Just Half An Hour

My first foray into social media was on Facebook. Back then it was really genuinely all about connecting with friends and family.

My Facebook “friends” were my actual real-life friends and family members. People I had personal relationships with offline as well.

Later, people I worked with started making “friend” requests. This was a big no-no for me… I refused to accept any friend requests that were from co-workers who I wasn’t truly friends with (and I did and do have some coworkers who became genuine friends).

If we didn’t hang out outside of work and did not “do life together” outside of the workplace, I did not add them as friends.

That was just my personal rule…

Then one day, a friend of mine told she’d just hit her “Facebook 500”.

What…??? What in the world was that?

She’d garnered 500 Facebook friends.

Now this was someone I knew quite well, and even though she was and is a lot more social than I am, I still couldn’t fathom how she could possibly have and keep up with 500 “friends” on Facebook.

After her revelation I decided to “relax” my Facebook friend standards and start accepting requests from acquaintances and people a bit more far-removed… If I had even just met someone through a friend, or if they were a friend of a friend and then sent a friend request, I’d likely accept it.

It was all just a vanity thing, and I can honestly admit that. I don’t know why that number seemed to matter to me but for a brief period of time, it did.

You should understand that back in those early days of life on Facebook, that was practically the only place most of us hung out on online.

Maybe I thought a larger number of Facebook friends would make me appear to be more popular… Ugh… That was so “high school”…

Anyway, those days are long gone. Thank God!!

Facebook became a lot less appealing over the years as a place to hang out. I lost interest in what I was seeing appear in my newsfeed and almost felt like I couldn’t even see what was actually going on with the people I was interested in!

And don’t let me even get started on all the privacy breach issues that are rampant on the platform…

So I pretty much left Facebook “in practice”. I still have an account but I no longer socialize on that platform.

I actually plan to go and clean out all the “Facebook friends” and whittle things back down to just real friends… Maybe one day, if I care enough…

My next forays into social media were all very focused on business and nothing social… Ironic isn’t it?

I was on there to promote an agenda (not a bad one, just a crafting podcast) and I was going to use it to shout my message out to the world and drive traffic to where I wanted it to go… Just like everyone else was doing on social media.

No socializing… Just business…

Needless to say, a few years went by and even that got old as well.

So I took a step back to assess.

My social media marketing efforts were working for me, but I wasn’t being social and I was not enjoying any of the platforms I was on.

I decided that I wanted to get back to using social media just for the purpose of being social.

I’d heard that in the early days of Twitter people used to tweet back and forth and engage with each other in real time… So I picked Twitter.

I created a new separate account and started fishing around for people and topics that were of genuine interest to me and with whom I might enjoying engaging on the real…

So here are some of the people, maybe I should say “people” I follow on Twitter:

• Survivor – I love this show. My friend Gina and I actually applied to be contestants for one of the seasons… We didn’t get picked, but now in retrospect, I’m so glad we didn’t… I doubt that I would have been able to survive the hardship of that type of rough living 🙂
• The Bachelor – Another show I’m a fan of, and no, I did not apply to be a contestant on this one… But I am a card-carrying member of Bachelor Nation so when the season is in full swing, I do my “civic duty” and engage… Lol…
• Married At First Sight – I follow this one somewhat differently. Because you have to follow the whole LifetimeTV account and I didn’t want to because I don’t really want to hear about all things LifetimeTV-related, I only follow the hashtags for this show – #MAFS and #MarriedAtFirstSight to “see what the streets are saying” 😉

In Other News…

I tried to do some decorating for Christmas today but was unsuccessful. I’ll table those ambitions for now.

Here are the recipes I’ll be using to make our Thanksgiving turkey and homemade stuffing:

• Juicy Thanksgiving Turkey
• Easy Stuffing

I really like that the name of the turkey recipe is “Juicy Thanksgiving Turkey” because that’s exactly what I want! The recipe had me at “juicy”, because nothing is worse than a dry Thanksgiving turkey.

Likewise, you can probably guess why I picked that particular stuffing recipe 🙂

I’m getting more even excited as Thanksgiving approaches. I also found a nice simple recipe for pumpkin pie on the back of a can of pumpkin slush/puree so I’ll be attempting that as well.

Stay tuned for pictures of the spread in hopefully T minus 4 days (or so) 🙂

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Catch up on my previous posts for this challenge:

• Day 1 – Why I’m doing this challenge

• Day 2 – 10 random facts about me

• Day 3 – The story behind the name of this blog

• Day 4 – Quotable Quote… Why it speaks to me right now

• Day 5 – Recent random act of kindness

• Day 6 – Three current guilty pleasures

• Day 7 – Collections… What I collect and why

• Day 8 – Throwback Picture

• Day 9 – Recently read book recommendation

• Day 10 – Three Favorite Blogs

• Day 11 – Wishful Thinking… If I won the lottery

• Day 12 – Purpose of this blog and future blog goals

• Day 13 – What’s on today’s schedule?

• Day 14 – All about my profession

• Day 15 – My first international trip

• Day 16 – Something I miss from my childhood

• Day 17 – An impossible dream

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To see the complete list of writing prompts, go here.