Blogging

How quickly did this school term fly by?? It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was fresh off the plane from Mexico, trying to get my bearings and crossing my fingers that Guerita would get a place in Pre-Primary at our local school and now there’s only one week of term left!

I’m very excited about these school holidays, though, because the girls and I are off to Sydney for 10 days to visit family and friends and enjoy the delights the East Coast has to offer. Both my parents grew up in Sydney so all my extended family are there (Grandfather, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins) and quite a few friends as well. There’s always heaps of people to catch up with - I lived there myself, for 8 years, did all my primary schooling there and am still friends with a girl I met on the first day of kindergarten (our Mums are close friends too). Plus there’s a few other Sydneysider friends I’ve picked up along the way and some great girlfriends from my days living in Central West NSW are coming down for a visit.

It’s going to be an action packed trip! We’re also going up the coast for the long weekend, and I am booked to do the Bridge Climb with 2 of my cousins! For someone who is just a little bit scared of heights, it could be interesting.

Anyway, I have been chatting with the lovely Super Sarah and we’ve been hatching a plan for a Sydney meet-up so our munchkins can have a play together and we can meet face to face. I thought I’d put the word out here in case any of you Sydney (or nearby) bloggers wanted to join us…

Here are (some of) the details:

Day: Wednesday 8th October
Time: 10:30am

I decided that just for a bit of safety’s sake not to post the location in the post, but if you are interested in coming along, please email me and I’ll let you know where we’re meeting. The place we’re going has a play area for the kids and a cafe for coffees/morning tea supplies etc and I expect we’ll be there for a few hours (ish).

We’d love to see you if you can make it - just shoot me a message at:

aussieguera [at] gmail [dot] com

And if you’re not in Sydney - then you’ll just have to wait for the photos…

Well, I certainly can’t believe I’ve kept my little corner of the net going for a whole year. I started my blog in an idle moment, on a bit of a whim, I guess. I really didn’t know about the vast blogging community out there and never thought I’d keep it going or that it would become such a regular part of my life.

I’ve said it before, but I never imagined the amount of support I would get from blog readers, or imagined that I would need that support so much. It goes without saying that I never ever imagined being where I am right now when I started this blog…

In any event, thanks to all of you for sticking with me, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep blogging the interesting and boring (and maybe even happy?) tidbits of my life for at least another year. And hopefully I’ll find time to blog soon about a few things like my wonderful new neighbourhood, the (real life) photography course I’ve just started and of course the kid’s usual activites and antics!

Happy Birthday Roaming Aussie Mum!

I was tagged for this meme by the lovely M from Eastern Max. These are the rules:

I have to answer 6 questions about myself. At the end of the post, I then tag 6 people and post their names, then go to their blogs and leave them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read my blog. Then, I must let the person who tagged me know when I’ve posted my answers.

6 places I have lived

1. Australia - for most of the time! Born in Kalgoorlie, WA and lived there 6 months; lived in Perth (14 years and more to come), Sydney (8 years) and the Central West, NSW (2 years in the 70s, nearly 2 years in the 00s)
2. Fiji - 1 year in the 70s
3. England - 1 year in the 00s
4. France - 6 months in the 00s
5. Saudi Arabia - 2 years in the 00s
6. Mexico - 2 years in the 00s (now, in fact)

What I was doing 10 years ago?

10 years ago I was living in Perth, working in a law firm (miserably), and was just about to move in with Rocky. We were busy planning a 2 month holiday to Europe to ski in France for 6 weeks and traipse round Spain for 2. It was a holiday that cemented our relationship. We got engaged a few weeks after getting back from that holiday.

The less said about that, the better.

What will I be doing 10 years from now? Looking back on a particularly bleak time in my life, hopefully from a much happier place (whatever that may be). But, eek! I’ll have a teenager in the house then!

5 things on my to-do list today

1. Pack up the contents of my pantry, and the mountains of toys and clothes that we are donating to the local orphanage (I have been ruthless with culling our stuff and it’s very liberating!)
2. Monitor Guerita’s temperature and administer medicine for her fever (poor little thing got sick after all the excitement of the ballet concert)
3. Clean the car ready to sell it tomorrow
4. Plan our 3 days in Disneyland next week - how many Disney Princesses do you thing we can meet??
5. Work out what clothes to stock up on for the kids when hitting the shops in LA!

Snacks I like to eat

• Anything chocolate, so it’s best not to keep too much in the house
• If I’m feeling fancy, crackers with blue cheese and dried apricots (divine combination)
• A more realistic (and un-fancy) version - bran crackers with butter and vegemite

If I was a billionaire

I once had a very detailed plan about what I would do with the money if I won Lotto. I realised I would be disappointed if I won anything less than about $20 million, because I would want to give $1 million to each of my family members (and there’s lots of them) and have some left over to have a nice house (not a mansion), a nice (not fancy) car and be able to afford regular travel, with some left over to donate a chunk to the Children’s Hospital in Perth. One of my family members works there, and Guerita was a regular outpatient there for her first few years with treatment on her feet. We never had a pay a cent for all our visits there, including surgery, and I always was struck by how tough it must be for families with children with far worse problems than ours. Improving the facilities there is a worthy cause, I reckon.

I’d have no problem with that if I was a billionaire. I don’t think I can really conceive how much money that is so its hard to know what to do with it. It’d be certainly nice to know the mortgage was paid, and the kids were provided for, and I’d probably go on a little spending spree for myself, to indulge my love of gadgets!

6 bloggers to go next:

Super Sarah
Gemisht
Planning Queen
Katef
Trish
Amanda

Feel free to ignore the tag if you’d rather not do the meme!

…I’d be tooting it right now! Except in a humble way of course, because I always feel awkward talking about recognition.

My theme customisation rated a mention today on the WP-Premiums - A Premium WordPress Theme Showcase site! You can see a whole lot of customised themes over there, rate your favourite and see the most popular.

If you felt like, you could go over there and rate my site. Mind you, I have no idea what I would get out of it, other than a smile on my face!

Well, I already have a smile on my face. As they say at the Oscars “It’s just nice to be nominated!”

I just couldn’t help myself! I was planning to wait until we left Mexico to load the new theme, but everything was ready and I was so excited about it, that I just couldn’t wait. Plus once we’re travelling and back in Perth my Internet access might be a bit sketchy so I didn’t want to load it up and then disappear. For now, my header says “almost back home”, but pretty soon, it’ll change to “now back home”.

So, let me show you around the new look Roaming Aussie Mum…

(if you’re reading this in a RSS reader, click on over. Go on!)

First things first - the theme I am using is the Thesis Theme by DIY Themes. This is actually a premium WordPress Theme (meaning I paid for it) and its the first time I’ve ever used a paid theme. I could never see the point before since there are so many free themes out there, but as soon as I saw this theme I fell in love with it and you get so much more than just a theme with this one.

It was developed by Chris Pearson of Pearsonified, whose blog I already read. His blog has great articles on customising themes, WordPress and blogging in general. You’ve probably all seen one of his other themes before, since his Cutline theme is one of the most popular themes out there. He’s also responsible for the Neoclassical, Copyblogger and Pressrow themes. I don’t fully understand all the ins-and-outs of SEO and theme structure, but Chris’ themes are certainly easy to use and beautifully presented.

Probably the most impressive thing about the Thesis Theme, is the support that comes with it. There’s a blog, with articles about how to use the theme, a user manual, and a forum where thesis users can get help with customisation, troubleshooting and just sharing ideas and inspiration for using the theme. The theme author is a regular contributor to the forums and not only have I got help over there from him, but I also discovered new blogs to haunt. Here’s a few I found through the forum (great blogs and great examples of ways to customise this theme):

Scribbles and Words
Wild Keys
Simple Mom
The Blissful Pixel

As well as all this support, when you buy this theme, you are then entitled to all the upgrades to the theme, for free. So every time Chris adds a new feature or fixes a bug, and releases a new version, you can upgrade easily.

Ok, so that’s my plug for this amazing theme. I love it, and I hope you do too. To find your way around, here’s a couple of things to notice:

• the pictures in the big image box at the top right are rotating so you’ll see a different one every time you visit or click to another page. These are some of my favourite photos an I’ll be adding to them as time goes on.
• Up the top left you’ll find tabs to various pages for my blog - most of which were already there, but one new addition - the Design page which sets out all the tweaking I have done to this theme, and to my previous theme.
• Underneath are a few more of my favourite photos (because I can’t help but put photos of my kids everywhere!). I’m using the Photoxhibit plugin for this but it still needs a little tweaking. When used in a post the plugin will open the photos in a lightbox, but in my sidebar it doesn’t want to do that. Bear with me while I sort that little glitch out.
• There’s a new blue box of text in the first sidebar, with a welcome message - click anywhere on that to go to the about page

For those of you who followed my previous post on getting ready for my new theme, some of the points there might make more sense now - like my custom background, made in Photoshop with a pattern using a “lace” brush, and my header image using a few swirly and heart brushes and fancy text. The little heart swirl is also my new favicon - the tiny image you see on your browser tab when my site is open, and also now in Google Reader in Firefox if you have the Better GReader add/on installed! Check out the design page for information on how to make one of those.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly with the new theme. One of the plugins I used to make sure everything would look right is the excellent Theme Test Drive Plugin. This lets you activate a ” test drive” of your desired theme that only you (the logged in administrator) can see. It’s fantastic for trying out new looks and I used it constantly to make sure all my little tweaks came out the way I wanted to. The only problem I found with this method was that moving widgets around in my sidebars when it was activated caused the sidebars to wig out. I suspect this had something to do with going from 3 widgetised sidebars to 2, but in any event, I would be wary of making “structural” changes while you’re in test drive mode. I found I wanted to move a lot of things around for the new theme and doing this even in test drive mode would also change things in my existing theme, so I also used a spare test blog to try out all sorts of fun and crazy stuff to see how it looked. Even if you don’t happen to have a spare domain name lying around (because I know you’re not all as crazy as me), you could probably test it out on a subdomain - something like www.subdomain.yourdomainname.com, if you are able to have another installation of WordPress on a subdomain (not sure about all that - check with your host!).

Other than that, everything else should be pretty straight forward. I’d love to hear what you think, and if you come across any problems or glitches or something just doesn’t seem to display right, please let me know!