Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Back to Raleigh for a moment in time.

This issue is dedicated to Merrily’s friend, Judy, who is, as far as I know, my only confirmed reader.  Sure, the stats say others are looking at it but so far, almost the only comments that I have ever gotten were from spammers.

Oh well, it Is a good thing I am neither motivated nor deterred by the acceptance of others. That does not mean that readers don’t have to hold up their end, too, and occasionally leave a comment.  Would it hurt?

As for us, we are still in Raleigh, getting Dr. Appointments out of the way, doing a few repairs and replacements, restocking some things hard to find on the road, like Smithfield’s Chicken and Barbecue (SCNB for short) BBQ sauce.  Nothing really like it anywhere else, so far.

Emery and Christi have really got the house looking terrific with flowers, retaining walls, grass and a general “neatness” about the place it has lacked for years under our management.  Way to GO, GUys!

Big deer in the backyard today, just looking out the big rear window to my right, a slight movement brought my attention to bear on a huge doe (for around here). Must have been at least 55” to the shoulder.  In the past, we have often seen two or three, sometimes with young ones, grazing but this is the first one I have seen since we got back on 5/18.  They really come out once the acorns start falling.

I really love being able to deposit my checks through my Cell Phone. I just run the Android app, take a picture of the front and then the back of the check, type in the amount, pick the account and Shazam! it is in the bank!  This is really handy for those occasional checks we get in the occasional  packages of forwarded mail. So far, only 1 check could not be deposited this way and it was due to the amount. We just found a co-op bank where we were and made it through them.

All other banking is done electronically including billpay. I use Quicken and do all paying through PayTrust. Really simplifies our life to have it all handled automatically for $12/month. Well worth it to us.

As soon as we get the rest of these little bothers caught up, we are off to see Randy and Shawna in Illinois.  Although they are right in the middle of tornado alley and many of the really severe storms that have gone through Oklahoma City and Kansas City have zoomed in on them, too, they have all dissipated by the time they got to the Champaign area… at least, so far.  They did spend a few hours last week in the small center bathroom with 2 dogs and 2 cats. No one had fun that night.

Back to the work at hand.

ttfn

2 comments:

Mike Mills said...

Well, Budd, I understand your frustration regarding commenters. Most readers are like me, I think: Lots of blogs in my reader and not much time to comment unless I see something really noteworthy as I scroll. On the positive side, you have a talent for writing; that's what got you into my blog list. On the other hand, you may have some impediments for readers: 1) Requiring commenter authentication; I rarely comment if I have to jump through this hoop. (I had to refresh the captcha letters several times to get in.) 2) Readers can't develop a relationship with you because you don't include any information about yourself on your home page. 3) You have way too many blogs; I would consolidate into one and put all my energy there. Concentrate on good storytelling with interesting photos, but not too many. You can find other ideas in my blog here:

http://www.mills-travels.blogspot.com/2012/05/getting-on-blogging-tips-bandwagon.html

Most important, keep writing; you're good at it, and most people aren't.

Happy Trails

Mike

Budd said...

Thanks for the comments, Mike.

I offer the following as my perspective rather than a rebuttal of your list, which I generally am in agreement with.

1. I agree that requiring commenter authentication is a turn-off for me, too. I just found myself spending more time manually stripping out spam comments like "love your blog. Ck out Bobbies bicycles, London, UK" than I spent writing each one.

2. Good clue. I will work on that. From what I have read in the blogs of many others my background is not unusual from theirs but I see your point. I think in my original blog I did have some boilerplate that fell away with the redesign.

3. Can't please all the people all the time... so I chose to please me all the time. This format allows me to develop topically related content in parallel across multiple thematic blogs. Some of the items take a lot of research and others take a lot of time just working through the process. Technically dependent posts usually take a lot of this.

On the other hand, On the road and when.... has been more of a journal of our stop and go progress towards this lifestyle. Who we are is its content and because we are changing so much on every level in this process, what we were before is almost irrelevant... at least that is how I have been thinking of it.

When it was all in one blog, I got the "Too much content" comments along with questions from those more technically oriented readers wanting more specifics about some solution or project.

This always made a blog post too long for anyone to stay interested in and the comments created comments from unlike minded readers.

Yes, I do try to keep this particular blog more about the "storytelling" and leave the others to a more "progress report" type of content.

As you can see, I am missing the terse gene so I am always looking for ways to say more in less words.

Thanks for your comment. I will keep it in mind as I go forward.