Charleen’s Chateau

I thought y’all would enjoy this.  I’d like to point out that the person that gave me the phalaenopsis was so confident in my ability to kill an orchid that they gave it to me in a reusable container! 😀

Update – and then I came home to these, which I was slow to get a picture up for…

Did you ever read the email story about the kid, the Chapstick and the cat? You know the one if you’ve seen it, in one of its five million iterations on the web.  I get it regularly as I struggle with my ongoing addiction to lip balm,

Lip balm at hand

as my friends think its funny to torture me.  Well, one day I looked up the story to send to a friend, and was delighted to find that the original woman who wrote the story (as a submission to a Suave promotion) lives here in Austin, and blogs (on WordPress) as txmomof3. I started following her (of course!), and ran across this hilarious video of her appearances (or rather, lack of appearances) on Ellen.  She warns you that the video is a tad lengthy, but it is worth it.

I haven’t made time to write!!! On the upside, everything is on the up-side 😀 I like staying busy, and although it gets a little stressful, I love the direction that my life is heading, so I’m willing to put in the time! Talk to you all soon!

Honestly, I run into the weirdest things by reading Whedonesque…

Lets talk about Felicia Day and Twitter. Felicia is known for the webseries The Guild, and for being one of the Potentials/Slayers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  but I noticed her when Joss tapped her again for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  She’s a prolific Twitter user (and WordPress user!!), and a huge supporter of social media, so when this article came out in Vanity Fair about business women using Twitter as part of their presence on the net, everyone got excited.  Disappointingly, its horrible (and not in the awesome Neil Patrick Harris sort of way).
Felicia was understandably disappointed and posted her thoughts about the incident on her blog. She was very polite about the entire incident considering how livid she must have been, and only crowed once about how the magazine was being made redundant in the spate and growth of new media. Talk about a great lady! I doubt that I could have been that reserved if I had been the subject of the VF article, especially with quotes like this:

In order to stay in touch with, and keep intact, their legions of “followers”—that’s twitspeak for the number of people who have signed up to read one’s tweets—these civilian twilebrities must, you know, tweet a lot.

Wow.  That’s deep. I’m now inspired to, you know, tweet a lot. If there is ever a course that focuses on gender presentation in modern technology, this would be an excellent cautionary tale of  how to alienate every educated and enlightened individual that reads your publication. Congratulations, Vanity Fair.

ANYWAY,  the comments on Felicia’s blog  get super interesting after a bit – apparently some of her commenters believed that in taking that photograph (in which the girls appear as stylized ‘virtual reporters’ in trenchcoats and heels with their phones in hand) and appearing attractive/sexy in it, they were deserving to be completely patronized and dismissed in the article.  Enjoy the debate.

I also liked the comment (via 2 Twitter posts) from one of the other picture “Twilebrities”  Sarah Evans, who managed to put a nice and positive spin on the whole experience.

Thank you to all who posted thoughts & reactions to the Vanity Fair piece. Hopefully this serves as a launching pad… …to highlight real accomplishments by these women. It’s sparked topics that really do need to be discussed, & for that, I’m glad.