Getting better

Well, ten out of ten to those of you who said "it's jetlag, give it a few days". It was jetlag, I gave it a few days.

I've been walking in the beautiful green Buckinghamshire countryside. Oh heaven. I've been eating too much (why does my mother think I don't feed myself properly, though the evidence of the last 30 years would suggest otherwise?) I've introduced my husband and my two oldest kids to the board game that was my total favourite as a child and that still lives in the games chest at my mother's house. A few rounds of Careers has cheered me up no end. There's nothing like a quick dabble in Politics, Hollywood, Farming, Big Business, and Uranium Prospecting to make you feel purposeful in life. Ah, if only real life was like Careers. You decide how much money, fame and happiness you need to win, and then you set about achieving it by shaking the dice and landing on the appropriate squares. A glorious mix of tactics and luck, but mostly luck, both good and bad. I've always loved that game, and it seems to fit the moment perfectly.

I've also taken on 13-yo (14-yo, tomorrow) at Dover Patrol. I used to play that with my big brother. It was another of my favourites. I remember discovering that Dover was a place, and being rather surprised. I'd thought it was an adjective meaning "strategic" or something similar. For Dover Patrol is a game of great strategy. 13-yo and I play it a little differently to how my brother and I played it, because we have the instructions (amazing what you can find on the internet these days). It's rather a shame, in a way. Not knowing the rules has a certain charm, when you're the admiral of the fleet.

Plus all that wonderful bloggy love, of course. You can't beat that. Thank you all so much. That has helped me feel better about my blog. And Cyber Mummy too. Yes, I'll be going, because I would regret it if I didn't. It seems though, from the comments and from two or three people who've emailed me, that I'm not alone in feeling overwhelmed, or on the fringes, or out of place. So here's a tip that I found worked for me last year. Be intentional. If there are bloggers you want to meet, email them beforehand and say "can we meet over lunch/coffee/tea?" Even just saying "can we look out for each other?" makes it considerably more likely that you'll meet. Otherwise, the day will pass, and you'll go home thinking "I wish I'd met Blogging Mum" or whoever it is. Meanwhile, if you are feeling on the fringes, take heart. You're clearly not alone.

I just have to share one more thing. I dreamed about Rosie Scribble! How weird is that, when you dream about your blogging life? I dreamed that I'd agreed to pick up her daughter, IJ, from school. Meanwhile, somehow I was at the zoo in the city I live in, in America. The road system in our city is very straightforward, being a grid, with main roads going north-south and east-west. There are, however, a few main roads that go diagonally, and confuse everything. Well, they confuse me, at any rate. One of these diagonal roads is Zoo Boulevard (the clue is in the name). In my dream, I couldn't get to IJ's school, because I kept getting lost on Zoo Boulevard. I didn't have the school's phone number, and I was at a loss as to what to do. Time was ticking on, and I was getting increasingly desperate about ever finding the school, and increasingly anxious as to what I was going to tell Rosie later on about why I had failed to pick up IJ.

Do you think it was an anxiety dream about blogging and Cyber Mummy?

This was a post of rather random things, but life is sometimes like that.

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Easter Monday movie titles game

Since it's Easter Monday and no doubt raining in England (and here too), I think we all need a game to play. Here's a fun one, which I am stealing unashamedly from Lord Celery's blog.

Think of a famous movie. Change one letter (just one letter, mind) in the title, and produce a new movie, the one they could have had a lot of fun making if only they'd left that typo in the original proposal.

Let me start you off.

Dig Hard - Bruce Willis's lesser known gardening epic

Fission Impossible - the story of how the atom was split

Chariots of Fife - Ben Hur's visit to Scotland

Shrew - you thought he was an over-sized green ogre, but in fact Princess Fiona was rescued by a tiny furry rodent with a Scottish accent

Paws - when the Australian coastline was terrorised by a man-eating chihuahua

Star Wart - Steven Spielberg's budget-busting series about an inter-galactic facial blemish

The 39 Stops - life as a driver on the Northern Line

Schindler's Lift - the history of the world's third largest elevator company

Now it's your turn.
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