Happy Birthday Shakira ♥

Put your party hats on and get ready for some cake! Today is a very special day! It's the beautiful and sweet Shakira's birthday!! Yay! I won't tell you how old she is (she can if she wants too) but I wanted to take this moment to tell her Happy Birthday and I love you!!

Click here to go to her blog and tell her Happy Birthday :)

New blogs

First let me tell you that my computer has issues. It hates the internet suddenly which really bites because I love the internet but I can't seem to figure out what the issue is so for now I'm just babying it and goin' on.

This means that I'm writing today's posts now (Monday night) while the goober my computer is cooperating and will schedule them for tonight at midnight or so...

Hopefully I'll be able to get online tomorrow and visit all of you but if not, I'll be there as soon as I can!

Now let me tell you that I am a horrible person! Ok, not really, but I am really bad about forgetting to tell you about new blogs that I follow. So, finally, here are the newest blogs that I follow:

• Chronicles of Marnia (this is one of the FOTTSP bloggers and I finally found my way over to her blog...sorry it took me so long!)

• Food As Art (this is our own Beth from Beyond the Garden Gate but it's her food blog)

And she has a cutsie button :-)

*By the way Beth, something is wrong with your button code on your Garden Gate blog. It won't let you copy it sweetie...just thought I'd let you know!* 

• Graceful (I've tried to follow Michelle's blog before but it would never let me. It finally is letting me but now it won't let me leave comments...yikes)

• Jingle (this is Ji's new Blogger blog)

• My Blessings of Kinship (This is Shakira's new blog just for awards)

And one more new button....click on it to visit duane~scott :)

Love

I have been blessed with some wonderful, true friends here in blogland and I love them all. This weekend three of them gave me awards that really lifted me up when I was down and feeling unloved. 

My sweet friend Terry @ Canadian Blogger gave me the following encouragement. It touched my heart so much!

be encouraged kathy..the lord knows your heart and is ever near to you and he is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother!...love terry 

That was exactly what I needed to see and hear dear Terry! I love you! Thank you ♥

My sister from a different mister Shakira @ My Blessings of Kinship, her new blog just for awards, gave me the following awards:




Thank you so much babydoll...I love you!

And finally, the sweet and talented Ji @ Jingle gave me the following awards:


         


   


Thank you so much Ji! I love you!

Jingle, Jingle, Jingle

Jingle has given me some more wonderful awards! Here they are:

Thank you so much Ji!! Because you are so sweet and always include me in your award giveaways, I'd like to give you the following award! I hope you like it!

MORE awards from Jingle

For those of you that know Jingle, you know that she looooves to give awards. Sometimes I am quite overwhelmed by the amount of awards she gives out and get confused over which ones are meant for me. I think I have these right...like I said, I get confused lol

Thank you Ji ♥ 

You can visit Jingle here and now here :)

Wow

I just thought I'd share this video with y'all today. It's just crazy if you ask me! I post under my own name though and not anonymous so I guess if someone wanted to sue me for my opinion it'd be easy to find me :)

Things I love and things I don't love

I told you yesterday that something had made me very unhappy but I wasn't going to get into it on my daughter's birthday. Today, however, you will hear about it.

If you read my Happy At Home blog then you already know why I'm upset. Aggravated is a much better word. Here's the deal...

My fish is very sick. More than likely she's going to die. I spent all of my free time yesterday and last night trying to research what is wrong with her. The key word there is trying.

Most of the sites Google sent me to were no help at all. That really makes me mad. Why did Google say they were good sites for the answers I so desperately needed? Because of the tags that were put on people's posts. They added tags that had NOTHING to do with the actual post that they wrote. That is so wrong to me.

Google has no idea that their search results are wrong. As far as I know they don't anyway. Their robots search the site and the labels aka tags that the site administrator added to their posts lies to the robots and makes them think there is something about that thing on the site when there really isn't. (Does that make sense?)

So today I'd like to suggest to you...to BEG YOU...PLEASE DO NOT ADD TAGS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR POST! I wasted a lot of time going to sites that did not contain what they claimed to contain. 

Ok, I feel better now. To feel EVEN better, I'm moving on to the things I love :)


My friends Amy @ Keeping Up With The Schultz Family and Ji @ Jingle have both given me several awards. I'm so sorry it's taken me this long to post them ladies!


From Amy:

From Ji:

Thank you so much Amy & Ji ♥ I love them and y'all!

I hope all of you reading this have a wonderful day! See you soon!

Day off

I'm taking the day off from this blog because I want to say some stuff that will make me unhappy and I refuse to be unhappy today. It's my daughter's 20th birthday ♥ Wow. Where did the time go? 

I'll be back tomorrow with some awards and the stuff that I don't like :) Have a great day everyone and...

Happy Birthday my dear Christina ♥

Why?

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I blog. Many of you know that I have several different blogs that I write. Five to be specific. Each one is based on a different subject.

In case you don't know, I'll briefly tell you about each one. 

This blog, Blog Love, was started because I wanted a place to post the awards and prizes that I've been honored to receive from my fellow bloggers. Then I decided to give a few tips. That's turned into 45 specific posts on tips now and become the main focus of this blog. I like helping other people know how to do the things I've learned how to do. 

This Crazy Adventure I Call Life originally started out on my own domain but then I accidentally deleted it, got disgusted with myself, cried for a day or two and then decided to start it over here on Blogger where it was free. It's always been the place that I've talked about things that have interested me but didn't have anything directly to do with me. The news, TV, movies, weird stuff that caught my attention. Those kind of things. 

The Eat Food NOT Money Cookbook started out because of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. She was complaining about how much money they spent eating out every day. If you spend an average of $5 per meal per person each day to eat out, that's $900 a month for two people. And if you only eat out twice a day that's still $600 a month for two people. I spend under $350 a month for two people to eat each month and that includes EVERYTHING: breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks. That also includes other people eating with us occasionally. And we eat well. Trust me. So I decided to put my budget friendly recipes out there for other people to enjoy. 


Happy At Home (aka H@H) has always been my place to rant, rave, brag, cry, laugh, be silly and be serious about me. About my home life. About things that bother me and things that make me happy. Pretty simple :)

Me & My Memes began because I really like to participate in memes and decided that they were kind of taking over my H@H blog. So it was born to just play games. I love it there. I post at least one something every day there except Sunday. Occasionally I do post on Sunday's there if a special meme comes along (like Jenner's game last Sunday). I have fun there.

Between all of those blogs I've written 1337 posts. I had to re-add that number and make sure it was correct. I couldn't believe it. It was right. I'm amazed I've written so much but I'm proud of that too. 

Looking at that number reaffirms my thought that I blog because I love to do it. It also was the reason behind this post. It made me think of all of you and wonder why you blog? What was the reason you started blogging? Have you gotten what you wanted to get out of it? Do you see yourself blogging for a long time or is it something you think you'll lose interest in? 


I really am interested in knowing why so please tell me in your comments today. Oh, one special note, Doris, make sure there is no space in front of your email address when you enter it. I actually got an error with MY email address and then realized I had put a space in front of it. That might be the issue. I know your one email address DID work. I left a comment using your information on yesterdays post if you want to look at it. I also sent you an email about it :)

Have a nice day everyone! 

BlogHer

I'm only talking to women today. Sorry guys. You'll have to come back a different day.

If you've been in the blogging world for long I'm sure you've heard of BlogHer. BlogHer is a community just for women bloggers. Here's just a little of what they say...

At BlogHer.com, you’ll find the best conversations led by women in social media. A curated selection of authentic voices. Life well said.

 

BlogHer is a community and media company created in partnership with women in social media. 

Today, BlogHer is the largest community of women who blog: 20+ million unique visitors per month (Nielsen Netratings). Engaged, influential and info-savvy, these women come to BlogHer to seek and share advice, opinions and recommendations. BlogHer’s team works hard to bring you the best and brightest conversations, writers and speakers – online and in person.

I created my profile there today and can't wait to get involved in all that they offer! It's pretty exciting to me!

Just click here to get there :) Sign up and join all the women who are a part of this great site! It's free...that's always awesome!

Want to hear more before you go? Ok. Here's Katie Couric talking both about BlogHer and with some of The Mommy Bloggers...

Awards and A How To video featuring lil ol' me

First of all I have some awards from the lovely and talented Jingle to share with you. She is the sweetest girl and the Queen of Awards if you ask me :) Here they are:

If you don't visit Ji already you are really missing out on a true angel. She is a wonderful poet and a beautiful person. Click here to visit her. 

Thank you so much for all my awards Ji! They are beautiful and I am honored ♥ 



Now, about the how to video I mentioned. I've talked quite a bit about memes and some of you know that I host my own meme on Saturday's on my blog Me & My Memes called Hooray for Saturday! that I've been posting every single Saturday for over a year now.

I really don't have any rules for my meme except one. That you link back to my blog. The blog that I post the meme on. There would be no point whatsoever to link back to one of my other blogs because the meme is only posted on the one I mentioned above. 


I only ask you to link back to me IF you are going to post your link in my MckLinky. I've even made it easy for you by posting the code for my button which AUTOMATICALLY links back to my blog for you on the Hooray for Saturday! post each week.

I really don't think it's too much to ask that you link back properly to me if you're going to add your link to my post. Truly I don't. 


I do understand that some of you may not understand how to get that code and put it into your post. That's what my video is of. Me showing you just how to do that :) 


I apologize in advance for the shaky video quality. I've been quite sick and my hands were, well, shaky. I still think it's good enough to share with you and hope it helps those of you with questions on how to add my button to your posts. 







I hope everyone has a great day...see you soon :)