Excerpt:
Not just the young or idle but mothers, fathers, husbands and wives are also recording the days of their lives
Not just the young or idle but mothers, fathers, husbands and wives are also recording the days of their lives
THIS week, we take a break from the current “blogging troubles” — sedition charges and all that — and turn to the wholesome, non-seditious phenomena of families that blog.
Read more at TODAYonline. (PDF version here).
Family Names: Cars and other machines
Creating blogs for family members and giving them noms de blog can be fun, as can be seen with the following bloggers.
Lancerlord (lancerlord.blogspot.com), a 32-year-old Singaporean, began blogging last December, and created “blogs” for his young family — himself, his wife and his two young children: Lancerlady (lancerlady.blogspot.com) for the wife, Lancerlad (lancerlad.blogspot.com) for the older boy, and Lancerkid (lancerkid.blogspot.com) for the younger child.
Lancerlord explains, for the curious: “How our names are created? It’s just that Lancerlady and I owned a Mitsubishi Lancer.”
A consummate blogger (he is a top contributor to the local blog aggregator Tomorrow.sg), Landerlord documents anything from family trips to the fish farm to interesting snippets from mainstream media.
There is almost always a photograph or 20 accompanying his posts — and when there isn’t, Lancerlord is almost too apologetic about his “cannot make it” camera and “cannot make it” photo-taking skills”.
MercerMachine (somethingstickythisway comes.blogspot.com), an American expat and Ang Mo Kio resident, explains that his blog nickname came from the movie Blade Runner and the book the movie was based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where a “Mercer Machine” was something that “would help us to remain human”.
“And that’s one of the functions of the Internet in general, and this blog in particular,” he adds. “This blog has allowed me, as a Westerner in Singapore, to gain an understanding of, and to a certain extent even become a part of, the fabric of the society of Singapore.”
And yes, his wife is “Mrs Machine” and his baby son “Machine Boy”.
Mothers and wives who blog (husbands, beware):
Huileng’s Sketches of Happenings (huileng.seng.cc) is one blog to look at if you’re raising a young child.
She shares with us her experiences with her husband in raising their young daughter.
There’s a recent funny incident in which her husband’s credit cards are taken out of his wallet by their toddler and hidden somewhere in the house.
To recover the lost cards, Huileng and her husband make their daughter “re-enact” the “theft”.
She writes: “We gave her a few expired credit cards and tried to observe her. She walked around trying to put them into some boxes. Oh, that’s clue number one. Secret boxes. But no cards in sight.”
They eventually find the credit cards underneath the fax machine — but not before Huileng takes a snipe at her husband’s effectiveness around the house.
She quips: “Man can be so unhelpful. They keep reminding you that it is very important to find the card, then walked around the house, trying to search with their eyes. For goodness’ sake, how to find a well-hidden object without using the hands?”
Huileng’s site also hosts a mothers’ forum called Playgroup Singapore (huileng. seng.cc/forum/), where mothers of young children can join or form their own playgroup in their area, or announce new activities for mothers and their families.
Then there is “The Diva Working Mum” (diva-working-mum.blogspot.com), who journals days in the life of a working mother — complete with dining, shopping and doing the groceries.
Among her observations, supplemented by many photographs, is her belief that supermarkets and grocery stores deliberately place snacks on shelves within reach of children’s hands.
Now, who says blogs are the domain of youngsters (like me, ha-ha) and people who have too much time on their hands?
Surf around, and you’ll find that there are many more mothers, fathers, husbands and wives who make time to blog — and not all of them name their family members after cars and machines, or talk about food and shopping …
Mr Miyagi a.k.a. Benjamin Lee, has been entertaining blog readers for a year at www.miyagi.sg, and is still trying to convince his family to start a blog.
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