The list of the little things is endless.

Now, I’m not saying that London doesn’t have any of those things. I know that it has lots of those things. The possibilities are endless, as the advert says, but how do you start to find them?! I still know people who commute back to their home town to get a haircut. My hairstyle maybe glorious and groovy, but glorious and groovy needs regular maintenance, and there’s no way I’m going to be travelling up/down on the train just to get a haircut!

I know that rather than the little things, I should be worried about the big things: getting a job, where I’m going to be living, things like that. But those are such big worries that I am just not acknowledging them right now. The little ones, those are the concerns that are freaking me out. I’ve settled in Southampton, that’s the problem. I never planned to stick down roots here, but I have.

And then there is all my stuff. Oh lords have mercy, the stuff! I’m a hoarder, a nester, and I’ve got the flat stuffed full of belongings to prove it. Once upon a time I could pack my life into a suitcase and a few cardboard boxes. Now the shoes alone need half a transit van!

Tell me again why I’m so fixated on moving to London?

Sunday Roast: there’s always room in your life for a sackbut

Credit for todays Roast title goes to the godhead, who deserves eternal props for recent road-trips. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events that led to such a quote-worthy line, but it did have something to do with five archaeologists being stuck in a car for a total of 11 hours, listening to a surreal mix of death metal, 80’s classics, Destinies Child, and singing loudly (and surprisingly tunefully) along to Ah Ha. One of those weekends that don’t sound funny when described but, to those that lived them, were priceless. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. It was a bit of a come down to go back to the office on Monday and the 9-5 grind. I enjoy my work but if nothing else, the conference reminded me that I really need to do something that stretches my brain a bit more.

Still I have a cunning plan in that direction, so all will be well 😉

Since I failed so dismally to bring you a roast last week, let’s see what I can do to make this week extra special, shall we?

And to start, one of those items I wish I could tag as “you couldn’t make this stuff up” – a Texas mayor resigns because she stole her neighbours dog

The British Library is digitising a raft of 19th Century literature to make it more accessible. Great. Lovely. And DRM’d from here to kingdom come thanks to the partnership with Microsoft, unless I miss my guess

Bill Thompson does a great job, as always, explaining the prevalence of surveillance in our digital world. I’m starting to get the knack of his articles as well; the first four/five paragraphs are the ‘news’, but it’s the later half where the stuff actually gets interesting and prompts a healthy reality check.

Something to persuade my mum that tattoos aren’t that bad? They could be used to deliver more effective vaccines. Thanks to the closing line that there may well be a role in the “routine vaccination of animals”, I have visions of Fido and Tiddles displaying some pretty ink…

The BBC has announced that their iPlayer will work on Macs in 2008. Finally! It has been bugging me to the point of yelling at the screen each time they show their bloody advert saying “iPlayer: making the un-missable, un-missable”. Grrr

The British sent 57bn text messages last year. That is a lot. For me, I blame Twitter. My bill last month was a whole £19.18! :O

As anyone who’s tried to get a digital map out of the Ordnance Survey will know, unless you’re in an academic setting (and to a less extent, even then), the licenses are fiendishly complex and expensive. Seems that finally the government is throwing its toys out of the pram over this. At last! I understand the OS is a company and has invested a lot of time, money and effort into these maps but do they have to be so damn trixy?!

British troops in Afghanistan are to blog their experiences. I find this interesting in how it ties into museum exhibits about the war. I’m less clear on the appropriateness of it.

Seeing as how pointless crass commercial hallmark holiday Valentine’s Day is nearly upon us once more, here is how geeks work. It’s not stalking, it’s an expression of devotion 😛

One of the many gems shared at ArchCamp 4 last week: Strange Maps. There’s a whole research topic right there on how people represent the world in which they live…

You don’t realise quite how busy the British waters are, till you see it displayed graphically (and in real time)

Two differing POVs on Google’s new Social Graph API. Both pertinent, both well argued, and both from people whose opinion I respect.

I have linked to these guys before, but when we got sharing links down the pub the other week, Neko reminded me about Temple ov thee Lemur, and in particular urban fox hunting. Tee hee hee…

I woke up this morning with a craving for pancakes. Not just any pancakes, but Scotch Pancakes. I always like the idea of pancakes, but the British kind just don’t work for me some reason when I cook them myself, and American style ones also don’t float my boat. Don’t me wrong, they are nice, just not… right. So I figured I would revisit my heritage and try my hand at Scotch Pancakes, which are more correctly griddle cakes… This is the recipe I used and damn, but they’re good! So stupidly easy and tasty. Mmmm, it might become a Sunday morning tradition, me thinks

Neil Gaiman is going to make one of his books available, online, for free (for a month). Which book? You choose. I’m torn between American Gods which was a book I adored but think might be just too big and weird for people new to Gaiman, Stardust (which is much better than the film, of course), and one of the other titles I am less familiar with and, consequently, think could benefit from some free-book-love.

This Flickr set is great – tattoos that people have relating to their (science) research. I’d be intrigued as to a similar pattern in Archaeologists. My experiences from Liverpool would indicate that at least the Egyptologists could be relied upon – getting tramp-stamped with an Eye of Horus or an Ankh was practically a rite of passage. Even my foot tattoo has thematic roots in the doodles I used to draw in direct response to the rock art of Megalithic Europe.

Have a dose of Google Horror

And to cleanse the palette, some movie trailers from the last couple of weeks:
Son of Rambow

Stop-Loss

Smart People

Dark Knight (in lego). Definitely one of those “some people have too much time on their hands” things, but genius none the less!

And now, as I’ve endured, and finally finished, Stargate: Atlantis (season one) I am going to go watch Stargate: SG1 (season 9). Yay for yummy Michael Shanks and Ben Browder!

Little Girl Quiet

Fairly regular Sunday Roasts aside, things have been a little bit on the quiet side of town around about Bright Meadow for a few months now. There was a time you could be almost guaranteed a new post every other day on top of the Sunday serving. I couldn’t speak to the quality of all those words, but they were there.

Lately though… Not so much with the writing. Why, you have a valid reason to ask?

I think I can split it down into two main reasons. Reason one is the most boring, so I’ll get it out of the way first. Simply put, I’m knackered. Cream crackered from here into the middle of next week. I have no fun reason for being tired, I just am. Work is hectic (as always – I’ve been waiting on a quiet patch for eighteen months now. I think it’s time I faced the fact quiet isn’t something we do very well). Plus I’ve got a few niggling health issues and other stuff batting around in the gloom behind me. Nothing serious or that I really want to talk about right now, but they are there all the same, sulking away, making me have to self-sensor to find the vein of fun this place deserves.

Reason two? Can reason two be slightly less depressing? Well, ok, since you asked so nicely.

Reason two is I think I have reached the “rabbit in headlights, year three, holy smoking mackerel” moment of blogging. There is a stat lurking somewhere about how most blogs make it to three years and then fall off the face of the earth. If someone could dig the source out I would appreciate it, because it is bugging me. Now I’ll be damned if Bright Meadow is going to go the way of the diplodocus but three years does seem to be my natural time for re-evaluating.

So why am I rabbit/headlight-ing it at the moment? Well, Bright Meadow is on the cusp of something. I am not sure what that thing is, but things are ever so slowly starting to happen. My readership – all you lovely, lovely people – is going up week on week by a couple of people each time. I am starting to get emails that are more “we are a valid company/respected person and we would like your opinion on stuff” rather than “ooh Cas, you’re so cool!” (Though a girl can never get tired of the “you’re cool” emails). I am starting, in my own small way, to have a little impact on people.

All of this is heady stuff and more than a little unsettling for someone who is essentially sticking her journal online!

There are other more intangible things going on as well. With all the good stuff comes the slightly less fuzzy fun. Given the people close to me who I know are reading, I am slightly more limited in what I can say, compared to the days my sole readership was Moose if I reminded her that week. It probably wouldn’t be wise, for example, to air dirty family linen out for all and sundry to see, now that my dad, my boss, my friends, potential dates (and possibly my brother, though he has yet to admit it) read on a regular basis. I gave up on anonymity a while ago, so any potential employer googling me is going to hit Bright Meadow, at a minimum, at the third result. I stand by all I have said here but you never know what is going to come back and bite you in the arse.

Then there is the pressure. I do feel a responsibility to keep the words coming and to make sure people have something nice to read and that is starting to be a drag. The Roasts especially take a good two or three hours to write and sometimes lately it has just not been fun. I always said, if nothing else, Bright Meadow was to be fun. Then let us not forget that part of the whole 9rules gig is contributing “regularly” for a given value of regular. I don’t want to be stripped of that leaf now!

I really do have to face it, but this website doesn’t exactly have a purpose beyond “ooh, let’s just write about something today”. Which is great but… Sometimes I think it might be time to re-focus. Re-brand. Re-think where I want to head.

Am I going to “monitize” Bright Meadow with ads? Hell no! The proverbial fluffy kitten stands a better chance than that ever happening. So income stream it most certainly is not.

Am I going to bring in other writers to ease the burden? *shrug* I don’t know. I’m not sure I could find someone to fit or – perhaps more importantly – I’m not sure I could let go! The Boss Lady won’t be surprised at this, but I do so like to be in control…

Is it time Bright Meadow changed direction and became a tech/lit/joke/… blog? Ne-yah. I can’t see it as anything other than what it is right now if I’m being honest. I like the mix of content I’ve got going on. I love the mix of people that are drawn here. I like that one day I can post a book review and the next a scholarly essay on wikis and personality on the web. I think my focus might shift slightly toward the new technologies and fields of research I’m interested in, but that is all.

Simply, is anything going to change, and why am I writing this damn post? I am not sure really. I am just doing what I always do when I have a problem; write it out and try to order my thoughts, see a coherent path through the chaos.

I need to take the pressure off myself and remind myself it is just fun. I need to stop having in the back of my mind “oooh… wouldn’t it be great if I got writing gig out of this” (for example). I need to stop wanting to be internet famous. That will happen on its own if it is going to happen. At the same time I need to fight my inferiority complex and start to believe that, perhaps, I have got something good here after all. That my opinions count. And that I deserve it.

So will things change? Probably not. Most likely not. I expect that I will go on exactly as I have been doing for the past three/four/five/six/seven (depending how you count the archives) years and write whatever the damn-hell I like and keep welcoming people to the party. I fully plan to keep on being star-struck when my internet idols speak to me and ask my opinion. I doubt the day will ever come that I don’t give a giggle of girlish glee when I get a “you’re great, Cas” email.

The day I’m not the blondest brunette on the block? That’s the day I’ll hang up the blogging shoes and not a moment before.

(But I do reserve the right to keep things ticking over for a few more weeks yet. With all things, planning is one thing; making the shiny future happen is quite another all together!)