Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Erin McKeown wrote in her latest newsletter about an experiment she did with Instagram. She started only posting images where she was in the photo. So sunset photos, but only if the sunset was behind her. River photos, but only if she was by the river.

She writes: “Posts with my face in them are seen by an average of 5 times more people than posts without my face in them.” She explains how this impacts what she wants to say, especially her anti-racist work. And I’m sure it’s true for the Instagram algorithm—this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this fact. But I don’t follow people on Instagram. I mostly only follow places. And I only like/bookmark images that do not have people in them. (With the exception of nieces and nephews because they’re adorable.)

It’s a photo site, so it’s an interesting question: What type of photos interest us? Clearly, in my feed, it’s only places I’ve been and places I want to go. What do you look at in your feed?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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ChickieNob and I have started our own mocktail hour. The boys are not into our concoctions or ruining their appetite for dinner. But we are working our way through several bottles of Torani syrups and seltzer.

The best combinations so far have been chocolate-covered raspberries (splash of raspberry syrup, splash of chocolate syrup, dilute with seltzer) and coconut-lime spritz (splash of coconut syrup, a twist of real lime, dilute with seltzer). We put out olives or crackers or cherries and pretend we have all the time in the world before I begin making dinner. We are so fancy.

Though we never want to eat dinner because we’re full of seltzer. The boys may be on to something.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I play a lot of solitaire. (Actually, the ChickieNob and I both play solitaire side-by-side, so we can talk during it, but it’s obviously a solo game.) So I was totally excited with the idea that there are dozens of games—beyond cards—that you could play solo.

Looking at our shelves, the Sherlock Holmes game is easy to play via Zoom, but you could also play it alone. (And like the article says, it states 1 – 8 players. I never noticed that before.) You could play both hands in Yahtzee. (Much easier to do than a game such as Scrabble where you’d see the letters in the other hand.) I’m trying to compile a list, or look at the games and reimagine them with slightly different rules in order to play them alone.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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We knew we weren’t going anywhere this summer, but last week, our airline finally canceled our flight, making things official. I had already dealt with the sadness, so I hopped directly to relieved. We’ll try again in the future.

In the meantime, articles about virtual travel keep popping up, but this has been the one that has interested me most. The woman at the heart of the story travels the world through Google Street View, taking screenshots of the sites. She does this because she has agoraphobia and can’t go out, but her method becomes an interesting alternative in this time period when we are all left between a rock and a hard place when it comes to leaving the house.

I tried it, going to places I know and places I don’t know. The images have gotten so much better since the last time I played with Google Earth. She writes:

It’s the opposite of how you normally travel. You don’t have any itinerary, you don’t have a planned holiday. You don’t know exactly where you’re going, you don’t know exactly where you’re going to land. So, many times I would jump in and go, “Oh my goodness, where am I?” and then do some research on the place. Then suddenly you know something about a place that you didn’t know anything about before. It kind of shakes up your idea of travel.

Try it. Start with a place you know, so you can have a sense of how well Google Earth captures it. And then go somewhere new. I’d love to hear where you go. I started in Chincoteague and then went to Corsica.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Do you know what I’m not on right now? A train. Do you know what I was supposed to be on this week? A train. Not a fancy train like these dream trains. Just a normal Amtrak one that would have delivered me at my sister’s house.

I love train travel as much as I hate air travel. Car travel is between train travel (at the top) and air travel (at the bottom). Boat travel is slightly (very slightly) above air travel.

I miss my sister. I also miss trains. (Thank you, Amtrak, for the refund. I will rebook when I travel again.) New life goal: Ride on the Belmond British Pullman next time we get to London. Did you see where it goes?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.