Merry Christmas!

Today, I wrote a similar post from a slightly broader perspective, so I'm very interested to find your post. If you get a chance, stop by and read
You are What You Eat; the Cortisol Addiction http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/4046
and let me know your thoughts.

My wife and I always have duck on Valentine's day, along with a nice cocktail and a nice desert. The kids are part of the celebration. Typically, we give them sparkling sweet cider. Perhaps our romance isn't as steamy as it was before kids, but it is still strong and I think it is important to demonstrate a healthy relationship to our children

Glenn,

Yet again, another good post, and thanks for mentioning me in your comments.I think a good way to think of social media is this. If you write something important, you want to tell your friends about it. Social media is how you tell your friends about something important you've written on your blog.

One way of looking at it is that you want to speak with your friends where they are, on Facebook or Twitter for example. Another approach is to blanket the town. I tend to go with this second approach in an effort to reach new people. With that, let me point out a few tools that I really like.

First, I like to get as much of this automated as possible. I use TwitterFeed to subscribe to the RSS feed for my blog and post Tweets on Twitter about it. FriendFeed and Facebook both subscribe to my TwitterFeed, so it gets repeated there.

For special situations, I like to send messages via ping.fm Ping sends the same message to a bunch of social networking sites all at the same time. I only use it from time to time because I don't want to overwhelm people with messages.

One final site that I like to recommend is Dandyid. Dandyid gives you the ability to list many of your social media sites, and makes it easier for others to find different sites they have in common with you. You can check out my DandyID at http://www.dandyid.org/users/ahynes1

Aldon
My recent post This Week In Woodbridge

This is a great list. I believe that a couple of years ago, my wife adopted a shark for her brother similar to the octopus that you mention adopting. I hope my brother's shark hasn't eaten any adopted octopus

As to CSA farms, that is a great idea. We get our fruit and vegetables from a CSA farm and I am a BIG supporter of CSA farms. I hope that if people don't get CSA subscriptions for their friends for the holidays, they at least check out CSA farms and see about getting their own fruit and vegetables from CSA farms.

I was off on vacation when this happened. I'm back for a few days, but then heading out again. Personally, I'm not expecting much, either good, nor bad from the change. I'll just keep using EC as long as it links me to interesting sites and brings me interesting traffic, and when that stops, I'll move on.

I have many reactions to this. I am very aware of my audience. My wife reads my blog regularly, as does my brother. I have it linked to Facebook so many of my friends read it there.

I try to always respect confidentiality and privacy of the people I am writing about. I encourage everyone to check the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics for some useful thoughts on this, even if you don't consider yourself a journalist or aren't writing professionally.

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

All of this said, I like to write, as much as possible about what is personal and relate it back to the world around me. I believe it was Tip O'Neill that said all politics is local. Given how connected we are with people around the world these days through the Internet, a better formulation might be, all politics is personal.

I find that E.B. White is a writer that has greatly affected my thoughts about my own writing. He wrote many great essays from a saltwater farm in Maine in which he related his experiences on the farm to the events of the world. I wish I could write like that.

Yet, perhaps, the most important aspect for me about writing on a blog is this: In a writing course I took years ago, the professor spoke about the true writers that write because they must. Not because they have something important they want to say, or because it will earn them a living or perhaps even fame and recognition, but simply because they must write.

I am no great writer, but that sense of writing because I must, balanced with a desire to respect others privacy and confidentiality help shape what I write.

You will note that in my post, I spoke about being an Episcopalian. I am glad to hear that Pope John Paul II spoke out frequently against the death penalty. I hope Catholics in Connecticut will similarly speak out at this important time. While many believe that there are issues of greater moral priority than the repeal of the death penalty, that should not be used as an excuse for inaction.

It seems as if the Church is very eager to rally against marriage equality, or against provisions to make it easier to hold church officials accountable for misdoings, but when it comes to the Death Penalty, we don’t hear much from the church.

Like Gov. Rell, I’m an Episcopalian, so I’ll refer to our church’s position on the Death Penalty. In 1988, the Lambeth Conference passed Resolution 33, which “Urges the Church to speak out against…all governments who practice capital punishment”. Gov. Rell should respect the position of the church on this issue and sign the bill repealing the Death Penalty.

I haven't decided for sure if I'll join the strike tomorrow. However, from an advertising perspective, I don't want to be running ads when a strike is on, so I pulled all my ads for tomorrow.

I will be surfing using BlogExplosion and Adgitize tomorrow. I may surf off of MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. I'll also probably get some time to do a little more coding on a smart surfing app that I want to build.

Oh, and for those who aren't on adgitize yet, I highly recommend it. It is another blogger oriented advertising network, similar to EntreCard, but done much better: http://www.adgitize.com/?affid=342