Orange…

The other morning there was this weird orangey light. It was like the whole of outside had an instagram filter applied to it. It made me want to blink hard to try and re-configure the light, it didn’t seem right. I remember years ago when there was a massive dust storm somewhere in central Europe ( im a bit sketchy on the details!) but where we were living at the time in the south east of the UK..there was a light covering of red dust on everything and the colours around at that time reflected it. It was bizarre, like being inside one of those seaside sand shakers.

It was a nice light this morning of orange..but it felt odd…my eyes frantically sending messages to my brain along the lines of ‘the sky is supposed to be blue, this is ALL wrong!’ Our brain has its colour pallet and when things don’t quite fit into that it sort of goes into a mad scramble to sort it all out and make sense of it. The sky should be blue, the grass should be green, that fence should be brown etc etc….

I like the colour orange, its such a cheerful colour and so fantastic at autumn time, so many different types of orange just in the trees…but when the light gets involved too….

Its a little bit special…you just have to tell your eyes to go with it….

 

one week

 

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Facebook…

I used to be a real fan of facebook. Really..i was.

I remember first being told about it by a friend and he was explaining how his sister in America used it a lot and it was this new big thing. I remember logging on (on dial up..which takes some patience!) and not being able to understand why it would ever be useful. I think i logged on, got an account and then promptly forgot about it…

Then dawned the age of the iphone and for me this opened up a whole world of possible surfing opportunities and in a moment of mild interest i loaded the facebook app from itunes and then facebook became part of my daily catching up, finding friends from years ago, seeing kids grow up and change, finding out news and of course that delightful past time of rolling your eyes at how wonderful everybody’s day, holiday, family, car, weekend etc are…yeah yeah don’t go on there after you have had a wet week camping in Devon you are going to depress the C**P out of yourself flicking through the 200 pictures posted by someone you vaguely know of all their inclusive, sun soaked, smiley, happy, sangria holiday. 😉

Anyhoo…Recently i added a business type page for my photography and it has been amazing for referrals and a quick way of communicating with my clients.

Then things started to change and i heard scary stories about photos loaded to FB being the property of FB, entire pages just disappearing without a mention. More recently there seems to be much more control over what you actually see in your news feed. The OH and i have had many conversations along the lines of..

‘hey did you see X’s photos of his kids?’ –

‘er…no’ and then i discover that, that person’s updates are not featuring in my newsfeed AT ALL despite being a friend of mine and you know a proper friend not someone who you vaguely know. 😉

This has been happening more and more. I see less of actual updates and more and more of company promotion.

Now it appears that if FB think you are newsworthy enough then you will feature in newsfeeds……nice… so companies that rely on reaching their clients via fb are now finding that they are only reaching (in some cases) as little as 10% of their followers because fb is not deeming their news worthy enough to go into all their followers newsfeed.

The newest development? The option to ‘promote’ your posts which means that you can pay for your posts to be in other people’s newsfeeds. Click on it and facebook will cheerfully ask you for your paypal details and off you go. *shakes head*  you would think that promoted posts would only be from people that you are friends with or pages you like. Not so…i keep getting promoted posts from facebook accounts that i have never had anything to do with..

I remember reading something about  Mark Zuckerberg saying facebook would always be free…hmmmm..guess that changes when you have shareholders to satisfy now eh?

twitter anyone?

🙂

one week

themondayclub

 

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Continuing our Summer Olympic Story…part 2

Apologies folks..as you can no doubt see i have been fiddling with my blog design…..and that has sucked up huge amount of time…but im digressing and although i am SO totally stoked by my new look..im going to keep on track for the sake of this challenge.

So…

Entering the Olympic park reminded me a little of going through an airport, you had to show your tickets a lot, you were hearded through lots of roped gangways like cattle and then you had to walk through security scanners and put everything you were carrying in plastic box and send it through the scanner camera. That is where the similarity ended though. My experience of airports is usually always fairly stressy..travelling with kids is not easy at the best of times and adding security to that usually serves for some warp factor stress levels. Passing through London 2012 security was the totally opposite. We were met at the start of the cattle pens by the smiley, chatty, games makers, high fiving the kids and pulling the Bolt pose with their comedy ‘foam’ hands.

“hey what are you going to see?” “make sure you shout really loud!”

Passing through the security scanners being manned by some members of the RAF, I reprimanded my son for trying to shove the plastic boxes full of our stuff along the rails to the camera scanner. I only did this because he tried doing this in Manchester airport once and got scowled at and ‘take your hands off it” look from the operator……

“Don’t worry, its fine!” young Mr. RAF man smiled, winking at my son ‘we could give you a job here i reckon!’

Even when they had to confiscate a can of pop from our packed lunch the poor guy looked mortified and tried to convince us to wait and drink it rather than throw it away. I had forgotten it was in there. I had remembered  that you could only take empty water bottles through security to fill up on the other side. We, along with many others had added to the trail of hastily dumped water running from the bottom of the large planters that lined the path to the entrance gates. Im thinking those plants are either dead by now or triffid-like.

The games-makers, the military and the police were such a huge part of making the day a great experience. I know everyone has said it…the athletes, the politicians, the celebrities but it really would have been so much less without those little moments, winks, cheeky shout outs on the loud-speakers that, if nothing else, put a smile on your face.

Walking into the park was such a thrill…it was like walking into battle..we had come to support, shout, believe. Bringing our young family to be inspired.

It felt a little bit like finding a book and only reading the last chapter. In most cases we know nothing of what these athletes have gone through to get to that start line, the highs and lows that have got them to this point in their lives.. but we become players in the final, triumphant, closing  paragraphs of their story.  Willing them on,dreaming for the best of best ending to theirs and now our story too.

We were ready to bring it.

This is part of my somewhat lame attempt to link up with my friend older single mum..you can find out about her challenge by clicking the lovely little link box below….

 

one week

 

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