It made me think of something I’ve begun doing lately that I’m really enjoying.

Throughout my day there are minutes here and there that I’m stuck standing in one area, such as waiting for the microwave to cook something for 2 minutes or watching a pot of boiling water or even brushing my teeth.

Instead of spending that time doing nothing, I’ve begun dancing. It doesn’t matter what kind of dance, or even how good it is. Some days I’ll see how much ballet I remember, sometimes I do the twist.

Often my 6 year old joins in. He especially enjoys twisting with me, and has decided ballet is harder than it looks.

All told, I probably spend 10 minutes or so dancing during a day. Not a lot since most of it is in 2-3 minute intervals.

What surprises me are the results of those 10 minutes.

My son is learning to like different kinds of dancing. He even asked Ken if he could take ballet (haven’t convinced Ken on that one yet though).

He will come to me while something’s cooking and ask, “May I have this dance?” How can you turn that down?

I feel better about myself when I dance. When most of the day is spent at a desk, even 10 minutes of exercise feels good.

Even 10 minutes a day helps me get into shape. I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight, but I know that my clothes are fitting better. At least in part, that’s thanks to dancing.

It stimulates my brain. After having a severe case of writer’s block last month, I discovered one of the best cures is activity; getting your body moving helps to wake up a sluggish brain.

So, do you dance? If you do, what is your favorite way to fit it into your schedule?

A bucket list is taken from the movie of the same name, and answers the question, “If you found out you had a year to live, what would you do with it?”

In the movie, the money is provided by a rich donor who also has a year to live, but no idea what to do with the year, so I’m not counting cost here.

I think the first thing I’d do is to move back to North Carolina. New York is a nice state, but it’s not home, and especially in these months that should be spring but are still winter up here, I miss home.

I’d get a house, one that was big enough to dance in, and with enough yard to run in.

I would encourage my husband to follow his dreams. To find something and even someone, who would make him happy. I’ve been very blessed being married to him, I can truly say he is the one person that my soul connects to, and I would hope that he could find someone else to love him dearly.

Then I would travel. I would take my older son out of school, and the four of us would go to all the places I’ve always wanted to see.

First, across the US, stopping at all the battlefields along the east coast, learning US history by being there.

We’d go see the Liberty Bell, I’ve always wanted to, driven by it many times as we drive down the coast, but I’ve never gone to see it.

I’d go to DC and let Ken take the boys, then spend a whole day in the Library of Congress, exploring books to my hearts content.

We’d go to Charleston, where we spent our honeymoon, and ride in a horse-drawn carriage on a tour of the town. Then we’d stop on Market Street and I’d buy one of the sweetgrass baskets that I enjoyed watching them make during our last visit.

On across the US, stopping at all the landmarks that I’ve wanted to visit but haven’t gotten to yet. We’d visit Lincoln’s birthplace in Illinois, since my 5 year old loves the story of Lincoln and the footprints on the ceiling. We’d go see Mount Rushmore, and ride in a barge down the Mississippi river.

In New Mexico, we’d stop at an adobe and look inside. The houses fascinated me the first time I saw one, and I want to visit one. I also want to learn how to tap water out of a cactus, something I’ve wanted to learn since I was a child. My older son has also inherited his Mom’s love of rocks, so a stop at the Petrified Forest would be on my list too.

In California, we’d work our way up the coast, after a stop in San Diego. From my first visit there, Point Loma has been the place where I’d like to retire to someday, so I’d stop there and look once more at the house I’d picked out there. Then up the coast, not forgetting to stop and let the boys try their hands at gold mining.

By this time we should all have our passports, so time for the world tour. Greece would be my first stop, I’ve loved everything about the country since I first heard the Greek myths, probably around the time I started school. I suspect I could easily spend more than a year there, exploring the country and islands, but highlights would be seeing the Parthanon and other ruins, seeing what I could of Mount Athos (translated Holy Mountain) and the monasteries there (since I’m not male, I wouldn’t get to see much, but the Byzantine era has always fascinated me, and the first monasteries here were built then) and the Roussanou Monastery built on the side of a mountain.

After Greece, we’d explore the rest of Europe, stopping in Paris to visit the Louvre and in England to see the Tower of London and Brighton Beach, two of my favorite places from my last visit.

Back over to Germany to visit friends and ride on the Autobahn, and then to Hungary, which, the first time I saw it, when it was still behind the red curtain, seemed to be one of the most beautiful and saddest countries I’d ever been to.

Budapest at Night by uzo19

By the way, my husband despairs of my knowledge of geography, so I know I’m jumping all over the map here. Sorry about that.

Thanks to Herman Wouk’s books, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and Ayn Rand’s We the Living, I’ve wanted to visit Russia for years. I’m not sure what I would be looking for there, but I think that I would find it.

A quick visit in China, and a stop at Hong Kong to see friends, and then on to Africa. I want to go on a safari at least once, to see the animals that I’ve only seen in zoos living in the wild.

I’m skipping a lot of countries I know, but last would be to Australia, to meet in person some of the great friends I’ve made online, and to see a kangaroo for reals, and then back home to NC.

I am not a stay at home person, perhaps especially when I’m sick, so outside of trying to find the time to write every day (I have a half written novel that I’d love to finish, and would write a letter to both boys) I would still be on the go. Up to the mountains of NC, to mine for gems, and give the boys a sense of some of their roots. Up in the NC mountains, life is a bit different. When the settlers first headed into the mountains, they were just off the boats from England and Scotland. For years, the roads into the mountains were so bad that even cars had trouble making it and truckers hated the route. So, that area was closed off from the world in a lot of ways. Even in the 1970’s the language spoken there was considered the purist form of the Queen’s English in the world. If you’d like an idea of what life was like up in the mountains, I highly recommend Christy by Catherine Marshall.

I can’t imagine a bucket list for me that didn’t include visiting the Blue Ridge Parkway. For many years, before I got married and moved away, the parkway was my hideout, my thinking spot, my refuge. I still recall coming down from Devil’s Courthouse one day as the fog was lifting over the greenery and I could imagine that this was like the first day looked like to the first man.

Devil’s Courthouse is a cliff where legend has it, a local Indian tribe would test guilt by pushing people over the cliff. If they were innocent, the winds would blow them back up, if they were guilty, they would plummet to their deaths.

I’d camp out once again in Graveyard fields, where boulders big enough to lay on dot the treeless expanse. Tree stumps that resembled gravestones used to cover the area, but fires cleared the stumps and now it is a beautiful hike, with blackberries and blueberries to be picked in the spring.

I’ve always been fascinated with legends and myths, I grew up reading the Carolina ghost books of Nancy Roberts, who I actually got to meet when I was helping my Dad one time. One of NC’s oldest legends is Devil’s Tramping Ground. Located in the middle of a forest, it is a 40 ft circle where nothing grows, and hasn’t for at least 100 years. Supposedly this is either the place that connects hell to the earth, where the devil comes out when he’s causing some mischief, or it’s the place where the devil goes to think up new mischief and he walks in a circle as he thinks, causing everything within that circle to die. Legend also has it that anything put in the circle over night will be gone the next morning.

At night, I’d teach the boys to play cards. I think a lot can be taught with cards, with games ranging from Old Maid to Poker. How to lose well and how to win better are two important lessons. Cards also teach you to trust your instincts, read others’ body signals, and how to stand up for yourself (don’t believe me? Lay down the best hand at poker when someone is trying to steal the pot).

Finally, I’d teach them to fish. Fishing demands quiet, time for discussions and introspection, time for listening to others, yourself, and God. Things that little boys, especially, need to learn.

Then, with only the regrets of not seeing my sons grow into men and my husband and I growing old together, I think I could die peacefully.

So now it’s my turn, who am I going to pick to write a bucket list? I pick Allan Cockerill, Ken Bramhall, Ange of Buzzing with Ange, Dr. Mani, Despil of Fractured Bloughts, and Oza Meilleur. I’m looking forward to reading your lists.

Here’s how it works. You put in the name of a group that you’re interested in. That group plus others with similar sounds comprise your first station. If you want to listen to something besides what’s playing on your stations, no problem. You can find most reasonably popular songs (although no Mannheim Steamroller (my favorite Christmas music)). I found The Unicorn by the Irish Rovers, but it’s the only song of theirs on the list. Jimmy Buffet looks like they copied his Greatest Hits album and only 2 Charlie Daniels songs. A decent selection of Rush songs (I’ve been a Rush fan forever). They’re supposed to be adding new songs though, so hopefully they’ll start adding more songs for those of us who enjoy a little of everything.

So, once you create a station, you can either select other groups that you want to belong to that station, or create new stations for different types of music. You can always go back and edit a station too, if you want to remove a group that you added accidentally.

Another feature that I only recently discovered, but really like, is the ability to influence which songs play on my stations. There are three faces right underneath the title of the song that’s playing. If I don’t like a song and click the frowning face, that song won’t play anymore. The normal smiley face will ensure that the song plays again, and the grinning face makes the song play often.

Finally, I don’t have to just listen to music that I picked out. If you’re wanting to listen to a song that’s not playing on your stations right now, you can tune into someone else’s station. Underneath the smiley faces, you can see a list of people who are listening to similar music. Click on one of them to hear what’s playing on their station, and then with your approval, Jango will send a thank you note once you’ve finished listening to their station.

A last quick note. If you use Flashblock, make sure you set Jango as an exclusion, otherwise it won’t work (learned from experience).

An online multi-player game that I enjoy playing shows this whenever anyone asks the standard asl (age, sex, location) question. The game, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, is one of the social networks I am involved in online.

Disclosure: If you click either link and sign up for YPP, it will give both of us extra game currency. No real money will be gained though.

PC Mag’s Encyclopedia defines social network as “An association of people drawn together by family, work or hobby.”

While offline social networks usually stay small enough that you can at least recognize the other members even if you only say “Hi” in passing, online networks sometimes have millions of members.

Recently I was discussing different social networks with a friend. Allan came to StumbleUpon after he had used Facebook for a while, and had become quite knowledgeable about their TOS and their rules surrounding it.

I’ve had a theory for a little while, that you can tell which website a person starts with by how they use a new site, particularly StumbleUpon.

When you join a new group offline, you probably don’t walk in to the first meeting and expect it to be like every other group you’ve been part of. You don’t expect a computer club to be interested in the same things as the astronomy club, nor do you expect the chess club to act like a baseball team. Even within the same category, most of us realize that things are different from one place to another. One preacher doesn’t sound like another and different football coaches aren’t going to give you the same playbook.

But yet, when people join a social networking site online, they seem to expect things to be the same as the last site they were involved with.

I can understand it, in fact, I’m guilty of it also. I had been using Del.icio.us when I first joined SU. At the time, it wasn’t that easy to organize your bookmarks on Del, so when I found StumbleUpon, I thought it was a great replacement bookmarking system. Most of my first stumbles were merely moving my bookmarks over to the new “list.”

I think it was about the time that I learned how to add pictures to my SU page that I realized StumbleUpon wasn’t just for bookmarking.

So, which type of StumbleUpon user are you? Do you use it like:

Del.icio.us and other bookmarking sites? Storing bookmarks is what it’s all about. The rest is just added benefits.

Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, or any of the other voting sites? It’s the numbers that are important here. Friends count as votes , and the thumbs up makes a pretty good voting system. After all, it did work for Siskel and Ebert.

Facebook or one of the other befriending sites? I almost listed Facebook by itself, since Facebook users are usually cautious. They’ve gotten used to the vagrancies of Facebook and expect other sites to act the same. I really don’t know enough about the other befriending sites to tell their users yet, but I’m sure they also have distinguishing characteristics.

Of course, the beauty of StumbleUpon is that anyone can have a great time with it no matter how they use it!

Also while I was playing on StumbleUpon today, I noticed this little icon (well, it’s little on the page…I enlarged it 500 times!) beside the avatar of someone who had given my page a thumb up. I’m always curious when I notice something new, so of course, I clicked it…

…and that lead me to another interesting page.

I know it’s easy to click on the place you’re from on SU and find others from the same place, but I can’t help thinking there are times when it might be nice to see a quick list of 100 people from a certain area (200 if you separate the list by men and women) and even more, the total number of people in the area who use SU.

I had already promised myself I would write something today though, so after trying two articles and finally giving up on both, I decided I would share something that’s not only fun and addictive, but also educational, and even better…the more you play, the more you help to end world hunger!

Free Rice is a site that I learned about last week from Buzzing with Ange. When you first click on the site, you’ll see an empty bowl and a greenish box with a vocabulary word and 4 definition choices. Above both the bowl and the words is this note: “For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger.”

So what are you waiting for? Go enrich your vocabulary!

I use it to let people know when I’ve posted a new article on SU Com, and sometimes to let people know about other neat events online. I’ve also found some interesting Twitters to follow. Three of my favorite ones aren’t even people. I love getting up to the minute updates of the NY Times, BBC news (which surprisingly sometimes has the scoop on events in the US before NYT does), and PBS Science. I also enjoy getting updates from many of my friends and other fellow bloggers…a couple that I like are Oza Meilleur of quotes on happiness (”Happiness is a Pig-headed Grandma“) and Dr. Mani of Money Power Wisdom.

This morning, Dr. Mani sent out a request on Twitter, asking for 5 bloggers who would be willing to answer 5 easy, short questions. I raised my hand and hollered, “Me, me, me!” then realized he couldn’t see or hear me, so I sent him a tweet instead.

So, I’ve been tagged to answer 5 easy (?), short questions…and then I get to tag 5 people to answer them. It’s the blogging version of all those “About Me” e-mails that I used to get at least 3 or 4 times a year. The nice thing about the blogging version is that it’s kind of fun to see all the links going backwards and forwards…kind of like when I tried to chase a picture to it’s source on StumbleUpon and ended up discovering several interesting stumblers in the process.

The questions:

1. How long have you been blogging?

2. What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?

3. Are You trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?

4. Tell me 3 things you LOVE about being online.

5. Tell me 3 things you STRUGGLE with in the online world.

The answers:

1. I started my SU page in April of 2005 and started three blogs (including SU Com which was then hosted on Blogger) a couple weeks afterwards.

2. What inspired me to start a blog…hmm. Will it sound silly if I say it was because my Bookmarks/Favorites folder was getting too full? I couldn’t find anything anymore, even with everything categorized in folders. I tried Del.icio.us for a while, but I really needed an easy way to tell why I was saving the link, because I had a tendency to save links with no other information, which really makes it impossible when you’re trying to find something 6 months later. StumbleUpon and Blogger both made it easy for me to post information I found interesting. At the time, I didn’t even think about sharing it with other people on the site, although I would occasionally send a link out to a friend.

Because I got my start on SU, most of my mentors aren’t “real” bloggers. Pseudonym is probably the person who’s taught me the most about blogging and building a website. Plus he puts up with all my “crazy” ideas.

Also, I’ve been following Flylady since she was posting to Yahoo! groups and offering individual help to anyone who really needed it. Watching her go from having a few followers (I think when I joined in 2000, it was around 50-75 people) to reaching almost 500,000 members now has been inspirational.

3. Can the answer be “Both boss.” To be honest a lot of why I write SU Com is because I saw a need. Friends were checking out SU and then leaving because they couldn’t figure it out. I remembered that I had started a blog about SU, and started posting to it again. I’d love to make money on the site too, and I’m actually working on an e-book on using StumbleUpon, since I’ve had a couple requests for one. Drawing on what I’ve learned from Flylady, I don’t want to advertise stuff on here just to make money, I want anything that I do sell on here to be things that I consider worth sharing with others. Do I want to make money on here? Yes. But both my name and reputation and you, my friends and readers, are more important to me than making money off of things that I wouldn’t buy or use for myself.

4. Only 3? Shoot!
1. I love the flow of information and ideas online. I LOVE learning new things and seriously can’t imagine living in a pre-internet time period.

2. I love meeting people. Ten years ago, I met my husband in an on-line chat room. He lived on the other side of the country (over 3000 miles) from me. Unfortunately, the internet was still in it’s beginning stages (MSN was mostly a collection of chat rooms), so our phone calls were expensive. In one month we spent over $1000 on phone bills. So I also love all the new communications technology. Plus, don’t ever try to convince me that on-line friends aren’t real friends…even most of my “real” friendships originally started online.

3. Anyone without children will probably laugh at this one, but I love getting to be an adult, without having to leave home. There used to be an advertisement on TV where a husband comes home from work and asks his wife a question, which she answers in baby talk. I couldn’t help laughing every time I saw the ad, because of the truth behind it. Being able to get online and talk to other adults is one of the biggest sanity savers I know of.

5. Three things I struggle with…let’s see: 1) has to be time. There’s never enough time to get everything done that you want, especially when a good part of that time includes writing and graphic art projects. Something has to give, and for me, unfortunately, it’s usually housework. You don’t happen to know of anyone who’d be willing to trade doing housework for a writing or web design project they’ve been putting off, do you?

2) Keeping focused. There are sooooo many interesting things online, that it’s easy to get sidetracked, especially when I’m trying to research an article.

3) Keeping up with e-mail and other messages. I’m really bad about this one. I tend to get focused on projects, and often it’s my correspondence that gets put to the side while I’m working. I have a friend who tells me she can tell when I’m in writer’s mode (and another friend who says I’m in Lala land) because even when I’m talking to them on the phone, I’m not really there.

Okay, now comes the fun part…picking 5 more people to answer this.

Ken Bramhall writes about sports, politics, and anything else that catches his interests on his StumbleUpon blog.

Allan Cockerill, a great writer, who knows more about Facebook than anyone else I know.

Mel from Ooh! Shiny! whose innocent question started me on my quest to learn about Internet Marketing.

Ange Recchia of Buzzing with Ange, a fun and thoughtful blog where she writes about abundance and inspiration.

Wayne Watts, who has been a friend since not long after I joined StumbleUpon and who also runs PilotSpeak, an internet community for pilots and anyone else connected with or interested in the aviation industry.

Okay guys, get writing. I’m looking forward to seeing your answers.

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