On my way to work this morning I spotted a guy walking this dog. I made my husband stop the car so I could ask if I could take a picture. I’m sure the owner thought I was a little nutty, but he was friendly and willing to let me photograph,
Cosmo, I learned, is an older rescue dog from the Anti Cruelty Society here in Chicago. We got our cat there also. It’s a great place to adopt.
Cosmo
I can tell Cosmo is loved. I love his wreath. Lucky dog!
He should be the poster boy on a holiday card for the humane society.
For the last week or two, it feels like I have been engaging in Total Internet Immersion (TII).
It all began when I followed a link to Twitter back in October. It seemed innocuous enough at first. Little messages between groups of people. Kind of like passing notes in class. Easy enough to do in between other online tasks. Initially, I found it interesting as a tool to use to follow little updates about the election through news media tweets and through political Twitterers.
At first, I couldn’t figure out how people got all those followers, or even why they would want all those strangers on their Twitter lists. But, as I began to explore some of the links other people shared, I moved further and further out into the Twitter stream, until I found a bunch of links leading me to people who are focused on using social media to their best advantage as a business tool as well as personally.
One of these links I followed was via @problogger leading to this TwitTip post, Ten People All Twitter Beginners Should be Following. It included a list of ten social media types, and, just for the heck of it, I decided to follow them all. That generated a lot of tweets, some not all that interesting to me, but others often with good links.
Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki was on the list. Among many other things, he’s the author of Reality Check Through his tweets I found his Alltop site. It collects pertinent and/or most relevant sites in all manner of topics in individual categories all on one page. Cheese, for example. Better yet, go read his explanation of this alternate type of search engine here here
Somehow I got from Alltop to posterous I think posterous is a great little site that could be very useful to bloggers of any type. It’s got an easy to understand interface which makes it very convenient to email a post which can also be routed on to your blogs, facebook, flickr or twitter. Check it out, I think you might like it. Believe me if this non-techie gramma can get it, it has to be easy.
I’ve also found links to other useful little sites like bit-ly , a nice little url shortener, much nicer than tinyurl, and from bit.ly you can also post directly to Twitter. And also to BrightKit another little application which allows you to manage your twittering in a more comprehensive way.
So, as you can tell, I’m suffering from TII, absorbed for the moment in following links like mad, and just getting more and more twitterpated every day. Why not follow me @jowho on into oblivion?
Hit and run today. Busy day, so intros and catch up and such will have to wait. Instead, I’ll introduce my trusty Christmas cactus.
For anyone who needs tips on Christmas cactus care, I guess neglect must be the answer. Other than remembering to water my plants every once in a while when they beg, I pretty much ignore them. Yet, this Christmas cactus started blooming prolifically during the holidays a couple of years ago. And it’s already started again this year.

It makes me happy when I see the blooms begin to appear. They last only about a month. It’s kind of like having my own little living advent calender.