Fall is Almost Here, I'm in Love, and Random Stuff

First and foremost! I am SO IN LOVE!!! I just met these beautiful new shoes by Ann Roth, via skirt!, and I think I'm in love. Not with these shoes specifically, with all her shoes.

This is the Charisma!

These shoes are just amazing pieces of art. I can not wait to afford a pair. LOL! I LOVE shoes, but I can not bring myself to spend more than $100 for a pair. Even $100 is way too much for me. I usually stay in the $80 range.

So Fall is here and I totally do not feel like it. I feel like something is off kilter. I know what it is. I don't feel like it's Fall because I'm not taking the kids to school every day or picking them up. Since Rey is still off, and doing all of that, I'm not following my school schedule. I don't feel as busy as I usually am when school starts, therefore I don't feel as useful. I still feel very lazy. I'm hoping that the start of Cheerleading classes tomorrow changes that a bit. I'm coming home a few minutes early to take the kids to their first cheerleading class. I'm watching this first class, but the plan is to work out every Tuesday while they are there.

That's another thing! I haven't been working out and that has a lot to do with the laziness. Fall always marks the beginning of a new phase for me, like my birthday and a new year. It's a time that I use to reasses my life. It is so hard to believe that it has been 8 months since the start of the year and six months since my 40th birthday. Incredible... I have never felt quite right in these six months. I haven't felt like my life is in order. Something is definitely askew.

Once again I'm also behind schedule. Instead of sitting down to revise my goals for the rest of the year and reviewing my five year plan before school started I am barely doing it this week. I never even made a vision board/bucket list. I kidded that I needed to make a love shrine instead. A love shrine to myself and my life. A definition of who I am and where I want to go. I hate it when I get this feeling that I'm just existing and not living. It isn't a good feeling and I must shake it off.

The 2010 Emmy Awards

Looking at the Emmy nominations makes me realize how little TV I watch. At first it was a conscious effort and then it just became the norm. I can actually count on one hand the number of shows I have watched on a regular basis in the last twenty years. Currently it's 30 Rock and NCIS. I love both those shows!

I decided to go through the nominees for tonight's awards and I found that I have not watched any of the shows, mini-series, or made for TV movies that are being nominated. I wanted to watch The Closer every time I would watch the commercials at the gym, but I just never did. The commercials make it look really good!

When I was growing up I lived with a sister who watched TV 24/7. I am not kidding. To the point that I did not want to watch TV for years. Once she moved away, when I was around 16, I stopped watching it all together. I read a lot and talked on the phone instead and then before I knew it I started college and I was too busy with studying to worry about it. During those years I probably only watched a Spanish novela or two with my mom during dinner.

The summer I lived in St Pete, Florida while doing an internship I didn't even have a TV in my room. I know there are many people who do the same thing. I often hear people say they don't even own a TV and if they do it's only to watch DVDs.

So this leads me to the question. How does TV even survive? Who is watching TV? With the Internet, Netflix, XBox TV shows, etc... who watches actual television with the commercials and all? Because that's how TV survives; from the advertising. If the advertisers aren't reaching their target audience and they aren't seeing an ROI on their investment (and TV is really expensive) they are going to quickly lose interest in advertising. If TV loses their advertisers they will lose more money and that is not a good thing for any media.

I started watching NCIS at the gym originally. I got caught up in some of the shows and then I saw that I could watch one of the seasons on Netflix without commercials. Since I was looking for a show to watch while I folded clothes I started watching Season 6 online on Netflix. When I finished watching those shows it was time to watch Season 7. And that's how I started watching the show on TV. Now that I think about it, that's how I started watching 30 Rock too. I watched the show on Netflix and then I moved on to television. However, I often DVR the shows and I watch them sans commercials.

So is the Internet actually helping TV or hurting it? I wonder how how many people do the same thing. How many people start watching a show online and then move on to watch it in real time? For some reason the song lyrics, "Video killed the radio star," keep running through my head. Except my question is did the "Internet kill the TV Star?"

I haven't decided if I'm watching the Emmy Awards yet. I may tune in just in time to see if Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin win in their category since they are the only two actors nominated who are in a show that I actually watch.

Where Did the Summer and Thirteen Years Go

annetaintor.com

In honor of my anniversary!

I may have said this before on here, but I will say it again and I'll probably continue saying it my whole life because I can't believe how much I didn't think about it thirteen years ago. My wedding anniversary will forever fall at the start or around the start of the school year. Yes, today is my thirteen year anniversary and it also happens to be my kids' first day of school.

I was feeling totally guilty for never taking a vacation day all summer long and then in the end I decided to just go ahead and take off the last Friday of the summer. I say I took the day off when in fact I logged on to work in the morning for a little while. After that we took the kids to see Nanny McPhee Returns.  Very cute movie but we went to see it for the kids. That wouldn't be my first choice, but they enjoyed it. Then Saturday we took them to the beach and they had a really good time.

I took today off too for our anniversary and for the first day of school. Rey and I decided to go see a movie we both wanted to see. So we took the kids to school, I came back and worked for a little while, took a nap, and then we went to see Salt. Great movie! Action movies with a strong female lead are always a great compromise. We both enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the sequels I'm sure are to come.

Then we had sushi for lunch and I told the Chinese waitress that always sees us there that it was our anniversary, but of course she didn't give us anything, not that I expected anything. But I couldn't help but think how different it is when you go to a nice restaurant and you tell them it's your anniversary. They always give you a little something, even if it's a free dessert. Not so at the Chinese buffet that is a great deal on freshly made sushi. I guess they figure we can just go get some ice cream from the buffet or some flan the Mexican cooks make. Maybe if I told them my blog is a channel for Chinese anti-communists they would have offered me something. I need to remember to mention that next time.

So we've been married thirteen years. We are both very challenging personalities, thus the two children with the challenging personalities. We are not perfect. Who is? We both got into this thirteen years ago really not knowing what to expect. At least I didn't. I'd never been married, he had. And yet here we are thirteen years later for better or for worse and believe me, we've seen a lot of the worse of one another. Two children and two c-sections later we have survived. Yes, I should have come with a warning label!

A few days ago we watched Date Night (yes, we watch a lot of movies, don't judge) and the two main characters, Tina Fey and Steve Carell had the exact same conversation that we have had before. It was hilarious! My husband says to me, "We've had that conversation before." And I said, "Thousands of couples have that conversation."

I have seriously had that same fantasy of taking off and just checking into a hotel room à la Ashley Judd in Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood in my nightgown with a coat and a bottle of vodka in one hand. What woman or man hasn't? But most of us don't. We work out our differences for our children and for better or worse, just like we said in our wedding vows, and we move on. We can't afford to take sabbaticals like the character in Eat, Pray, Love. That's not reality for most of us.

In an age when divorce is always the answer we have somehow managed to hang in there and make it work, and that has made all the difference.

Hey! I Think I'm a Latina Blogger!

Woman Blogging by Mike Licht

Here's some interesting news! After six years of blogging here and on skirt! and also reading many other Latina's blogs over the years, word on the street is that there has been a "recent explosion of Latina bloggers on the web."  Maybe no had noticed us all of this time, so I guess it's nice to know that we've "sparked a buzz of excitement through cyberspace." 

According to this Hispanicad.com article "Latinas are outpacing the general market in growth and use of social media ."  I guess that's why the new excitement. We Latinas are actually blogging more than our non-Latina counterparts. Which makes sense really given that "Hispanics and Latinos constitute 15.4% of the total United States population, or 46.9 million people." (Wikipedia)

I enjoy blogging. Blogging for me is a weekly (and sometimes more) writing exercise. It gives me time to sit down and craft my words, however rudimentary. Sometimes I have the time to really go back and edit my work and sometimes I don't. Those times that I don't it's more like one of those 15 minute writing exercises where you are only allowed to write non-stop without any editing. Those are fun. It's always cool to see what you end up writing.

So I keep blogging. I don't do it for the money, although I should add that option to my blog. I tried it once but didn't see much ad activity. I really just blog for the love of writing and to send my words out into cyberspace in hopes that I will touch someone and make them go, "hmmm," laugh, or to spark some memory of their own. It's all about the pen, or the keyboard in my case.

Back to more Latinas blogging. There was actually a panel on this subject at the BlogHer conference. I've wanted to go to BlogHer for the last couple of years, since I first heard about it. I think I am really going to make an effort to go next year. What I found most interesting about this article was the statistic that "Hispanic women in the U.S. are one of the fastest-growing online demographics, and more than 85 percent of Latinas visit social networks on a regular basis." This is interesting to me, not only because I'm a Hispanic woman blogger, but also because I sell Hispanic media, including digital. This is great information for Hispanics as a viable digital market.

There I go again! Always wearing both my writer and my advertising hat at the same time! Argh! Thus the reason why I don't write full time and I blog. 

Up to my Shenanigans!

This is what I've been writing other places when I'm not here.

I have a week to finish "the talk" with my daughter. The birds and the bees in other words. Here is the story on that on skirt!

Sopalatina.net, a really cool Latino web site posted this essay that I submitted about reading and what an important part it has played in my life.

Enjoy!