Month: October 2015

Facebook- Are You Wasting My Life?

Next time you’re in a bad mood, resist the urge to try and cheer yourself up by checking Facebook. It likely won’t work, according to a recent study, reports Rebecca Hiscott, Editorial Fellow, HuffPost Business. 

The reason? Even more than other areas of the Internet, Facebook makes you feel like you’re wasting your life.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook due to the fact that I am host to three different Facebook pages; my professional page, my personal page, and one of my son’s Facebook professional fan pages.

I’ve been sitting here today waiting for a new furnace to be installed in the back of the house so I have a lot of time on my hands with nothing much productive going on except for the simmering vegetable soup on the stove. Which brings me to Facebook and all the time that I spend with my FB friends.

I started thinking about exactly what posts are in my newsfeed. What is the profile of my friends and their interests. Just exactly what shows up as I scroll my newsfeed every day? Are the posts in my newsfeed a mirror of me?

Well, a lot, a whole lot of my friends love animals. Dogs, cats, kittens and unusual friendships between domestic and wild life. Videos that have circulated forever of cute, crazy and rescued animals. Then there was that crazy dentist who killed Cecil, Zimbabwe’s beloved lion. A favorite. My friends, including me, couldn’t get enough of that dentist of death! A pox on him!
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My Facebook friends and I share envious pictures of food – where we ate it and what we were doing and who we were with while we were having a good time eating food and taking pictures of it, including not-always-so-flattering selfie’s with our friends while eating at that marvelous place. I kind of feel left out of the good times when I see these friends of mine celebrating while I am sitting at home wracking my brain for a blog idea, or alone with a pile of laundry looking at me. They may be right on that point if you never ever have anything going on in your own life.
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There are the political posts and gun issue posts. This is where my friends divide. I find a spectrum of diversity on both of those issues, each friend so sure their conclusions are right. I have always believed that friends and politics don’t mix, so it is only on a rare occasion that I stick my nose into any divisive issue, rather than to have it bitten off. I don’t think FB is a forum of persuasion. Just my opinion.

And music. I love music and many of my friends also find music to be an integral part of their lives and we share all kinds of music information on Facebook. I love these posts. 

Finally, there are the myriad of shared posts with affirmations about how much we love being mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. 
Someone said to me the other day that when she logs onto Facebook and sees all of these people socializing and having a good time it makes her feel lonely. So maybe the studies are right, but I doubt in the very near future that people are going to walk away from Facebook. 
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In the meantime, in my own personal non-scientific study I do find that my friends mirror who I am and what I’m interested in reading about; with the exception of politics and keeping my nose out of it.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2015©. All rights reserved.
 

 
 

Postcard From The Edge Of A Hurricane

  

Carrie, Eloise, Belle, David and Gloria. Charlie, Chris and Allison, Gabrielle and Hugo. Claus, Marco and Bob, Andrew. Danielle, Beryl, Gordon, Aaron, Felix, Bertha, Ethel, Edward, Fran, Danny. Bonnie, Dennis, Floyd, and then there’s was Sandy.  

No. These are not baby names I have considered in my lifetime. They are the tropical cyclones my family and I have weathered living on the New Jersey Shore since the early 70’s. Gloria was the naughty girl who blew off my roof over the living room. We New Jersey Shore folks, between the months of June and October are under watch for these storms. 

Alone, in the 1990’s, thirteen tropical cyclones affected New Jersey. The 1991 the Halloween Perfect Storm eroded beaches severely along the coast.

 Perfect Storm, caused strong waves of up to 30 feet (9 m) in height. High tides along the shore caused significant bay flooding. Strong waves and persistent intense winds caused extreme beach erosion, amounting to 13.5 million cubic feet (383,000 m) of sand lost in one location. In all, damage amounted to $90 million (1991 USD, $142 million 2008 USD).

Another Halloween storm, that left us without power for about two weeks., Hurricane Sandy (no relation) was the most destructive hurricane ever recorded in New Jersey. The second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history caused widespread, devastating damage and left millions of New Jersey residents, for some two million residents lasting as long as three weeks. 

We were cut off by a huge oak that had fallen across our access road and we survived by cooking in our fireplace stove, gathering wood from the property.  

 When we finally were able to leave our property, the surrounding damage was as though we lived in a war zone. Everything was leveled. Boats plowed into houses that were still standing. Very little of everything was left. 
Sandy became the worst hurricane to affect the state on record, killing 37 and causing nearly $30 billion in damages. The storm surge flooding causes massive destruction. 

 

I know that while you are reading this you’re scratching your head and wondering why anyone would ever live on the New Jersey Shore. Well, I can tell you the answer is we have water in our veins that overpowers the need to live inland.

For me, being able to wake up in the morning and have my coffee with an ocean view is worth the fear of nature’s wrath. The sea inside of me will not let go and all the days I spend breathing in the fresh salt air is well worth a few days of sea worthy courage I have to endure for this magnificent way of life. 

So here I sit very grateful Joaquin has decided not to visit our shores this year. Sure the rain is depressing and the constant days of hearing the wind roar through our mighty oaks gets old. Even the thought of raking up the mess Joaquin has left behind isn’t really bothering me. Because I know tomorrow, or one day soon, the ocean view will come back to great me. All of this making the sea inside of me feeling very blessed, indeed. 

 Copyright Sandra Hart© 2015. All Rights Reserved