My 4 Year Bloggaversary & Conversion story.

Today I celebrate 4 years of blogging!

I never thought i’d make it to 4 years since i’ve griped at least every couple of months about my cyber torn attachment to blogging and pondered so much about whether or not to continue with it over the years, and of course i must have carried on with it, because i’m writing this aren’t i?

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just the way a lot of bloggers are, i’m not unique, at least not in this particular way. I’ve never yet interacted with a blogger who didn’t get the hump with blogging every once in a while.

…and I continue to blog because it’s almost like I just can’t help myself.

So 4 years.

I’ve gained a lot of weight sitting at the computer, and now at my laptop.

Seriously.

I have.

The good (?) thing about having a laptop though is that it allows me the freedom to walk to the fridge with it and not lose a moment of my online time.

I realise that not many of my readers know me in real time and therefore might look at the pic that used to be up top of this page (my Facebook pic) and think that’s what i actually look like everyday. But really, i have gained about 4 stone since I first started blogging, I am a very voluptuous lass and that is why I don’t post anything but head and shoulder shots of myself usually. And even then, they have to be tweaked considerably!

Huh!

Weight gain is one of the side effects of blogging?

Who knew?

All we bloggers, but we still can’t help ourselves.

Somebody pass the peanut M & M’s.

NOW!

So why did I ever start blogging you may ask? (humour me, i wanna talk about this)

Wellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll…….

….in 2000 or 2001 I first went online.

In those days I thought AOL was great and good and honourable…and reliable….and hey I happen to LOVE ‘You’ve Got Mail‘ and digged the american voice that would tell me that I too had mail, everytime I went online. (and i was gutted when no one sent me mail and i felt deeply unaffirmed ;-)

I had moved to my current home with the children, shortly after the irrepairable break down of my marriage (now annulled) and once I had moved, for the first time in years I started to have a say in what I did, where I went, how I lived my life.

Really. You don’t want to know how bad things were, really you don’t.

(once you get me started I might never stop)

I began to attend the Church of England Church nearby, becoming great friends with the vicar’s wife, and our children got along with one another equally well, and even further links were forged when our children went to school together.

I had always had an interest in Religion, and as I became more and more interested in it, I went online a lot and began to read up on church history….I also digged out an old New Testament I had been given many years before, and I soon realised that far from baptism being an option, it was a necessity.

(my ex husband, a non practicing Catholic… had assured me baptism wasn’t necessary and that a baptism celebration would be an unecessary drain on our finances).

Thinking myself already baptised (that’s a whole other story)….I had my children baptised soon after we moved here.

For a couple of years then we attended the C of E Church nearby, but the children didn’t really connnect with it and neither did I. We would go one week and not the next, our attendance was sporadic and though the intention to practice the Christian Faith was there, I really couldn’t reconcile a lot of what i was learning, with the church I was attending.

The fact is, that once the spark of interest in faith issues had begun, I was spending hours online every day researching more and more about Christianity and particularly, its roots….after a couple of years I felt that I could no longer continue to receive communion in the Church of England (they’d never even prepared me to receive ‘communion’ it was just something people were encouraged to do and I was certainly never discouraged from it).

You could say then, that God used the internet to reach out to me and to bring me to the fullness of faith in the Catholic Church.

So no matter how many wierdos I ever encounter online (and I am convinced there are a plethora of them) I earnestly believe that internet interaction is a hugely valuable resource….because it certainly proved to be such in my own case.

At this point then, via my internet reading I knew a bit about a lot of stuff pertaining to Catholicism, but I had no one to discuss it with. I didn’t know any Catholics and I felt I couldn’t really discuss all this with my friend, the vicar’s wife as her hubbie was a minister in the Church of England after all!

(I did eventually talk about it with her, though perhaps I was a little too enthusiastic in inviting her to attend Mass with me?… and she was genuinely happy for me to be following the path that I felt God was calling me to walk along.)

I was almost prepare to leave the C of E church behind, but I still needed some convincing before I took that step of Faith…I neeeded to know so much more ….I needed to know that this was really God calling me to the Catholic Church…I needed to know that I could fully accept all that the Catholic Church teaches…..because it wasn’t just about me anymore, I would quite possibly be bringing my two children (then aged 7 and 11…is that the name of a store in America?) with me…if they chose to come over to Rome too.

But who could I discuss this with?

I didn’t know any Catholics and I didn’t want to set foot in a Catholic Church until I knew for sure that was what I was being called to do….I’m such a romanticist you see, that I suspected I might just fall in love with the Mass if I attended one and I didn’t want a romantic faith….I didn’t want a faith built on sentiment, but rather Faith and Fact.

It was around that time in 2002 that I discovered online Catholic Forums.

I began enquiring about conversion by tentatively dipping my toe in the water of a ‘thread’ or two and before I knew it I was asking how a person could become Catholic!

I received a huge amount of support and encouragement and it was absolutely fabulous that I could at last discuss Faith issues freely and also that there was such a wealth of knowledge available to me by so many devout and well informed Catholics and I will be forever grateful for their pointing me in the direction of encyclical after encyclical, apologetics website after apologetics website…I also spent a fortune on books from Amazon.

One of my best ever purchases in those early days, being Scott Hahn’s Rome Sweet Home. (I gave it to both my parents to read after my conversion and they both converted too, so it can’t be that bad a read can it!)

I was almost certain at that point that God was calling me to the Catholic Church, but I was concerned particularly with my CULT history (you can read about that in the following posts 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that this was just another thing I was ‘latching’ on to. I was anxious that I might be jumping on yet another faith trail that may lead to heartache and confusion….that it wasn’t something God was leading me to at all.

I would cry and pray an cry and pray and then one particular Sunday morning when we we were about to go to the C of E service and my children were ‘kicking off’ about not wanting to go….I went upstairs and knelt by my bed and tearfully, and somewhat angrily said,

“God, you have GOT to let me know where you want me… I will follow you wherever you lead….but you have to show me how to take those first steps towards you….I have to know that YOU are guiding me in this.

I am going to the C of E service now and you’re going to have to let me know if you want me to be somewhere else. I’m so confused, the kid’s are confused too…you’re just not being fair…I want to receive the REAL JESUS in communion….why do you have me learning all this stuff about the Catholic Church if you won’t let me know loud and clear that it’s where you want me to be?

Show me where you are, show me where you want me!!!”.

Or something along those lines.

And so we went to the C of E service that day and when we got home I knew that in good conscience, we could never go back there again.

It began to ‘feel right’ that I was making the decision to leave the C of E Church behind. And soon I started to be strongly of the belief that it was the right time to start thinking about going to my first ever Mass.

I went with my daughter to the Catholic Church in the City Centre one Sunday.

It happened to be the very church where my Mum, a non Catholic, had gone to watch her friends being confirmed when they were little girls. When I had talked to her about thinking of becoming Catholic, she spoke of its great beauty with such unreserved sentiment that I felt a pull toward it myself.

But truth be told, I had previously gone to a different Church on the Saturday evening before that, but as we had not known the Mass times we had turned up too late for Mass and the gates were locked!

I like to think it was meant to be that we ended up at Sacred Heart Catholic Church…and although it isn’t necessarily the church in which I will always worship, it will certainly always have a very dear place in my heart and I will forever consider it my ‘home’ parish, because I knew the moment I walked into the Church for the very first time,the moment that I met Canon David Goodwin and his homily spoke to me so greatly… that I had indeed, come ‘home’.

And so it was, that when I finally became Catholic after an all too long (to me!) course of RCIA instruction…. like most enthusiastic, newly converted Catholics, I wanted to share my journey with others.

I did this verbally with friends and family and even with complete strangers…. I couldn’t help myself….but it also seemed a natural progression for me to want to share the Good News of my conversion in a medium that had fascilitated my own journey to discovering the Church that Christ founded.

In cyberspace.

I won’t go on and on about that here, because you can read more about mine and my children’s conversion and reception into the Catholic Church here and here…and how a couple of years later my Mum became Catholic and a year after that my Dad became Catholic.

But basically, my blogging all started out pretty much being just me and a couple of my fellow forumites commenting on one anothers blogs. (those comments didn’t transfer from my original blogging platform to the next one I blogged with, which was blogger).

And then it all changed.

It had all pretty much been just me spouting forth to an almost empty echo chamber until I began to get comments from people I didn’t know.

What a buzz that was!

Real people who didn’t know me, interested in me, interested in what I was saying!

Well, i’ve discovered many things since i’ve been blogging these 4 years….one of which is that there are as many different personalities as their are blog templates in the blogging world, but with a lot of time and more than a little inclination you can ‘read’ a person in cyberspace just as surely a you can ‘read’ a person of your real time acquaintance.

I’ve discovered that very real ‘friendships’ can ensue from not only a commonality of shared belief (though we don’t all share the same faith or indeed, any faith) but an enjoyment of learning about one another, our families and experiences.

And not that I’ve ever really cared much for the opinions of others if they differ to my own, but it’s no longer thought of as ’sad’ to establish friendships via the internet, because most people nowadays realise that it doesn’t infer an ineptitude or inablity to make ‘real life friends’.

Cyberspace just affords us all another means of making friends.

And about ‘real life friends’….what does that mean anyway!

Thanks to a wealth of exposure to ‘real life’ friendships in which bitching and backstabbing have often been the ‘norm’, I have become, ove the years, incredibly selective about who I spend my time with, when I have a choice to do so.

If I felt so inclined I could have scarcely an hour to myself on any given day of the week if I wanted, but i’m more able than ever to see that gossipy fake friendships turns me into someone i’m not very proud of being.

Truth be told then, I have relatively few ‘real time friends’. Lots of mates, lots of acquaintances, but friends I can rely on?

I could count them on less than two fingers.

I’m intensely private despite the blogging (believe it or not) and I suppose that bloggin’ friendships do largely fulfil my desire for friendship and communication but yet also that of my need for privacy. (I don’t have to leave the house and no you can’t share my vanilla slice).

Having said that, I’m not anti-scocial…i’m just selective about who I socialise with.

I used to think there was something wrong with me for not having accumulated a vast wealth of friends over the 40 years I’ve been here on earth (largely because i listened to people who have that opinion themselves) but I think it’s an awfully naive person who believes that the measure of an individual can be ascertained by how many ‘friends’ attend their funeral service….or of how many friends they have on Facebook, come to that.

So I would summarise this little ‘friend & blogging analysis’ by saying that you, my dear readers, are in fact very real friends to me indeed (you might want to pinch yourself just to make sure!).

You’re as much a part of my life as any other of my friends.

And while i’m in sentimental mood I would like to say that it might have been a zealous enthusiam to profess the faith that bought me to the blogging world, but it is the sharing of our lives with one another that keeps me blogging.

We bloggers offer prayers and support to one another in a way that some of our ‘everyday’ friends aren’t even ‘there’ for us. We know and care about one another’s health and wellbeing, faith and families…. and through all the letters, the emails, the facebook thang, the real life meet ups that may take place behind the scenes, we are connected in a way that sometimes leaves those so-called ‘real life’ friendships to be discerned to be only as shallow as a petre dish.

So no, I don’t happen to think it’s sad at all to count you as my very real friends, and I thank you….on this my 4th Year Anniversary of blogging, for sharing this journey of mine, and for allowing me to be a part of your journey through life also.

 

Home Improvements

Believe it or not, enquiring minds want to know (via email and comments) what’s happening with the improvements that were being made to the kitchen and bathroom.

There have been lots of blunders by the workmen, lots of inconveniences too like them not showing up at all on days when I was expecting them and them turning up on days when I wasn’t expecting them. But an intolerable amount of swearing later (theirs out loud and on occassion mine, under my breath) the whole 3 (nearly 4) week venture is at last almost done.

There’s still stuff that’s unfinished. A new back door is going on on Tuesday, a dryer vent has to be put into the wall sometime too so that i don’t have to keep lugging the dryer to the back door when I need to use it

In the above pic it looks like a dry and sunny day but it’s showering periodically here and I have too much to do to keep running in and out every 5 minutes to take it off the line and put it back on!

So we have gone from the kitchen looking like this:

To the new kitchen being fitted and the (almost) end result looking like this…..

Bit of a difference huh?

The rewire on the house was supposed to be done at the same time as all this work but the department responsible for the rewire have not bothered to get back to me on when that will now happen.

I had to have an asbestos check done on the house before they were prepared to start work on the walls of the rooms with the horrid artex I inherited when I moved in here, the asbo check was done 3 weeks ago now and I’m presuming the house doesn’t have an asbestos problem since no one has got back to me with bad results…having said that, no one has got back to me with a start date either so who knows what’ll happen about that.

At least I have the comfort of knowing the whole kitchen has now had new electrics fitted so I have one place to retreat to while the rest of the work is being done on the house….i know the elctricians will have to come in and out of the kitchen as that is where the fuse box is and they need to rewires the downstairs loo that is next to the kitchen, but the bulk of the work will be done elsewhere in the house. Which is a huge relief!

I also had a new bathroom suite fitted during the last few weeks.

It looks sparkling clean and shiny at the moment….you’d never normally get me publishing pics of my bathroom online and that’s the only reason you’re getting a sneaky peek at ‘em now!

I don’t have any ‘before’ pics of the bathroom but take my word for it it’s a one hundred percent improvement on the old bathroom suite.

This last month of having workmen in my home has not been an experience I would want to repeat…..the hassle, the lack of privacy, the huge inconvenience of having to stay home or to arrange for other people to be here when I’ve had to go out has been a nightmare… but I have to say, I am very pleased with the end result.

We may not own this place but while we live here it’s certainly a benefit to our family to be able to make use of these improvements to our home.

I have to tell you though….these workers….

I once had to go outside in my pj’s early in the morning before he workmen came, so I could raid the near-empty paint cans they’d left in the front garden so I could scrape some paint out to paint over all the bits of wall in the kitchen and bathroom that the painter neglected to paint.

As you can see in the pic below…the old loo is still in the garden too….

I suppose it could be handy for passers by who are desperately in need of relieving themselves?

I haven’t been brave enough to lift the lid up.

It’s been there all week, who knows what’s in there now?

 

Free Apron Patterns and Tutorials!

The fabulously talented Kitchen Madonna is familiar to many of you I know. Not only is she known for her blogging, but also for her making of aprons with a Christian twist.

I never knew there were so many apron lovers out there until I came across KM’s blog and so I thought I’d share a link with you of a site I recently stumbled upon as i thought it might be of interest to apron lovers.

Whilst not wishing to deter people from placing orders with KM, I can appreciate that not everyone who likes to wear aprons, is in a position to order one and the great thing about the free patterns and tutorials is that even an idiot like me could probably make the very basic one featured on the site…i’m especially thinking of the one that can be made out of a pillowcase!

Love it!

 

Rest in Peace Steve…

In memory of Steve who died on 21st July 1992 when our daughter was 8 months old, I made a Youtube video which contains photo’s of Steve and me and of Primadonna as a baby, shortly before he died. On the site, if you click on where it says (more info) you can read what I wrote about Steve there.

For some reason WordPress doesn’t take well to Youtube Videos so i’m sorry but you’ll have to follow THIS LINK to play my video. (you can leave any comments over there too).

I don’t go away on holiday till next Saturday but wanted to get this posted in advance to check the video works and everything.

I am having a Mass said for Steve on the 21st of July but will be in Wales at the time. It would be appreciated if you would please join with me in prayer that his soul may be at rest.

Thank you.

 

Colour me stupid

My ex-husband text to ask me if I had a spare 2008 calendar as he has done something to his (I didn’t ask what) and when I couldn’t find one around the house though i’m sure i have at least 2 unused calendars somewhere, I thought an act of charity was called for and decided to print one off the internet for him.

Am I a complete numpty?

He’s an ex for a reason.

Anyway.

In a way I’m glad I did this (not for him) because it gave me the idea of making Calendars as very inexpensive Christmas presents.

Yes, I am already thinking of Christmas and there’s even a post waiting to be put up here about that exact thing actually.

Anyway, in case you want to use this as a frugal Christmas prezzie idea, here are some links.

free printable calendars

more free printable calendar

even more free printable calendars

okay, this is the last one…MORE printable calendars for free!

As money’s too tight to mention I especially like that I can make an early start on these kinds of gifts because the 2009 calendars are already on some, if not all, of the above websites.

There are times when you have to buy X amount of small goodwill presents aren’t there?

For suprise guests or friends and relatives you don’t have much to do with…..you want to give them something but you don’t maybe have a whole lot of money to splash out on them and you wouldn’t really want to anyway! (Let’s be honest here)

I’m sure not everyone I know would be thrilled to bits with a home made calandar but that’s tough really. Because when i get back from my holidays i’m going to be doing some Christmas crafting in what will be left of Summer.

I’m going to craft mine up of course because I njoy crafting, but some of these calendars come with printable images too.

I so like things that are free.

God’s love.

Salvation.

Printable goodies.

Whoopee….doesn’t take much to excite me does it?

 

Encouragement E-Card

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower”

I took this last summer when we were on our holiday in Wales. We return to Wales next Saturday for our final family holiday of the year. Can’t wait! Click the image to enlarge it and see if you can spot my daughter in the picture!

To send this E-Card please visit my other site - Credo Christian E-Cards

Enjoy!

 

Books Glorious Books

I’m not sure which i like most.

Books

…or photographs of books.

Hence a post about and including both.

I’m almost ashamed to say that I had forgotten quite how pleasurable it is to while away an hour or two with a good book. I used to be a voracious reader, but reading has taken a back seat for longer than i care to remember and in recent years it has pretty much been the case that i would only read a book cover to cover if i was away on holiday and could wind down completely with a book and a nice cup of cha and not have to worry about the laundry or the school run or the bills or the….oh well, you know how it is, you have the same kind of obligations and responsibilities i’m sure.

At some undefined point in my existance I began to view (my own) book reading as something of a luxury. The irony being, of course, that I spend many an hour online each day and have long since forgotten that there was a time when I self imposed cyber time rules, fully intending to go online only between BIG chores or in the evening when the kids are in bed.

Ha.Ha. Ha.

So anyway, since the workmen started work on the inside of the house 3 weeks ago, I had absolutely no where to go to have any privacy (they even monopolised the bathroom) and since there wasn’t much else to do with my time while i’ve been sharing the confines of my home with the guys from early morning till teatime, I thought i’d crack open a spine or two (just foolin, I know a lot of readers are quite touchy about that kind of thing).

Blogging has been light, so too has blog reading and commenting largely because of the intermittent electrical supply and the router forever going on and off, so really there was only one thing left for me to do.

Read.

I soon discovered that once i started I just couldn’t stop.

Sometimes i would read a book within 24 hours.

(I think this has something to do with why I gave up reading actually… it’s all encompassing and very time consuming (providing one reads a good book)

During the last few weeks, some of the books i’ve enjoyed reading are…

Northanger Abbey -actually, I thought this whole novel tedious from start to finish.

Persuasion - captivating, enchanting and all those other nice flowery words that evoke beauty and passion.

Enduring Love - my daughter recommended this to me. Considering she is 16 I was a bit embarrassed to find she’d read something that had a fair few explicit sex references, but once i’d got over that, and the uneccessarily ‘wordy’ first chapter, I was pretty much absorbed in it…between, intermittently thinking it as completely bizzarre and toying with leaving it unfinished.

The Warden - actually I read an ancient version of this made for WWII readers. A delightful little book and story, Trollope’s first in the series of Barchester novels he wrote.

And i’m currently reading Jane Austen’s Emma

I’ve really enjoyed all the reading i’ve done in recent weeks and as trawling charity shops and second hand book shops for books, is one of my all time fave pastimes, i’m especially looking forward to getting away in a few weeks and perusing the bookshelves when i’m on my holidays with the kids.

We always bring loads back with us and our car is invariably filled to bursting on our return journey.

I’m especially pleased that reading has allowed me to escape (to some extent) what’s been going on in the house in recent weeks….even when the workmen have been working in the same room.

While I wouldn’t want to go through this house invasion again (though the work isn’t finished yet …and someday soon the rewiring will have to be done - hopefuly not for another month or two though!), I’m delighted that my passion for reading has been ignited once more.

 

If there’s one thing I hate

Edited to add: I chose to remove the visible stat meters on the blog. I still have the private one that automatically is installed in the wordpress template, but it gives so little info i tend not to look at it very often, so all in all i think this is a fairly healthy decision to make :-)

t’s when bloggers blog about their Stats.

So I feel a right tool mentioning my stats now, but I’ve had a real problem with my statcounter ever since I changed my blog template.

For example, my private WordPress Stats that are not available for public viewing, tell me that so far today I’ve had the following amount of visitors

But the public Statmeters at the bottom of the page with external codes are not properly recording visits and in fact they havent been recorded accurately ever since the template change.

I took the following picture of the days stat recording at the same time as the ‘accurate’ one pictured above….

..but as you can see, there is quite a significant difference between them.

Anyone know how to rectify this problem, or have you maybe experienced similar problems after changing templates on WordPress?

I really don’t want to change back to the old template again so maybe I should bite the bullet and have no visible sign on the blog of how many visits my blog gets each day?

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway.

A bit of blog humility.

I can still read the private WordPress Stats in my dashboard area afterall.

Any thoughts?

 

Prayer Requests in the combox

From Jadown:

“please pray for my business,which is very defected because of unseen powers or evil spirits,i am a rice exporter and my every deal fails due to no any reason.so please remember me in your special prayers.i realy need your prayers.
Thanks”

From Maria:

Widow problems what facing
Stress
Jobless
lonliness
Finance
My Son Job, Promotion, Health Stress what he is going through
Brother who is missing for so many years
Sandra Problems
Thanks and God Bless and keep us in prayers for my Brother and Sisters and the whole world at all times.

From Janet, who just wrote in the combox :

“My 28-year old cousin died in his sleep after surgery on his legs on Monday. It is not at all clear yet what happened. He had been awake post-surgery and speaking with his family, and ate some dinner. At midnight, the nurse gave him a light snack. At 3 am he was found dead.

Please pray for peace for my aunt and uncle (his parents), for his fiance, and for his two brothers.”

Please pray.

 

Ayd’s in a box

I was reading Rosemary’s post this morning and thinking to myself how wonderful it would be if some real life Willy Wonka invented a ‘weight loss’ fudge.

Then i remembered.

In the 1970′ and 80’s weight loss fudge really did exist.

With the benefit of hindsight however, the company may have done better to have called it something other than ‘Ayds’ in a box.

At a time when tombestone AIDS and safe sex avertisements were scaring us all out of our wits (especially those of us who were more than a little promiscuous at the time…pre conversion and all that) I’m sure the product could have been more apealingly presented and more profitably sold if only the company had changed the darned name of it!

(my mind is now running rampant with quips about the ‘benefits of having AYD’s’, but I do not want to be seen to be making fun of such a serious illness, so I will sit on my hands instead).

I was a sad, sick, neurotic tenager and I had zero weight to lose back then, but I was secretly bulimic with a dangerous habit of starving myself for days on end so let’s just say I had some food issues!

(I still do. Only now I am double the weight I was then. Really.)

Back then I would buy a box of Ayds or a pack of ‘diet biscuits’ on days when I would eat, thinking at the time that it was better to eat ‘diet products’ than proper food.

I would eat the recommended meal replacement/tummy filler of one or two pieces or one or two biscuits…but not having recognised at that time that I have an addictive personality (it’s not a copout, it’s true)…..I couldn’t stop myself from having another…..and then another…and before the hour was out i’d have eaten the whole box, the whole pack…because i don’t do anything by halves, me.

Oh what delightful memories!

Who wants those kind of ‘good ole days back?’

Not me for sure!

On my forthoming holiday in Wales I will buy me some fudge and sit my lardy butt on a beach somewhere and think of how much nicer my fudge tastes than those teensy cubes of Ayds I used to munch on in an attempt to stay impossibly thin.

I can hardly wait.