Have You Ever Met Up With Someone You Talk To On The Internet? Today I Did!

Now if your teenage son or daughter told you that they were going out to meet someone they'd been chatting to on the internet, how would you respond?

Yep, I think we all know what we'd say to that one!

So what's so different about a middle-aged mother doing just the same?  Weird or what?  Does it make it okay just because we're both quilters and bloggers and expats with children around the same age and our life circumstances are remarkably similar even if one of us is English living in America and the other American living in Tokyo?

Well, today I did just that, for the first time I met up with one of my blogging friends, Cynthia @AQuilterbyNight.  For safety's sake, we met in a very public place in broad daylight, The City Quilter, and given that we were both remarkably normal individuals who were very pleased to finally meet each other in person we then went to Stout on 33rd Street for a tasty fish and chip lunch.

It was so great to chat with someone who knows and understands everything I've been experiencing over the last 2-3 years as a wife and mum/absentee mum living a long way from 'home' and better still that we both love to quilt - I don't think either of us stopped nattering long enough to catch our breath the whole 3 hours we were together!!!

I gave Cynthia a small gift that I'd made - a needlecase made with some of The City Quilter's exclusive NYC fabrics and a small strip of Stars & Stripes fabric that I had leftover from my 'An Actor's Life For Me' quilt.

And, Cynthia returned the favour with a fab gift of Japanese fabrics.

This is a plain navy woven cotton - in reality, it looks incredibly navy but the camera's picked up all the different shots of thread running through it.

A fab piece of Kimono fabric - that's the full width of Japanese fabric apparently - this piece is only 14.5" wide (left to right), - how amazing!

This is a large piece of Tenegui fabric, white with blue dots - I could tell you all about it but Cynthia does a much better job here on her blog :)

As we were leaving I remembered that Flicky had said I had to take a 'selfie' photo for her to see and here it is:

We were both struggling with this 'selfie' photo stuff, which part of the phone to look at and all that and fortunately Cynthia spotted that my phone was set to video or I don't know that I'd have a photo to share at all!

We had such fun and on Thursday we're meeting up again and heading over to the "Workt by Hand": Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts exhibition at Brooklyn Museum. 

So, if you've got a quilty internet friend coming into town, go for it, meet up with them, they may just become a real life friend too!

Disclaimer: 
This post is for informational purposes only, no payment or commission is received on click-throughs and opinions are my own.

So Long Google Reader - What Does It Mean For Bloggers? PROBABLY NOT A LOT!!!

For the last few days I've been watching and reading a whole heap of craziness across the Internet over the announcement that Google Reader won't exist after 1 July 2013. What does this really mean to us bloggers?  In my opinion, the answer is 'probably not a lot'.

Will your Blogger/Wordpress account still exist? - YES

Will you still have your Google Followers? - YES

So what exactly does Google Reader do? - It allows you to easily access/read all the blogs that you follow.

How will you read your blogs once Google Reader doesn't exist? - Simply change to another reader such as Bloglovin or Feedly.

These other readers already exist, it takes only seconds to sign up for them.  Hey, you can really go mad and sign up for both of them and even stick with Google Reader too for now - there's no Reader Police checking how many you've signed up to and are using - which is what I've done just to try them out and see which I like best.

Your blog isn't going anywhere, you don't need to tell your readers where they can follow you now (how many posts have you read over the weekend telling you just that information and asking you to click to follow them at their new location?!!!).  Your blog will still be sat on Blogger or Wordpress or whatever platform you're already using.  

I don't believe that you'll lose Google Friend Connect Followers either - this is another separate Google application and not directly connected to Google Reader.  This doesn't mean they won't ever make other changes that could affect this application though in the future. 

Of course, you may lose some readers if they don't move to a new reader themselves but do you think they're not going to that?  Are any of us really going to stop reading all blogs, forever?  I don't think so.  It's up to the individual to move to a new reader and they can quickly have their old Google Reader blog list transferred for them by the new reader system.  

You as the blogger don't have to do a thing - though as a reader you'll probably want to move to a new reader yourself so you can carry on reading all the fab quilty posts out there (how many reads can you have in one sentence?) ;)  As I type this post my favourite new reader is Feedly - I'm enjoying using it over Bloglovin via my laptop but I haven't tried either via my phone yet - that's a task for tomorrow.  I'll let you know which I settle on as I go.

I wanted to type this post to try to alleviate some of the confusion/worry that seems to be out there right now.  This latest Google change isn't a disaster for any of us, but who knows what they'll do next?!!!