Housekeeping---- My blogroll

For months past, I've been reminding myself that the blogroll in my sidebar is out of date. I hadn't kept it up by adding new blogs which I customarily visit (though they're on my favourites on my laptop), and I know there are some defunct blogs which I had kept sitting there (in hope that they might suddenly come back to life - sometime). Some blogpals have moved from Blogger to other (what's the word? Servers?) - You know, Typepad or such, and I hadn't updated their addresses.

Well, my halo should be shining brightly, because I've just spent an hour or more checking that everything over there is up-to-date and shipshape. I realised there are quite a few wonderful blogs I visit that hadn't made it at all into the list, and now that they are there, I am hoping that you too will discover them. So, I'm inviting you to scan the list and go check out one or two of the unfamiliar names.

This exercise has just given me a renewed appreciation of the community of bloggers I've been lucky enough to fall into. There are bloggers who are artists, writers, spiritual thinkers, Mamas, walkers, nature-photographers, poets, dreamers, schemers, wishers, SoulCollagers, cartoonists, crafters, jewelry-makers, teachers, helpers, travellers; People coping with the things life comes along with for all of us. There are empty-nesters, young Mums, people dealing with transition in work, in relationships, in study; people trying out new ways of life; people living with illness, battling and singing; people working through loss and adjusting to gains. I'm tempted to start putting links in here, but then I'd have to be leaving some people out, and I don't want to do that.

What I do want to do is to say thank you to all of my friends in BlogLand for your open-hearted ways, for sharing your days and your art, for your constant presence in my life. I feel very rich for knowing all of you. Every blessing to you all.

Sunday Scribbling - Superstition

I brought it on myself. There was that email that was to be forwarded to my very best female friends - and returned to the sender; there was another that promised luck if I made a wish and forwarded the email to five friends (and the sender) within 15 minutes; there was another with a prayer to St. Theresa (was that to be forwarded to 9 or 19 people? I can't recll). I left them all undealt-with.

I have spurned the blessings of various saints and gods; the luck of the Irish; I have disdained promises of wealth and jobs, of love and eternal happiness. I have turned my back, time and time again on the promise of unimaginable good things falling into my lap if I would only hit the "forward" button and send on the message to others, let them share in the good fortune that is right now winging its way to me (or would be, if I did what I am being urged to do).

I can say that it is modern-day distaste for spam and its ilk that causes me to ignore these emails, but in truth, it is my old-time anti-superstition rearing its head here. Chain letters and the fear they engendered in people during my school days are alive and well and living on the web, and I don't want to be part of carrying on that chain.

If people send me a pleasant message asking me to share it, I might well do that. I often do. But when it comes with attached threats of dire consequences if I do not comply, well, then, that's exactly what will guarantee that I will dig my heels right in, and say NO! No, I will not forward this to my friends. No, I will not tell them any such thing. And if there are promises of great results, well, No. I will make no such promises either.

So, friends, if you have sent one of these emails to me, please don't be surprised that it does not return. I'm sorry if I've broken chains of good luck, but now my reward has come to me.

For no reason, no reason I can see or discern, I'm being regularly (but not regularly enough to see a pattern) locked out of email and the net. Or I'm being let in, and then blocked up. So, if I have spurned one of your messages, you will know now, that all my bad luck has come at last. And the punishment suits the crime. My computer is the instrument of torture, and it will soon bring me to my knees, repenting, and promising to forward, without murmur, any and every piece of spam that comes my way. Yes. I may well be converted to cyber-superstition!

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To read more Superstitions, go HERE