blogging orderliness

There are lots of tools 'out there' on the internet to enable me to run my blogging life with total order and efficiency. I got as far as joining bloglines twice but both times I neither worked out how to make it work properly and nor wanted to use it after the initial burst of interest.

I did take a giant leap forward a few weeks ago and change the setting on my own blog so I get an email whenever anyone leaves a comment. This includes if I leave a comment myself which I suppose is useful if I lose my mind and start blogging and replying to myself in a hallucinatory and fleeting fashion. It has meant that if anyone comments on a post older than a couple of days, I will pick it up. So far this means I know that a lovely person from China read a post from last year, last week and kindly left the details of her own English language school for me to check out. Good luck to her. I am way too arrogant about my own grasp of the English language to seek tuition from the other side of the world from someone who presumably speaks it less often than me.

A long time ago someone told me how to work technorati and I have that favourited and periodically I look at it and it tells me if anyone has linked to my site. It does odd things though and doesn't record everything and then other times tells me someone linked to me just 17 hours ago when in fact that was five and half months ago. I guess it fits with the semi-randomness of my blog world, but rather ineptly as it is supposed to be a tool for unrandomising my experiences. I think.

There is a lot of evidence of chaos in my life, chiefly in the mess in parts of the house (usually the whole house but given the recent visit of my parents, there are still spots of pleasing serenity) and there are bits of flotsam and jetsam around the section as well. The state of the car is akin to a midden - we are not a roadshow to be admired.

But for all that I would actually argue (to myself I know, the beauty of blogs is that you can click out and not have to listen to me be tiresome face to face in your own lounge) that I do operate with lots of order. I work part time in a job which involves lots of juggling of paperwork, teaching and managing of diverse personalities. I enjoy it and while the chaos factor does enter some days, I do feel that I have a reasonable amount of order there. The order involved in getting my children to the right place with the right equipment so I can go to said job is considerable. Well it feels so at 8.26 every morning. even on the non-work days. I've gotten myself involved in various local projects and though I wouldn't claim consistent order over the lot, things do happen. Knitting group has fallen off my radar because I'm so often in bed asleep before it even starts but I'm keeping up on writing group and making progress with the local school garden project. I've yet to make it to a meeting of the working class history museum project but there is hope yet.

I forget about Fionn's homework more times than I remember (whose homework is it anyway?) but we do good things together and I don't feel altogether out of touch with what the children need and where they are at. We looked around toyworld, the health shop and the photo shop this afternoon after school as we waited for a print of our chooks for Fionn to take to show and tell tomorrow (Chelsea Flower Show ain't got nothing on show and tell for social calendar HIGHLIGHT - how lucky is it that it even happens every single Friday? I've read the thoughtful and learned and impassioned arguments in favour of full time home education but really - no show and tell?) Then we ate cake in a coffee bar (if you saw it you would know why I chose that term) and discussed the possible origins of a piece of jelly like substance which I identified as glace cherry but Fionn saw no link to any grown food.

So sometimes I don't read much in the way of blogs at all and other times (tonight being an example), I muck around reading favourites and finding new ones for ages. But if I had it on a 'feed' (that is the correct technical term?) then reading blogs would become a job. Which would mean that I would put it off. Instead, reading blogs is a random joy. I refuse to read manuals of how to raise children by a clock because I don't buy that I need a stranger to tell me when my children are/should be hungry when all I have to do is look at and listen to them. I certainly refuse to sign up to the Flylady and thus sort out my house so it would look properly conventional. I looked at her website once and it said that to feel good I should start by shining my sink before I went to bed every night. Who needs drugs when you can start behaving like that for free? I refuse to sow seeds or plant seedlings in rows (apart from a once-more tragic experiment with carrots. I fear I am destined to have to buy carrots for yet another season).

I am still not reading enough. I found my book yesterday. It is in a moderately sensible place (under the telephone book in the special nook for a telephone book built with the house back in 1948) but then I fell asleep with the children and then when I woke up hours later I went blogging and blog reading instead. So despite pulling out of a forum on which I was previously active and vowing only to go online once I'd read for half an hour every day, that idea has fallen the way of regular exercise. Maybe I should not allow myself to blog until I have read the rest of Kate Adie's excellent book on foundlings?

Maybe I should go to bed...