Goodbye Weekend
I survived the weekend. My other half arrived home about an hour ago (mid-way through the Grand Prix, which I saw no more of), and said a simple “thankyou” when she noticed the skyscrapers of washed clothes, neatly folded on the dining room table. Of course she didn't notice the spotless kitchen, the playroom, the shoes in the hallway, or that you could see across the lounge.
At least I had an excuse to put a bottle of wine in the fridge (I stayed away from alcohol entirely yesterday, following the “entire bottle of Prosecco” incident on Friday night).
In some ways it feels like the weekend hasn't happened. I've been pretty much flat-out throughout – washing clothes, tidying up, grocery shopping, helping the kids, and so on. The one respite was “Iron Man 3” on Friday night – I worried it might be a bit grown up for our middle girl (it's labelled a 12 over here – she's only 11), but I took the risk. Through sneaky glances now and again, I figured it probably wasright on the limit of the movies she can watch at the moment, but she didn't have any nightmares, so I think we got away with it.
p.s. the Dora the Explorer reference in Iron Man 3 was the best part of the movie. Quite sad really.
I sat down last night with the intention of finding more people to read online. I joined BlogLovin', filled out my profile, and went in search of like minded people – only to discover that they no longer have a “personal” blog category (aka “other”) – meaning their entire database is at first glance filled with the niche blogging marketing morons that I so often rail against. Doing a few searches found a few needles in the haystack, but I realised I needed to do more – be more clever.
Then I had a brainwave. Some time ago I wrote a python programming script to crawl websites to find things – so I tweaked it to crawl the commenters of blog posts, and return their URLs. I then let it go on a popular blog. Two minutes later I had a list of 400 blogs, and a huge smile on my face. The smile didn't last though.
It turns out that of the people who comment on popular blogs, perhaps 95% are marketing morons, looking to attract attention to their own sites. The remaining 5% nearly all hold accounts at Blogger, or Wordpress, but haven't posted anything for several years. Perhaps one in ten of them actually has a blog worth reading. After working my way through all 400 blogs, and crashing the browser several times in the process, I found perhaps four new blogs to read.
I had no idea personal blogs had become such a rarity on the internet. It's a bit of a downer really – realising you are almost extinct. There was a tortoise on the Galapagos Islands a few years ago, wasn't there – that had no known mate, and that would go in search of her every year until he died. Perhaps that's the fate of us last remaining “real” bloggers.
Not if I have anything to do with it.