About This and That and Here and There

This week has been a fun week but has been busy too. We went to see a friend at the farm he staying at and had such a good time that we decided to take the dogs for a day to have a picnic. No prizes for guessing whether the dogs had fun. They went all out running, sniffing, playing and marking areas :D They played so much that they came back a slept most of that evening and the next day!

Cuckoo being cuckoo of course tasted all plants in sight so next morning we found her broken out in rashes. It was nothing a good bath and some antihistamines couldn’t sort out, so now she’s all Tide white and cuddly cute.

I’ve been trying out the neem and apple cider vinegar mix on the dogs to keep ticks and fleas away and it seem to be working. I had sprayed the dogs down well before we went to the farm and they haven’t picked up anything. So, either the spray worked or the farm and dogs there didn’t have any fleas or ticks.

After two days out on the farm we were all tired, so yesterday was rest day with us lazing around catching up with friends. We watched a movie too! ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ was just the right movie for yesterday. When I got to know it had Emma Watson in it, I was looking forward to see what I thought of her as not being ‘Hermione’ and I wasn’t disappointed. She is a good actress and the movie is definitely a must watch (not just because of her)! The movie is based on a book of the same name by Stephen Chbosky, should add this book to my to-read list for sure…



Other than that its life as usual :D Oh yeah, the one thing I haven’t talked about on the blog (I wanted to avoid it getting jinxed :P) was my attempt at growing a kitchen garden. Since the first few plants I bought were doing well I figured I should try and set up a mini garden. My first attempt at germinating chillies, tomatoes and the like was a disaster. Most plants died and just a couple survived. But I’ve just started out again trying to germinate a new batch and things seem to be looking up :) A big thanks is due to the guys at Garden Guru, a store near home that is run by three guys trying to promote home gardening. They have been helpful guides, answering my many questions and encouraging me to not give up. Do check out the store – Garden Guru – and stop by if you need help :) And you can follow my journey on Greening My Fingers here.

I also spent a lot of time on Feedly yesterday. I’ve been a bit shaken after Google's news of removing Google Reader. All my feeds are on GR and I was quite upset about how I would move them away without losing out on my RSS feeds. Google seems to be making these crazy announcements, a while back they said they would remove FeedBurner too, and I’m yet to find a replacement. Hrrummph… Wish Google wouldn’t make such crazy-ass announcements. That said maybe it’s a good thing, since all such things will over time reduce my dependency on Google and that in the long run saves me for the dangers of monopoly.

Now Feedly is an excellent app to use when following and reading blogs. It does a good job of layout and also integrates with my various social media channels. That means I can post or mark to read later as I browse. Feedly also works on all platforms and syncs beautifully across all of them. So, I can move between devices without skipping a beat. As of now they are still depended on Google Reader to save RSS feeds but are actively working towards setting something up before GR shuts down so users can move to Feedly from GR seamlessly. This is one move I’m glad to make and looking forward to it too! (Down Google, Bad Boy!)

Ok that was a long update post. Onto some interesting articles I came across yesterday…

Jeff Bullas blog has an infographic on the 9 Reasons Why Facebook needs a ‘I Don’t Care’ Button that I associated with and laughed along as I saw them. There are just so many times I’ve thought ‘who care’s’ when scrolling on Facebook.

For all readers out there, Book Riot has 6 Bookish Cartoons you are sure to enjoy. I did!

Facebook has announced Lookalike Audiences, which sounds great from a marketers perspective as it gives more targeting control but I’m not so sure about how I feel about my facebook profile information becoming a statistic in their data. Also have to wait and see just how well the targeting works considering the spam audiences I’ve seen while promoting posts on pages.

In other Social Media News Pinterest is rolling out a new look to improve user experience. This is something I’m looking to get my hands on, but not sure if it’ll roll out for apps simultaneously. Hope I don’t have to wait to see it on the iPad.

Also found a new cool blog All About Ami through a post on Chris’s blog about a Chinese New Year Snake she made with crochet. All About Ami has some lovely ideas and designs that I’d like to crochet sometime soon :)

Wow! That’s a long post! Word says 931 words until now. So I’m gonna wind up here. If you’ve read until now, thank you :) if, you haven’t then guess it doesn’t matter coz you’re not gonna read it anyway :D

See ya laters…