Hey Vanna, I'd Like to Buy a Vowel!

I enjoy blogs.  No really.  I REALLY enjoy blogs.  I think part of the reason is because life seems to be stuck on fast forward and blogs remind me that there is (somewhat) normal life out there. Because I work for an online high school, I talk to people all day through IM, text messages, rapid fire emails, Twitter (sad, but true), and Facebook. I have learned how to condense what I need to say into 140 characters or less, and the shocking thing is that this has become normal to me! My conversations have become "convos" and daily I use abbreviations in place of actual words.  *LM, CB, IM , TXT,  BRT, WYSIWYG, OMW, OMG, WTH and my favorite? DRVN - which means, "Please accept my sincerest apologies, but I cannot text you right now because I am driving and it is illegal to text and drive, dontchanno?" (BTW, if you report me to the UHP, I'll deny this ever happens!)


Occasionally it takes me longer to respond to all of the voice mail, instant messages, emails and urgent texts, but DO NOT PANIC if I am MIA!  If you suddenly find me AWOL from TXT, PLZ no SOS or 911. Prob drvn!  BRB!

Whew!

After a hectic day without my recommended daily allowance of vowels, I love to curl up in bed with my laptop and cruise the blogs.  Why do I love blogs so much?  FULL SENTENCES, PEOPLE! Actual punctuation, vowels, and thoughts that have been completed already. It's enough to make a girl giddy! There's no guesswork involved, no filling in the blanks, and relatively little txt spk. Ooh and look at all of the colorful pictures!  Nice!

So please, for the love of WEBSTER, keep those blogs coming! I want to hear about your weekend shopping trips, lunch with the girls, favorite cupcakery and what you cooked for dinner on Sunday. It is important to me to know that your latest vacation included a plethora of run on sentences and cousin Earl who drinks too much and then won't shut up! If you have an adorable toddler who is learning to crawl, walk, eat from a spoon, or drool enthusiastically, I NEED to read about it.  Consider it exercise for my eyes and a reminder to my brain that words do, in fact, require vowels.  

To all of you bloggers out there, thank you for the time and effort it takes to put your thoughts into actual words. You are my linguistical heros!

*Left message, call back, instant message, text, be right there, what you see is what you get, on my way, oh my gosh, what the hell, driving.

Tweety Birds

Tweeting used to mean something entirely different when I was a kid. Undoubtedly, it meant that summer vacation was upon us and if I could hear "tweeting" then I'd overslept my crack of dawn internal alarm clock and I needed to get moving because 7AM means get outside and have some fun! I'd leave the house right after breakfast and not be seen again by my family unit until dusk. All you children of the 70's know what I'm talking about. Am I right, or what?

But not now. Nope. Nuh uh. Play outside? But it's c-uh-old out there!

The70's happened a long time ago and these days birds are for the birds, if you know what I mean. So what exactly does tweeting mean in our modern technopia?

Wikipedia has redefined the word for us uber technical modern types.
Tweet: A micro-blog post on the Twitter social network site, or the act of posting on it. Each post is referred to as a tweet, and the act of sending a tweet is referred to as tweeting.

Look out, Tweety Bird, you're so old school!

There are some days when I have pretty decent conversations with my kiddos via tweets and I am actually grateful to know what's up with them. When you think about it, it's pretty genius. In 140 characters, or less, tell the world what's up with you. 140 because in our fast paced world of "gotta get there like 5 minutes ago, so hand me another latte and stand back" if you go beyond your word limit then you're talking to someone's vapor trail.

Just think about the time that could be saved and put to better use if corporate meetings were conducted by tweets! And how about that State of the Union Address coming up tomorrow? Twitter politics anyone? Thanks for the brief tweet, President Obama, now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Nice. A girl can dream!

Seriously though, I was just pondering how this bit of technology has changed my personal life and brought my kids closer to me throughout the day as we each go about our own daily patterns. We even communicate with Ashley, in Georgia, on a regular basis via Twitter! Beyond that, there's a completely different layer to how Twitter affects my daily life because I happen to work for an Online High School that uses Twitter in a professional capacity. Very cool!

So tweet away! The day has started and there's information that NEEDS to be exchanged. What are you up to? What interesting things have you seen today? Have YOU squished a spider on your locker lately? If so, the world wants to know about it!

A sampling from my Tweet collection:

BinzaBear- Strawberry orange banana smoothie! Yum! :p

mads_the_kat- Calculus hurts my brain.

BinzaBear- Just had to squish a spider on my locker... I am now grossed out... Ewww

JayBabeAbby- I got a 4.0 for the first time in my life! :D

Shlaberry3- Watching the lion king 1 1/2 in science because we are learning about producers and consumers :) yay

Artistryomen213- The crayola slipped into my prismacolors when I wasnt looking! Rude!

mads_the_kat- I love the way my hands smell after peeling an orange.

Nikole928- Brightly colored helium balloons = Happiness :)

AgonyInEcstasy- @postsecret Just what I've always wanted, a toaster I can check facebook on!

Shlaberry3- Just accidentally ate an ant HOLY NOMILICIOUSNESS!

Artistryomen213- I am completely amused. The newspaper class decided that they want a pet goldfish. The teacher said yes.

Nikole928- Spending the day with my little girl at PCMC for her cardiology check up. An amazing girl, and an amazing team of docs. Life. Is. Good!