Who's The Boss?

The winner of the big swag contest is....

Jessica from A Wealth of Knowledge.   Congrats to Jess and her new swag bag valued over $150!

How did she win?  Randomly of course.  And it only took about an hour.

First, I thought it would be cute to have Darius pick a name of out a hat and then video tape it or something that shows what a fun, cool mom I am.  But all I have on video is me demanding him to pick a name out of a hat and he throwing all the names out because I had the audacity to use his baseball hat.  I know.  No mother of the year award for me (and no I will not  being airing the vid either, some things are better left alone). 

Then I remembered that Plain Jane Mom had posted once about deciding random winners.  So I hopped over to her site and found her reference to Random.org.  It was easy.  Beyond easy.  Why I ever wanted to solicit the help of a three year old when this site exists?  I'll chalk it up to deciding to pick a winner at 6am with no coffee. 

Swag Contest - don't forget to comment!

My Swag-travaganza contest is still open.  All you have to do is comment in the Swag-travaganza post by Friday, August 17th.  Check it out to win free swag from BlogHer07.

Swag-travaganza!

If you didn't make it to BlogHer - or you just can't get enough of the swag - this contest is for you.

I'm living under piles of swag and have decided to share it with the blogosphere.  Here's what you get:

• Jar of Jif peanut butter
• Reliadose medicine dispensing unit
• Living the Dream t-shirt
• oops apron
• Busy Body Book
• Revolution Health sweat towel
• Bliss spa mini-products from the W (taken from my very own room)
• Packin Smart Formula Dispenser and Snack Case
• 75 minutes from tutor.com
• Wati dress
• and the infamous Butterball pot holder

All will be in my very own swag bag given out during the SV Mom's cocktail party at BlogHer.  As an added plus, it still has my name tag on it (I'm not famous now, but I will be one day).  Total package is worth over $150!

The rules? Easy as pie. All you have to do is comment on this post by Friday, August 17, 2007 (don't forget you need a valid email adress).  One comment per person, please! I'll only ship in the continental US, so if you live outside of that, well then, no swag for you. Winner will randomly be chosen and announced on Monday, August 20.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

After the entertaining BlogHer session with Amy Sedaris, I picked up a fabulous magic wand designed by Amy. 

It was only 3 bucks and Amy signed it.  Totally worth it.

Today, I brought it with me to work after smuggling it from home so that my very curious toddler wouldn't see it and break it within 30 seconds of touching it.  I swiped it over my computer and said a little spell. 

"Please oh please let me get outta here on time today.  I've got to pick up my kid by 5:45 or else I will have to deal with spawn of the devil (aka the preschool director and her $15 per minute fine for being late)."

I also plan on using it to cast spells on the Stoopid People Who Ask Stoopid Questions. 

And I'll bring it back home later.  Amy swears that if you wave it over your oven, a turkey will magically appear.  Honey, I don't need a turkey.  I'll settle for a cheese quesadilla and a beer. 

My BlogHer hangover

Ok, so apparently I am not the only one suffering from a BlogHer hangover.  By the time I got home on Sunday afternoon, I felt like I did the entire summer of my 21st birthday where I partied too much and didn't sleep enough.  Although this time, I stuck to two or three drinks per night and slept for at least 7 hours.  Is this was "getting old" means?

Coming home to a very cranky toddler and the fact that I was never able to connect my work VPN to the BlogHer wireless network meant that I had a lot to juggle.   I'm not sure who missed me more: my team at work or Darius (aka Mr. McCranky).  I wanted to cuddle with my cranky boy but I also felt compelled to jump into the corporate email which would inevitably have hundreds of email by now.

Yesterday, I got up at 5am and turned on my laptop.  To my surprise, I had less than a hundred emails.  There is a God.  Nothing urgent and most things already completed by my fabulous team. 

So I did what any working mother would do.  I sent my kiddo to daycare and took a sick day. 

Maybe a hangover isn't so bad afterall. 

Take-Aways from BlogHer '07

Lots of focus on professional blogging.  It seemed to overtake many of the sessions.  Even ones that were focused on other topics seemed to end up on monetizing your blog.  Got a little annoying by the end of Day 2.

Bloggers needs to take a chill pill about probloggers.  If you want to do it, great.  If you don't, that's fine too.  I am certainly not going to stop reading blogs because a person now accepts ads.  Bad, unathentic writing is a reason to stop reading.  But to not read because of ads?  That's just stoopid.

Everyone loves my big hair.  I've given out my secrets (box color and the local Supercuts)  dozens of times during this conference.

Andy Sedaris is a weird shade of orange.  Love her, but lay off the spray tan.

I wish I could vote for Elizabeth Edwards in the 2008 election.  I wish she, not her husband, was the candidate. She rocks!

Live from BlogHer: Amy Sedaris and Crafting

The room is packed and many bloggers are drooling over the presence of Amy Sedaris.  The panel: Cathy Cano Murillo, Kirsten Roach, Natalie Zee Drieu, and Amy Sedaris.

Blogger Challenge - Do a googly-eye photo in honor of Amy and post it on your blog when you get home.

how has the online community changed crafts?

• Sub-culture of crafting.  more appreciation for extreme and diverse crafting
• Accountability to chart progress
• Community to learn new techniques, meet new crafters

how do you price your finished goods?

• Charge for your talent, not for your materials
• Go into detail for all the materials - call out those aspects when you market the product
• Include packaging
• Take into account everything that it takes to make

how do you convey the quality online?

• Have a compelling story
• Show the creative process making it
• Link to the process posts so that a buyer can see the effort involved

how do you protect your work?

• copyright your patterns and illustrations
• doesnt have to be a business
• do a promo on your blog for work that inspired you but still make it your own
• check out creativecomments.org for copyright-like guidelines for your crafting

Live from BlogHer: Healthcare and the 2008 Election

Live blogging the breakout session from the Earn the Vote discussion at BlogHer.  The group broke into different groups to discuss healthcare, environment, Iraq, and ecomonics.  The goal is to come up with the top three questions that candidates need to address on each issue.

Top 3 Healthcare Questions

1. How do you intend to ration care? How are we going to allocate resources?
2. How do you intend to make sure that everyone get health insurance?
3. How do we get birth-control universally covered in health insurance?

Additional healthcare questions asked by the small group

• How do we allocate fairly?
• When will we achieve mental health parity?
• Insurance dictating to the doctors the choice of treatment?
• How will we make better health policies without partisan politicization?
• Getting the science into healthcare and the politics out of it?
• Getting the candidates to actually reveal a healthcare plan instead of a dancing around specifics in the debates.
• What about long-term care and disability?
• What is family-friendly healthcare policy?  What is good for children?  What is good for families?  Let's build policies around that?

Live from BlogHer: Earn our Votes!

This session (which does not have enough women in attendance) will focus on what women bloggers want candidates to answer in the 2008 US Presidential Election.  There were representatives from the John Edwards campaign and the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Where are the Republican candidate's representatives? BlogHer invited all the candidates, only two showed up.

Women voters are an electoral majority and represent the "swing" vote in every election. 

Women Who Vote: Who are We?

• 35% are moms
• 55% voted Democrat in the 2006 election
• 62% are married
• 53% are btwn 45-54 yrs

• Single women are powerful.  45% of women are unmarried in the US and they equate to 25% of the total electorate.  They consistently vote democratically.

Top Issues for Women

• #1 issue for women is  HealthCare.
• For men, it's illegal immigration. 
• Independent and Democratice women have similar concerns compared to Republicans.
• When women talk about immigration, they talk about the affects of illegal immigration in services, healthcare, public schools.

Will 2008 be the year of the woman president? 

• Overwhelmingly popular for democratic men and women while overwhelmingly unfavorable for republican men and women.
• Women can be the biggest source of support for women candidates.  When there are women candidates, more women get out to vote, volunteer in campaigns, and are generally more active.
• Will women vote based on policy or personality?

Interestingly enough, international issues, humanitarian assistance, and world-wide support have not registered on the polls.  Perhaps it's due to the Hurricane Katrina crisis and the lack of government assistance homeland? 

Raise of hands - Will you vote for a candidate just because of their gender?  The President of NOW stood up and said that they will vote for the candidate that is best FOR women.

_____________________________

Links:

Emily's List

Women in Media and News

National Organization for Women

_____________________________

Cross-posted at the Silicon Valley Mom's Blog

Making new "friends"

Last night I hung out with two awesome working mommy-bloggers, Self-Made Mom and Susan at Working Mom's Against Guilt.  I love getting to connect with my fellow working mother bloggers.  LOVE IT.  We hung out, drank wine, talked about our struggles as working moms, and told lots of hilarious work stories.  Self-Made Mom is my new best friend.  Seriously.  We're buying BFF necklaces at the end of the conference today.

Then, this morning, I was on the bus with the fab Plain Jane Mom.  I pointed at her and made an ass of myself.  I don't think she figured out it was me.  I keep forgetting that I post under BirdieRoark and I introduce myself as Robyn.  It's throwing people off everytime. 

Alright, on to paying attention to the Keynote Breakfast on Artifical Intelligence.  I will be live blogging during parts of the day either here or at the Silicon Valley Mom's Blog.

Live from BlogHer: The Art of Storytelling

The crowd for this second session is packed to standing room only.  Many of us, like me, wanted to get insight in turning our blog from a dramatic diary to a story.

The guest speakers Claire Fontaine, Birdie Jaworski, and Ree had a lot of advice and insight that I'll be able to take back home with me.  As I figure out the purpose of this blog, I know that I don't want this to just be a diary of my life.  I want more than that.  Frankly, I'm not all that interesting, but I have great stories that I want to share. 

One of the panelist, Birdie Jaworski, stated that if you are writing for your readers or what you think they want to read, then you miss the human element that will actually connect with your readers.  Since I don't have a large readership (yes, I watch the stats, but I don't obsess), I don't feel like I need to worry to much about y'all.  I'm about to start a journey and I would love for you to share it with me.

Ree, from Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, stated that you don't have to have momentual moments in order to write a story.  You can take a simple thought or feeling and transform that into a story.  She started out by writing down the stories that she used to tell at parties.  Take stories from your past and translate them into written word. Use your blog to workout your writing. 

The group spent some time about the dilemma of writing for you or writing for your audience.  Do you censor yourself too much or not enough? Do you fear Sitemeter? Do you not write the tender, vulernable moments?  How far do you open yourself up to your audience?  Do you even care if you have an audience?

Start with an idea or theme (ex., We are all human underneath the surface) and then start to figure out how each scene will layer into that theme so that the reader is able to solve the mystery by themselves.

We finished the session discussing the difference between memoir, non-fiction, fiction, and truth telling.  I previously posted about not sure about how far I open up when it comes to telling my family about this blog.  I want to speak my truth.  But I realize that my truth isn't always truthful.  I pull scenes from my life and translate them into a single story.  I take numerous conversations and turn them into one.  It is how I write, how I feel, how I absorb the world.  My writing isn't always anecdotal.  I realize now how important it is for me to be truthful about how I write.  It'a all real.  Just the time, place, and context may be a little different.

Photohunt: Creative

This week's Photohunt is a picture of the fabulous women on Silicon Valley Mom's Blog and our sister site, Chicago Mom's Blog.  We had a fabulous cocktail party at Viand in Chicago courtesy of Yahoo! last night as a kick-off for BlogHer '07.  This group of writers are incredibly creative, smart, funny group of women.  And I am so proud to get to be a part of this blog community.

photo courtesy of SV Mom's Blog