What do you appreciate?

Couple of days ago on Twitter someone asked the question What makes you happy and what do you appreciate? With the hashtag appreciate after it. And I answered it with a tweet that the little things make me happy and I appreciate them.

I guess everybody is different. Some people appreciate the big things in their life, others the smaller things. I have many of things that I appreciate in my Life – big and small. My kids for instance are a big thing. That I have a roof over my head, another. But it is the smaller things in between that just sometimes make you stop and think and say thank you those are the ones that we seem to forget sometimes, a smile, a hug, a ray of sunshine, a lady bug climbing up your arm. 

I suppose I have reached the age where little things like this matter now. So no matter how much you appreciate the success in your life – the big things, stop and appreciate the smaller ones too, cause without them the big ones aren’t so big anymore.

 

No more complaining..well for right now anyway

The other day one of my Twitter followers Liam Alexander and I were having a conversation about the cold and snowy weather here in Michigan. He lives down under and naturally only enjoys summer, summer and mansoon season. He visits his In-Laws in Minnesota and gets to experience snow during those visits and thoroughly enjoys it. I guess when you only have 3 seasons which are all hot you do that.

But it is totally different when one lives in a State that has Lake effect snow, and Alberta clippers and North Easterners as a description of the weather forecasts and owning a snow blower is a must or if you fortunate enough have a “Plow guy” on speed dial.

So as we were talking about the weather, actually I was trying not to complain about it anymore, I remembered my childhood and as how we as kids never complained about the cold or snow. Sure I grew up in Germany, which has compared to here mild winters, but we had a ball. Out sledding after school till the street lights came on, home for dinner and then back out  (our local sledding hill had the help of street lights). Or weekends, we were out from morning till night fall, soaking wet, blue lips and shivering to no end but we never complained. Or ice skating. We had a little stream running behind the school and every year it would flood out into a field and freeze over which we used as our skating ring.

But now I dislike the cold and snow. Sure it makes everything look pretty, and for a lot of people it is a playground. But not me. My excitement with or for the snow ends around Christmas and then we can move on to spring.

Which brings me to the other part of the conversation, of me complaining when it is too hot outside and that hot flashes are making me miserable (which have been a no show this winter, go figure). I guess someone needs to remind me when I do complain, on how I did not like the cold and to put on my big girl pants and deal with it.

Trying to get back into the blogging mood

It has been awhile. It has been hard to get into the mood to write about something that with all possibility hasn’t already been blogged about. Nonetheless I will give it another shot – just like with Twitter. It’s been hard staying active there too. I look at my Twitter feed and it has become nothing but an endless re-tweet, spamming of links, self proclaimed social media guru, peddling real estate, make big money wasteland. Don’t get me wrong there are a handful of actual tweeters on there which with one can have a 140 character conversation, but otherwise it is disappointing.

I miss the good old days when I first started out on Twitter (2007) and people where actually interested in what you where doing at this moment ( wasn’t that the actual theme of Twitter?)  and you could have a single tweet turn into a gigantic conversation with 20 to 30 other People joining in, which subsequently could put a group of people into a twitter timeout. Oh did we dislike twitter jail. But it was fun and entertaining. I also feel that some Tweeters have adopted a god like personality and don’t respond to tweets that they deem not worthy ( I know I probably will catch hell for this) but that is the way it is. Yes you have the “Twitter rock stars” who by all rights have become a Twitter personality, but they even still value Twitter enough to be personal with their followers.

Anyway, lets see how well I’ll do trying to re-kindle my blogging mojo and keeping the ” What are you doing” spirit on Twitter alive.

 

From my home to all over the world

So we all know that I am a avid Twitter addict, I do not know what I will do once I have to return to work, and my twitter time will be limited during the day. It is going to be nuts for the first  couple of days and I will have some serious withdrawl from all of you people.

Anyway I have met lots of new people, made lots of new connections, and have been given opportunities, that if you would have told me a year ago this was going to happen, I would have said get out of here and called you crazy.

Well it did, and I have had fun so far with it.  I have several Followers on Twitter that are podcaster’s. And one of them, Mark Baars from the Netherlands has been one of my Followers for about a year now. And he messaged me one day about this Idea for a Paulina minute on his Podcast The Markbaars show. What a crazy Idea !! A Paulina minute that would feature my blog and what I wrote. I am like, ok Mark who will listen to that, but he convinced me and soon after, we were e-mailing each other with what he wanted to do and about 2 weeks later I was recording my first interview

To friend or not to friend…

Oh yes!! That is was the question, but I already can tell you it was to friend..and you know why? Because to friend is good, to friend is a Adrenaline rush, to friend is a high that makes a coffee buzz small potatoes.

I made lots of friends last night with some great hashtags. #followfriday and #fridayfollow, wow what a rush. I was on it, I tweeted names left and right, I could not choose one, Tweetdeck was keeping me informed, my fingers went and choose the people down the line, I had my game going, I was on top of it…till Twitter put me in a Twitter timeout. HELLOOOOOO…..what is up with that. I cannot be put in a timeout. Do you know what that means for me? I sat there, with my hands shaking wanting to twitter more names? I had Direct messages to reply too, replies to be send to all the new Stalkers. NO NO NO !!!I went back to Twitter homepage , tried there, no go. I thought about installing new clients..well no that would not work either..I had all kinds of ideas going through my head.

I had actual Twitter withdraw. I told @pfmonaco to tell everyone I was on a Twitter timeout. I wanted him to take on my name and twitter for me. I was in Twitter agony!!The timeout lasted 15 minutes till I got to start over, the longest 15 minutes of my life. I mean I could not wait for the time to start over, I was on edge, I saw all of the Tweets pass me by, I was a nervous wreck, or it could have been the coffee I had earlier. A timeout to review a play in Football doesn’t take that long, so why did my Timeout?  It was like I was cut off from the outside of the world. I would never want anyone to go through this. It is utter misery. It’s like you are being told you can’t have Chocolate and someone is eating a piece of Chocolate in front of you. That is how it is. But now I know how @TheDailyBlonde feels when she gets sent to a Twitter timeout. I think me and her need to band together and protest. 100 tweets an hour is not high enough for the two of us. We need at least 250 to satisfy our Twitter addiction, and on Hashtag nights we need at least 500. Then we should be happy. So if you hear us Twitter, can me and @TheDailyBlonde get an increase on our Twitter responses ? Trust us, we would love it. Forever grateful @paulina1 and @TheDailyBlonde !

On the serious side

As all of you can see from my blog entries, I am usually a very funny person. Humor is important to me. I don’t think that Life without a daily laugh is good. Don’t get me wrong, I have my days were I am down and were I do not feel like laughing, but eventually I will crack a smile and hopefully move on from thinking about the sad thing in my Life.

But here is a subject that is near and dear to me. And it is on the serious side, because it affected me so tremendously, I still have to deal with the after effects of it in my daily life.
The subject is mental abuse. Yes I had it. And it took me years after I was divorced to realize that I was still suffering of the effect from years of abuse.
I was married to an Alcoholic, and to realize that and come to terms with that alone, took a lot for me. Because that was not supposed to happen to me. How could it. Maybe I knew in the back of my head, but did not want to acknowledge it, acknowledging it would have meant failure. Failure of my Marriage, Relationship with a Man that everyone thought was doomed from the day I left Germany for him, you know the “I told you so” sayers. He tried to hit me once in his drunken state, but his Mother actually stopped him. So instead of beating me, he continued with the mental abuse. And that hurts more then a beating, the beating pain will stop, but the mental abuse will scar you forever.
Over the years of my Marriage I was told that I was not pretty enough, that I needed to change my looks about every 3 months to make him look good. Long hair, short hair, different color, loose weight, dress differently, what ever he could come up with to put me down.
Abuse about the meals I cooked. Some meals were not good enough for him to eat, so I was told what I had to use to make them and how to cook. At one point he even told me I needed to get recipes from his Mom to learn how to cook like her.
The house was never clean enough, even though he was the main reason why. The laundry needed to be done a certain way. I veered off the course with a different Laundry detergent, hell was to be paid.
The biggest one was that I was not Woman enough to keep him home, that if I was more sexually active with him, he would not be drinking and going out and having a good time.
He used our second child that I was pregnant for, labeling her as a mistake in his drunken state to get me to break down, to this day I still believe he tried to get me to miscarry or deliver the baby early.
But he always put on a show for everyone else to see, on what a great guy he was and show me off and make himself look good. And everybody thought he was such a great guy, all the while I am thinking you guys just don’t know.

These are just a few of the examples that are on the top of my head, there are many more. And ever so often while I am doing something, somehow something will get triggered and I remember something and I start crying because that is the kind of effect this man had on me.
12 years I spend with this Man, I had 2 children with him, that I made my Life long before he walked out on us, because I couldn’t cut it anymore in making him happy and as a Wife. I spend 3 months crying, till I got raving mad finally and went to an Attorney and filed for Divorce. I borrowed the $500 from a friend, who said don’t worry of paying that back to get the Papers filed. His mother to this day thinks, I should have not done this and waited for him to come back. Are you nuts? That was the best thing I did after crying and thinking my Life was over, no way was I going back to this. But I still did not realize that I had a problem, that 5 years later I finally broke down and realized that the once proud, stubborn, strong woman from Germany, which came from a stubborn stock, was actually a mental abuse victim. And for me to realize that, my friend took me to an ALO-NON meeting. People that have Alcoholism or just the Abuse in their Life, learned how to deal with it through the support of these group meetings. And there I realized that I am not supposed to be abused, that I am a person that is worth something. That I can hold my head on high and say “Screw you” to the abuser in my life. I learned to stand tall and stand up for me and my kids and not be a victim. And trust me, he did not like it and I was nervous as hell, and my Adrenaline was pumping and I was shaking, but when I stood up to him the first time, afterwards I felt like Goliath and cried, because I finally found me again. The Woman that I once was.

Trust me it took me awhile to really learn to handle him or any of my ex-inlaws which are mostly all alcoholics. And where abuse is rampant. Mentally and Physically. I started to stick up for myself to the Ex-mother in-law. I made boundaries, rules, and they did not like it. But it saved me from going down a path of feeling like I am worth nothing, a path of self destruction and repeatability with my kids. I re-learned on being a person. I am still learning, day by day, but it gets better and easier.

So if you are a Female or Male ( yes Men can be abused too) that has someone in their Life that abuses you, be it Physically or Mentally, please seek help. You do not need to live your Life like that. You are a person that is worth something. And help is out there, you do not have to be alone. It won’t be a piece of cake, I am not gonna lie, but it will get better and be better, because it can be done.
If you need help or just want someone to talk too, you can find me on Twitter as Paulina1, direct message me.  Everything you write to me will stay confidential. I won’t make you feel bad for being in this situation, I will listen and give you advise that I learned through the support of many a people that went through the same thing. I will help you on finding a support group, a shelter for you and if you have kids to be safe. I just don’t want you feel you are alone in this and there is no help. Because there is. It is the first step to get help that is the hardest and after that it gets easier. Remember I have been there and done it, and for me to see Woman or Men in a position that I was in, breaks my heart. Noone should go through that, so please seek help.
 

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Life in the Social Media Scene

About 2 months ago I wrote a blog about the Social Media applications that are out there and how overwhelmed I got with the choices.

Well I am still exploring and getting confused and having a ball at the same time. But it isn’t easy for this almost 40 year old to stay on top of things. But my favorite one, and I’ve said that already is still Twitter. And over the Weekend I  learned something new and I was just like a little kid in the Candy store all excited.

There is a little thing called Hashtags. I never paid any close attention to them on Twitter. But now I am. We used to call them Channels on IRC like #germany. So when I found out through my fellow twitterfriend @marymcd what hashtags are, I immediatly was taken by it.

I have met a lot of new people and still getting to know all of them by visiting their Twitter page or blog or homepage. But so far being introduced to hashtags has been a excellent opportunity to meet new people, to twitter my little heart out and having a good time. And since I have to recover from Surgery for a few weeks, I have lots of time to go over some other ones that I have signed up for, and that are probably going to be a challenge for me. I am taking one social media scene at a time, we cannot have me on overload.

The other thing I would like to mention is that if you are on Twitter and are using one of the smaller Twitter clients like Twhirl or Snitter, which are great Clients if you are a beginner to Twitter or have a small followership to keep track off. But if you want to expand and include hashtags, I would suggest Tweetdeck. You can actually follow the hashtags in a column and don’t miss any tweets that go to that hashtag. It has proven itself to me over the weekend to be on top of things for me, otherwise I would have been really lost.

So here is to the Social media scene on Twitter. I can’t say enough great things about it. You meet so many wonderful people and make all kinds of new friends. Can you tell that I am a total twitter addict?

On a disturbing side note. I had a really bad Twitter dream last night. Twitter decided to shorten our 140 characters to 120 charters. It was a nightmare !! Don’t ever do that Twitter !! We big talkers already have a hard time expressing ourselves with 140 characters, 120 would be devastating.

Me and social networking…

So I am really a private person. ..No scratch that I used to be a really private person. My extend of being social online was limited to online games and IRC, and that was it. No Myspace, Facebook, Home page or anything else.

And now? I have Facebook, Myspace, Utterli, blip.fm and a few more and of course Twitter. I have become a online social butterfly. A person that is getting excited by the increase of her follower number. A person that has sought out to stalk as many people as she can, or her fingers allow to reply too. A person that throws confetti up in the air when she receives props…ok the confetti is overdoing it..but it’s close.

So what is it with the social networking scene that draws you in, and grabs a hold of you and does not release you?

I remember when I was on IRC many,many years ago, how exciting it was to talk to other people around the world. My main channel back then was #germany. I was able to communicate in german to people in Germany and around Europe, when the servers weren’t split happy. It was fun. I am kind of sad those days are gone, I made lots of friends that have moved on to bigger and better things.

So now I have other social media gadgets to invade other peoples homes with and it is exciting. I have not truly explored utterli too much. I found twitter first, well I was turned on to twitter by someone first and that is what I am most happy with. I started out small with just a few people to follow, but I am growing. I am entering my Stalking application with a handfull of people every day, and I get a few new people stalking me back each day.  I am meeting so many interesting people it is unbelievable.

So to all of you stalker-backers and people that allow me to stalk them. Thank you! I promise I won’t disappoint you in making your life a bit more interesting.

So twitter on people..twitter on !