I love crossing things off lists

I'm having a productive week, since all the busy-ness seems to have settled down. Crossed off my to-do list so far are:

• change sheets
• wash towels
• purchase and wrap 21st gift for Bethany
• ironing
• cook chocolate chip biscuits
• clean kitchen sink
• buy singlets appropriate for breastfeeding
• renew Bicycle NSW membership
• RSVP to two invitations
• mending
• pick up free PixiFoto
• clean bathroom sink and mirror
• dissemble and wash fans before packing away for the winter
• make little curtain for the pram
• cook pavlova for American guests we're having over tomorrow night

I've still got a few things left to do tomorrow, but on the whole, I'm feeling happy about my pottering around this week. :)

Now, in my second-last post I mentioned a few things I wanted to post about, one of them being the "12 Random Things" meme which I did, also Facebook, and photos of our little girl. So today I'm going to tackle the Facebook thing, and next time the photos - hopefully on the weekend.

So... where to start. Last November I deactivated my Facebook account (see this post), and had it deactivated for a few months. However, I missed the ease with which I was able to keep in touch with my family - especially Lachlan, since he's overseas. But, I loved not being in contact with so many random acquaintances who had gradually "friended" me over the years... I LOVED not seeing their silly status updates... and that got me thinking - maybe they loved not seeing mine too! :P Oh, and after deactivating, only TWO people (outside my family and my close circle of friends) noticed that I had gone from FB and chased me up. TWO PEOPLE. Out of nearly 200 friends. Haha. "Friends". :P

Alastair was also particularly concerned about the security breaching with FB, and their harvesting of information - something to do with them setting cookies in your browser and seeing everything and having access to everything that you look at....? Along those lines anyway.

We started to talk about how I was missing keeping up with people - and yes, I know that if the relationship is only Facebook-deep then what kind of a relationship is it anyway. But still, it's the little bits of involvement in people's lives... the people that I'm actually related to, or am really truly friends with. So we hatched a plan. :) If I used Facebook only in Google Chrome (set aside that browser to use for FB only, so that FB couldn't see what else I was doing when using Firefox or IE), and if I culled a whole lot of my "friends, then we would both be happier about having Facebook in our lives.

So... I whittled down my "friends list"... it wasn't very hard.... I got it down to 52. I now have 57 friends, since we're starting to get to know people from our lovely new church, the number has gone up :) - and when you think that probably nearly half of them are family and extended family, and some of my friends have three or four siblings, then I feel that's an achievable number of people for me to be in touch with, and a nice Facebook to have. :) I don't have to listen to the moany, crappy status updates from randoms I hardly know, those ones who I was just "aware that they were there" and was just "keeping up with the goss". My "news feed" only contains (well, 99% of the time!) the things that people I love are doing, and because I have way fewer friends, it doesn't get updated as often - so no need to check it all the time.

It's working well. For now. We'll re-assess it if we need to. :)