Ever Wonder What Our Kids Will Think of Twitter? Me Neither.

Look out! The O-bots are coming! Er, I mean they're already here. En masse.

Even if you don't use twitter, and I think you might be weird if you don't, you have probably heard all the hullabaloo that has been going on with it lately. First there was good ol' Ashton Kutcher managing to connive CNN into playing along with a ridiculous contest, and then there was Oprah. Oh, Oprah. Without even tweeting a word, she had hundreds of thousands of followers.

Personally, I don't get the whole "follow a celebrity" thing. I tend to think that the Boring Folk actually tweet some of the more interesting tweets that have been twatted. I mean, I literally laughed out loud when CranberryPerson wrote, "Promised my kids Happy Meals if they behave at Costco but the joke is on them because McNuggets are highly detrimental to brain development." That's WAY funnier and more interesting than Demi Moore's tweet, "I really liked E P L the mid section was a bit slow but the info humor & honesty were very uplifting." As an added bonus, CranberryPerson's tweet was in a language I actually understand.

But, whatever. If people want to cyber stalk boring celebrities, more power to them. Just don't clog up my timeline with your messages to them. It's kind of like you walking down the street yelling, "I LOVE YOU BRITNEY!" It's going to get on my nerves eventually, and I'm going to go find another street to hang out on. (Or unfollow you, because that's a heck of a lot easier.)

Anyhoo, it's not so much the celebrity stalking that has started getting on my nerves in the past few weeks, it's the O-bots.

Yes, the O-bots.

In case you haven't noticed, ever since Ashton sat down with Oprah and told her all about the twitterverse, there has been an explosion of new twitterers. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm seeing upwards of 20 new people a day following me. Except, they aren't "people." They're O-bots.

O-bots are easy to spot. They are the twitter users who have posted maybe five tweets, are following way over 1000 people, and have words like "expert," "optimize," "marketing," and "monetize" in their Bios. They are on twitter to pimp something and will follow absolutely anybody in hopes of getting you to click their little links and have over some cash. Some say they are there to help you "learn to use twitter the right way." Others say they can help you get thousands of new followers. Yet others are there to solve all of my "male performance problems." Funny thing is, I don't think there is a "right way" to use twitter, I have no interest in new followers if they aren't going to manage to entertain me, and I don't have a penis.

At least I don't think I do.

I do have a need to hide from the O-bots. They aren't just annoying, they are starting to scare me. What if the Free Laptop O-bots and the Internet Marketing Guru O-bots get together and make tiny Free Laptop Internet Marketing Guru O-bot babies? That can't possibly end well. It might even cause the universe to implode.

If you are an O-bot, please leave me alone. If you're not, and you want me to follow you on twitter, you had better send me an @ message because I can no longer see you in the sea of O-bots. Mostly because I've got my head buried in the sand so that the O-bots don't destroy me.

And if you don't yet use twitter? Beware the O-bots. They will eat your soul.

Neither of them uses Twitter, but I wonder what it will be like when Alexis is old enough to tweet. Will it still exist? Or will the O-bots have taken over the universe?

I Have No Excuse

Lately I have been really sucking at taking photos. I know this is shocking. After all, when Alexis thinks back on what I was like when she was little, she's going to picture a tall brown-haired lady with a silver camera attached to her left eye. I take Mr. Canon with me absolutely everywhere, and yet yesterday? I took ZERO photos. Considering I'm attempting Project 365, this is downright inexcusable.

There were plenty of opportunities for photos. We spent most of the day working in the yard. Alexis happily lounged in her pool, looking cute, while I yanked out weeds. When I started loading mulch into a wheelbarrow and hauling it around the yard, Alexis sat in her beach chair, donning sunglasses and looking cute. When she grew bored of chillin', Alexis rummaged in the garage until she found her little sand shovel and started helping me load mulch into the wheelbarrow. And guess what? She was cute doing it. Then there was the ultimate in cuteness when Alexis sat in the yard with Cody, the two of them happily romping and hugging and kissing and playing.

Lots of cuteness.

No photos.

I could make excuses. Like, I was really trying to get those three yards of mulch where they belonged as quickly as possible and didn't want to stop. Or, I didn't want to get Mr. Canon dirty. By the end of the day, it was pretty obvious that I would have stayed cleaner if I had gone mud wrestling. I could even blame the giant blister I got on my shutter finger when I had to hack at an overgrown bush with really dull pruners.

But, alas, I have no excuse. I was just too lazy to take photos yesterday.

Overcompensation to start . . . now.

She's Going to be My Partner in Fine Crime

For weeks now I've been in a funk. A sucky suck funk of stupid, delusional, crazy, and just plain not smart. I've been wrong, I've been shamed, and I've been just plain clueless. In the middle of that, I went and did something so nuts, so ludicrous, so spectacularly idiotic, that when faced with it last night, even I couldn't believe I had done it.

I bought Alexis and I tickets to the ballet.

Cinderella, to be specific. Because, you know, nothing screams GOOD TIMES like an activity that requires that a 3-year old sit silently watching people on a stage dance to orchestra music. No talking, no singing, just dancing. The best part was that I was soooo smart that I bought tickets for the 8pm showing because the cheap seats were sold out for the afternoon matinee. Surely she would be the epitome of exceptional behavior if I just kept her up waaaay past her bedtime!

I was just asking for a disaster. Clearly.

I didn't get it.

For two and a half hours, Alexis sat quietly in her seat, transfixed by the "secret musicians" and the dancers. She oohed. She aahed. She whispered, "That's really beautiful."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I. was. stunned.

She was in love. Alexis loved the costumes, she loved the set, she loved the music, and she loved the dancing. She smiled from ear-to-ear all through the entire performance, and I didn't even slip her some happy pills.

Something tells me we have a major performing arts dork on our hands.

I'm OK with that.