I wake up this morning to discover there are Americans who believe very strongly that Andrew Joseph Stack, the man who flew a plane into a building full of people in my city, is a hero. I don’t even have the words to describe my disgust at the moment.

Anyone reading these words I am typing right now who feels this guy was a hero, should remove my bookmark from their browser, unfriend me, or do whatever it takes to make sure they will not be able to read the words I am sure to come up with later in the day. I do not think Andrew Joseph Stack was a hero of any kind, and I am certain to be explaining why in great detail at some point in the near future. If he’s your vision of a proper American patriot, anything I have to say will only make you angry. Furthermore, if you believe that any American trying to kill other Americans is doing something heroic, I won’t be arguing with you. I will simply be removing you from my online existence by whatever means I can.

This announcement is going out to all locations where my words are carried, so everyone has now been warned and has the opportunity to take measures to avoid having to hear me denounce their oh-so-courageous “hero” heroism.

I haven’t announced this publicly yet, but I might as well. I joined Facebook a few months back. Yes, it’s true. I finally gave in and signed up. It eventually became impossible to avoid doing so.

I didn’t announce it publicly at the time, because I wasn’t sure how I would use Facebook, or if I would even use it at all. Though it has been suggested to me otherwise by a few brave souls, this was not some kind of attempt to snub the readers of my blog or avoid interacting with them. I just wanted to settle in and see what Facebook was about and how it might fit into my online life before I added a whole slew of friends and felt overwhelmed. I may be a total geek, but I do get overwhelmed when adopting new online services of the social networking variety.

It wasn’t even, as someone insisted, me trying to keep people from discovering my “real” name, which, I might add, is actually on my web site in several locations. I am not especially anonymous on the internet. Never have been. I just prefer to use my nickname, because more people call me Orb than call me Lora-Lee. The only time I use my “real” name is when I have to or around family,^† but I have never hidden from my real name or tried to keep it some dark secret. My real name was in the search engines before I was even online. It’d be impossible for me to hide from it without far too much effort on my part, and I am lazy about that kind of thing.^††

With that said, I did mean to announce my having joined Facebook over here sooner, but the holidays got in the way. I simply forgot that I hadn’t. So without further ado, if you have a Facebook account and want to add me as a friend, all you have to do is search for Lora-Lee Blalock and add me. Though I will mention that if it’s possible I will not recognize you by your real name or whatever name you use on Facebook, you might want to mention that in your friend request, and then give me time to adjust to knowing you by another name (just as I have had to adjust to seeing my real name associated with me, which was weird at first).

I have found I use Facebook quite a lot. In fact, it’s open in my browser just about all day, whether I am at my computer or not, and I post status updates a few times a day. Silly stuff I likely wouldn’t post over here to avoid cluttering my blog with short little posts of unimportance (the same reason I don’t Twitter much either – need to disconnect. The long posts of mundane unimportance are, I would imagine, annoying enough. Sometimes I post links there before I get around to posting them here (where I can babble endlessly about them), and sometimes those links never make it over here for lack of time (babbling endlessly does take some time). I also tend to post photos there that never make it here. Anyway, I’m active over there, and I am also easy to get in touch with there, seeing as I am there so much.

A couple things you need to know. I am hopelessly addicted to a few of the Facebook games. If game posts annoy you, I hope you have learned how to hide them on your feed. If not, ask and I will tell you how to do it. Also, I don’t rant over there, and I avoid political arguments. If anyone attempts to engage me in heavy political discussion at Facebook, I will simply not engage. I will ignore. Even I need a place to be more lighthearted and less fighty. It’s where I go to look at photos of my friends’ babies and have fun. I plan to keep it that way.

And finally, if you feel snubbed because I announced my having a Facebook account only to a select group of close friends before posting it on my blog publicly, I am genuinely sorry. No snub was intended. They were the people who were pestering me to get an account there, and to be honest, I never expected my existence over there to last long or amount to much. I was doing it to make them happy and to get them to stop pestering me on an almost daily basis. Well, I found I like it over there, and I do use it a lot, so here we are with the official public announcement of my Facebook existence.

How is it that I am one of the most “open book life” people I know, and my online “persona” being exactly how I am if you sat down to have coffee with me, I am constantly being accused of being manipulative or deceitful or in some other way NOT the same person online as I am offline. All I can say is that if you think my not announcing a Facebook account the moment I created it was somehow a planned event or me trying to hide something, well, you haven’t been reading my blog long enough or you just haven’t been paying attention. Also, it’s possible you may need to get a life. It’s a Facebook account, not some matter of national security.

1. † Though even my family doesn’t use my real name. No, they all call me Lori, except for Lin. I would not, under any circumstances, ever call me Lori to my face, unless you are elderly and are one of my direct blood relations. I can’t stand it. Really. I’m serious about this. Don’t even do it in jest. I do not respond well. [↩]
2. †† The easiest way to keep the facts of your life straight is to always tell the truth. I have always answered every question posed to me about myself, and I suck at being anonymous. I am not an anonymous sort of person. I am who I am, whether I am online or off. [↩]

Every two years when our cell phone contract comes due for renewal, there’s much excitement and angst about the new plans and phones. This year it looked like I might finally be able to send emails, which would mean being able to send photos and lengthier posts to my usual posting locations from anywhere on the planet, but my hopes and dreams of placing the last brick in my online empire have been squashed by T-Mobile and a limited budget.

Oh sure, the new unlimited family plans are great and cheaper, but if we want to do email from our phones, it’s going to cost $30 a phone a month. Um, yeah … not happening. In fact, that’s pretty damn ridiculous. Lin and I would be paying $60 a month for both our phones to send emails, and we don’t even pay that much for our broadband internet access at home.

So no posting things to my blog from my phone for at least two more years. Boo. Hiss. I guess now I can look at the free phones and pick out whatever I want whether it has email capability or not. Not that I need a new phone. I still love my old phone, but I’m not turning down a free phone. I rarely turn down anything someone wants to give me for nothing. I’ll just have a spare phone.

Still, I find myself excessively disappointed about still not being to post cell phone photos to the internet while on-the-go. I know I would do it a lot too, but $30 a month is a bit too much to pay for that ability. WAH!

In case you didn’t catch the news in any of my previous posts, I’m going out of town for a few days. I don’t know if I’ll be making any posts or not while away, but most likely not … unless the urge becomes overwhelming or I remember I can make audio posts and Tweets (and the urge becomes overwhelming).

So enjoy your break from my babbling, and I’ll try to enjoy my break as well. I should be back early next week sometime to begin babbling anew. I know you can’t wait! :)

And now, I am running incredibly late, so I must dash to the truck and hit the road before my mom’s head explodes.

Could the Russian comment spammers please die now? Seriously. The last few days have been insane with Russian comment spam. None of it gets through to the web site, of course, because it’s spam and my web site knows spam when it sees it. But still … I have to deal with it and delete it, and when it stacks up I have to look at them all to make sure there weren’t any real comments that got caught in the net.

So annoying.

And yes, that’s all I really have to say at the moment.

It rained all day. I’m in a mood.