Suburban Oblivion

But a friend passed this along, and it was too good not to share!

Straight No Chaser sings the 12 Days of Christmas.

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How is it I can spend a whole week getting ready to go on vacation, and forget to blog about the fact that I was..well, going on vacation? Talk about leaving out the details!

We go down to Orlando every year for a week, and this is no exception. We have a timeshare here, and stay in a nice little condo about 10 minutes from Sea World and about 15 minutes from the Disney parks. It’s our only vacation; we don’t travel to visit family or do weekend get-aways like many people I know, so we really look forward to it.

We’ve been here since Saturday, and I have to say this has been one of our more interesting trips. The internet *just* got fixed this afternoon, so I’ve been offline since Friday. Offline..with no internet…Can you imagine?? Thank heavens I didn’t have to go the whole week or I’d have looked like a junkie without a fix by the time we pulled into our driveway next weekend. Unfortunately the wireless internet we were promised does not work, or possibly just doesn’t play well with my laptop, so I’m stuck using the terminal they have set up in the room. The last few days It’s only allowed me to stay logged on for about 3 minutes at a time, and would not load most of the page for anything important, like my email or Wordpress dashboard. (You know, the things I NEEDED!) Fixed now obviously.

We went to the Magic Kingdom yesterday and as we were getting settled back in the room, we hear something on the news about a woman being arrested for trying to bring a loaded gun into Disney. WTF? Luckily this happened the day before, and no one was hurt, she just supposedly *forgot* she had the gun in her purse, along with a knife and something else that I can’t remember. Do a google search, I swear I’m not making this up. Anyhow, we had a good time, and are quite thankful we didn’t go on Sunday. We hit Sea World for a few hours today, the kids had a good time, but were dragging tail after about 3 1/2 hours so we came back and played in the pool. Now I’m dragging ass and hoping we won’t be doing much of anything else tonight. Tomorrow we plan to hit a few outlets, and will probably go to Downtown Disney at some point. The plan for the rest of the week is to do Aninmal Kingdom, MGM, and back to Sea World. I am so tired I couldn’t begin to tell you what day is which.

We got some good pics, and some not so great pics. (It’s a blog post for another day, but I will say there is no torture like having to buy a bathing suit at a Walmart, in a town you don’t live in, with your husband and kids waiting and tapping their feet impatiently. Not pretty, and I have the pics to prove it.)  Ian has played the photographer this week, but I plan on taking my camera out with me to get a series of pics I shall call “Fashion mistakes that could only happen in a tourist town.”  I’m not crazy about my new swimsuit, but it’s not nearly as bad as the things we’ve seen walking in public the last few days. I’ve seen more muffin-top than a New York bakery at 7am, and I’m not talking about at the pool.

Hope everyone is having a good week, and I look forward to hitting the mark all as read button reading your fabulous blog posts when I get back on Saturday evening. More vacation updates to come.

(Updated below)

I’ve heard whispering over the phone, and a Twitter or two here and there, so let’s go ahead and talk about this out in the open.

What the bloody hell is going on with BlogHer Ads?????

I know by now I’m not the only one who got a nasty shock when they received their latest BlogHer ad check. Maybe I should have been paying closer attention, but boy was I surprised when I got a check in the mail for only about a fraction of what I would have expected for that month’s traffic. Since getting that payment, I checked in on my revenue report, and it looks like the next check won’t be any better.

How did the payment drop so significantly? I’ve heard a rumor that the BlogHer ad network lost a contract with an advertiser, and has not gotten a new one to replace it, but I have not heard anything on the BlogHer Ads newsletter about it. Actually, I think that’s what is bothering me, that so far I’ve not heard *anything* from BlogHer about it. Just whisperings in the background from people I suspect are not wanting to make waves by bringing this out in the open.

So did this come as a shock to anyone else? Has anyone heard any news, or even ideas of why payments have dropped so drastically? Until now I’ve been really happy being a part of this ad network, but unless things pick up I may have to investigate other options.

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Perfect timing! The BlogHer Ads newsletter mentioned today what the problem seems to be, and how they plan to resolve it.

Lots of new ads are on the way in December!
The first week of December was quiet on the ad front, and we’re happy to report that we’ve got several new campaigns kicking off over the next five days.

Where did the ads go?

Many of our November campaigns ended on the 30th, and we’ve had some creatives delayed by the agencies, resulting in the brief lull we’ve been experiencing.  We’ve gotten the go-ahead for several great new campaigns that we’re happy to tell you about:

Dove is returning to the BlogHerAds network with a fantastic campaign starting on December 10th.  This new campaign will feature a limited number of Rich Media ads in addition to more traditional ad inventory. See below for more information about these innovative ads!

Kraft has kicked off a cool new campaign for those of you running the box ads, and we’re currently running campaigns including the Simon Santa ad, Care.org, Kajeet, ID Safeguard and Green Dimes.  Next week, we’ll see even more ads, with new campaigns launching on Monday and Thursday.

As we move into the middle of the month, we’ll see more and more campaigns, so for now, we’ve opted to purchase a larger concentration of BlogHer house ads to fill our inventory at the beginning of the month.