babybloomr

Over at Music City Moms they have a post that asks readers to send in their prom pictures, which is always a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Unless it is your own kid and was just taken last year or something, everybody’s prom pictures are funny; the older, the funnier. Even more than wedding pictures, I think, because while there are at least some semblance of guidelines for wedding dresses, all bets are off for prom! And in the world of bad prom pictures, the overwhelming majority are always from the 70’s– that was simply a butt-tastically ugly decade, no denying it. I should know, that’s when I was in high school and I had a front-row fashion seat to all of it–polyester leisure suits, gauchos, Dingo boots, Farrah hair, hot pants, granny dresses… brings a tear to the eye.

Russ was my date to my prom. He had already been out of high school for two years, a struggling musician with no money, BUT he did have a Freddie Prinze moustache and a green Pinto. (Boom chicka wow wow!) He was also determined to show me a really good time for my prom, and somehow scraped up enough coin to rent a tuxedo, take me out to dinner AND buy me a lovely nosegay (no stinkin’ wrist corsage for me–I was a fashion renegade, I tell ya!) On the big day he was really excited about his tuxedo choice, but wouldn’t give me any details because he said he wanted it to be a surprise.

This concerned me.

Russ was smart, amazingly talented and sweet, but when I met him… Honestly? He dressed as if he had been raised by circus people. Or Elvis. I remember a lot of shiny clothes and blindingly bright colors, interspersed with baffling odds and ends like a big blue and white checkered seersucker jacket. For reals. So when he said he had decided to “go another way” instead of the classic black tuxedo we had discussed, I got a little nervous.

Prom night came, he pulled up in the Pinto and stepped out wearing, how shall I say this, the worst piece of crap dinner jacket I have ever seen. It had wide pinkish stripes on a pale yellow and aqua background. Kind of like an Easter egg, only with really wide black lapels. It confirmed my worst fears. But you know, he was just so dang happy about it, so proud of himself for picking it out and obviously feeling so dapper in it that I…. I just…. ended up marrying him.

Three years later, though. Come on people, just because it was Arkansas doesn’t mean I ran off and got married on my prom night– let go of those stereotypes, already!  He wasn’t my cousin, either!

(Behold the glory– trust me, it was so much worse in person than this tiny picture would lead you to believe. This upgrades it to merely tacky, instead of godawful.)

(Also? I am giggling and hunching my shoulders like that because he was pinching my booty.)

I have been looking forward to starting this blog for a long time.

The Music City Moms blog that I have written for a little over a year confirmed my suspicion that this kind of writing was a good fit for me–I was born to blog, baby! My nephew Daniel (who from this day forward shall only be referred to by his official title, The Computer Genius) has been urging me for months and months to just go ahead and launch my own, already. He lured me with the siren song of offering to design and set it up for me, administrate it, and… something else to do with a ‘server,” and some other stuff that I don’t really understand but I’m really grateful for.

Ennywho-when we finally up and did this thing this past weekend, I was so giddy with the shiny/happy/newness of it all that I immediately wanted to do whatever we could to make this thing look official, you know, like a Real Live Blog. So The Computer Genius contacted GoogleAds and I feverishly jumped right in and registered at BlogHer.

Perhaps I was a smidge premature. BlogHer sent me a sweetly worded email that said that regretfully, they couldn’t add my blog to their register just yet because, HELLO? Apparently it’s a little hard for them to successfully get an overview and evaluate the contents of a blog when it’s only been up for 24 hours! They asked me to please re-register when I’ve been online for 30 days, which is their standard policy, which I would have known if I had actually read that Agreement page that I blew right past in my rush to look like a Real Live Blog.

And the GoogleAds? Well… OK, I understood the rudimentary basics; I knew that they picked up on random words from blog posts and then matched them with their pool of advertisers, but I guess I didn’t picture that being done by some soulless computer program. I thought maybe Google had some grandma-types, you know, like Walmart greeters, who spent their days carefully reading thousands of blogs and painstakingly choosing the absolute perfect ads to grace their sidebars– ads that would speak straight to the heart of my many many handful of readers. If I had done a little more homework, if I had given my first blog entry about swimsuits a little more thought, then maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so terribly surprised when I scrolled down my sidebar and saw ads for “Hot S*xy See-Through Swimwear” and a seniors dating service for “S*xy Mature Single Women!” (Using * to try to fool Google…)

Um, yeah. No offense, Google, but that’s not really my target audience and that’s not really the kind of Real Live Blog I was going for! I’m still not sure exactly how we’re gonna work this whole thing out, but here’s a little heads-up for you: if you read anything over there ——-> that mentions something about “S*xy Model Pix” and then you do a lot of clicking? You’re going to be up to your hips in v*brator ads! Don’t say you haven’t been warned.