Autumn At Oak Hollow

A cute little girl, blond and about 8 years-old, walks into a Dairy Queen with her equally blond mother. The little girl looks over her shoulder and smiles at at a boy sitting in a nearby table.

Cut to the girl and her mom sitting in a booth. A waitress comes over with a sundae and tells her its compliments of the little boy down yonder. The little girl waves to the boy, picks up her spoon and says to her mother, “Like shooting fish in a barrell.”

That’s Dairy Queen’s new ad for something or other and all I could think was, “Are you kidding me?”

In light of the whole Miley Cyrus scandal involving the hoochie pics taken by Annie Liebovitz, I don’t think this ad could have been rolled out at a worse time.

Our little girls are growing up way too fast.

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I know I said I wasn’t going to change much on the site, but I kind of got carried away with the widgets today. My goal was to make it look similar to the old, widget-less sidebar. I’m not sold on the layout yet. I like some things and others not so much. Your opinions would be greatly appreciated.

A couple of new things you may have noticed are the two buttons at the end of each post. If you mouse over the “share/save” button, a list of the most popular social bookmarking sites will pop up and you can tag my post to read later. The “vote for post” button is a Mom Blog Network thing and if I get enough votes I’ll be featured on their home page. And yes, I do realize I’m starting to pimp myself out here.

The other chicklet I’d like to call to your attention is the “subscribe” button at the top of my sidebar. If you read a lot of blogs (as I do), subscribing to feeds is a great way to be notified when the blog owner submits a new post. I can’t tell you how great this is because I just don’t have the time to keep checking my favorite sites for an update. There are a lot of good feed readers out there, Bloglines being my reader of choice, but the other most common readers are Google Reader and My Yahoo.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which you are no longer obligated to call your friends and family for the latest news because they automatically call you. That’s how great feed readers are.

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As part of my “blogcleaning” project, I’ve imported about sixteen posts from an old blog. These new (old) posts aren’t from the original “Autumn at Oak Hollow” blog on Blogger (which, incidentally, was first called “Noah Baby Update”). The new (old) posts are from a blog I started in late summer of 2004 back when there was just so much magnificence bubbling up inside me that I had to share myself with the rest of the world.

I wound up losing interest in the blog after a couple of months. Apparently that magnificence erupted like a shaken soda bottle and not Old Faithful. I didn’t have the heart to delete the thing until today, but I didn’t get rid of it before I saved those old posts. That’s my history and I’m all about self preservation.

While the new (old) posts aren’t groundbreaking by any means, they are kind of interesting for the simple fact that I wrote them before I was a mother. I was trying to figure some things out (and still am now, really) and wrote a lot about work. I think whining is the correct term to use here , but I also wrote about how I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a parent. Those are the posts I find especially intriguing. The work stuff you can skip unless you’re itching to know what I do to put food on the table. My job hasn’t changed a whole lot since then.

Out of those posts, this one has to be my favorite and is a must-read for anyone whose husband has ever read her blog. It’s also rather timely because I recently set Nathan up with a blog on his own domain and am very anxious to see what he does with it. He’s a regular reader now so I hope he gets the hint.

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