Well, it’s Christmas Day, the waiting is over…. Santa and his reindeer have been and gone, leaving half a mince pie and a few crumbs of chewed carrot behind them. 

To say that I’m totally exhausted by it all, is putting it mildly.  Thing 1 and Thing 2 decided that 5.30 this morning was a suitable time to wake mum and dad (and probably the rest of the street) and now our sitting room resembles the aftermath of an explosion in a paper factory.  Both Things are ultra-hyper on chocolate!

Thing 2 is bouncing around the house headbanging to Pink on his new iPod, yelling tunelessly “na na na na nana na I wanna start a fight“.  I am sure he must have it on at full volume, cos I can barely hear the TV over that deeply annoying fizzing, tinny sound coming from the headphones.

Thing 1 is making in-roads into his £10 airtime that came with his new mobile `phone, by send text messages to everyone he knows. His thumbs are made of steel and they’re flying – are kids born with the ability to text at the speed of light? And why does that bleeping “you’ve received a text message” sound every 2 minutes make you want to drop the `phone in a bucket of water?

My husband is in the kitchen, cooking a ridiculously large turkey (I suspect he’s trying to keep out of the way);  Shark Tale is on the TV, and I’m seriously contemplating pouring myself a sneaky vodka, even though it’s only 3.30 in the afternoon!

I’m proud to tell you that today I’ve been a Guitar Hero, found out that I’m not so Wii Fit, shot basketballs at a net in the freezing cold and played Pro Evolution Soccer on the Playstation.

After all that, I’ve realised I’m still in my PJs, so I’m off to take a hot bath and relaaaaaaax.

But before I do, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a happy and joyous Christmas.  I do hope you are all having as wonderful a time with your families as I am.  And for all those that can’t be with their families this Christmas, I sincerely hope you’re reunited with them very soon.

Happy Christmas!

No, that’s not me barging into some plush restaurant, being refused a table and demanding “Do you know who I am” like some publicity-crazed reality TV Z-Lister!

I had never really thought I was that elusive, (obscure, maybe), until my friend, ghostwriter to the stars, Pat Graham, referred to me as “one of those hard-to-find Internet Marketers” on her “Pay It Back With Gratitude” section of her just-launched site, Kitchen Blogging.

I mean, I’m not exactly the shy and retiring type and I always thought that I put it about quite a bit! You couldn’t exactly put me in the pigeon hole of “most private internet marketers on the net” in the same league as the recently “self-outed” Tony Shepherd – and no, before you get hold of the wrong end of the stick, I’m not saying he’s outed as in `gay’ outed…. not that I would have a problem if he was gay…. but he’s not…. he just has a big wooly beard…… so, perhaps we do have something in common after all!! Hmmm, best stop now before I dig this hole any deeper…..

Anyway, back to ME and the whole point of this post… to let you know about the release of `Real Life’ blogger, Daniel Flower’s warts and all, no holds barred, kiss and tell interview with little old moi!!!

So if you want to know how I muddle through in the I.M. world and other stuff, you can download it here

Oh, and don’t forget to download Tony’s interview — the link’s in PDF above ^^^ (Phew, think I might have got away with it!!!)

Do leave a comment and let me know what you think, I can handle it!

Well, I’m fresh back from my Florida whirlwind holiday! Did ya miss me? Did ya, did ya?

I actually got back a couple of days ago but the jet-lag has hit me much harder than I expected, and I’ve got some dreaded lurgy from breathing in everyone’s recycled germs for 9 hours on the plane, so this post has been added to a bit at a time, in between dropping off to sleep and whinging about how bad I feel.

I did take my laptop away with me with all these good intentions of being a roving reporter from Florida… you know the kind of thing -  a postcard from America every day on my blog… but unfortunately, I was so knackered schlepping around those blimmin’ parks every day that it was all I could do to turn my laptop on in the evenings!

Our holiday didn’t get off to the most auspicious start.  As we filed through the departure lounge to get on the plane with the other masses, who should get picked out for a quick strip search? Yes, you guessed it, the Adams Family a.k.a. The Bretts!! And this was before we even left the UK!

We all had to take our shoes off, including the boys, who thought it was all great fun. They were most disappointed that they didn’t get patted down like my husband and I did.

I was lucky enough to have a rather eager, mature lady allocated to me who seemed to take her job very seriously — I’m sure she thought she was onto something, as she spent rather a long time feeling around under my belt and my bum area.  Sadly for her, instead of discovering a kilo of Semtex buried in my knickers it was just the result of a few too many cream cakes bulking me out.

Goodness knows what they expected to find hidden in the leaves of my sons’ colouring books that they’d packed in their bags to keep them occupied on the plane, but they had a good old leaf through those too. Maybe they were art lovers, who knows!

Once at the other end, in Orlando airport, we dutifully queued for an hour or so to get our fingerprints taken.

Again, the boys were gutted as they were too young to have their dabs taken – kids have to be 13.  My husband and I were visibly relieved partly because we didn’t want our little babies to have their prints on  some database somewhere at their age… but mostly because we’d used them both to do the dirty work in the international bank heist we’d masterminded a couple of months before. Phew! A close call!

Next it was `hunt the car rental outlet’.  So off we trotted in the direction the signs pointed to for `car rentals’… and we trotted, and trotted and trotted and trotted – down this seemingly infinite corridor with about 10 million different rental companies – but could we find our one? Nooooooooo, of course not, that would be too easy!! So we trotted back again, to double check, and then my husband decided to do a bit of trotting on his own, without the baggage (i.e. me and the kids).

So he disappeared off for about 20 minutes and came back bearing news, which was exactly the same news that I had gleaned by picking up a courtesy telephone that I happened to be standing next to with our car rental firm’s name on it, much to his aggravation!!

We had to catch a coach outside which would take us to the car rental office somewhere in the backlot of the airport.  By the time we lugged everything outside and waited 15 minutes for a coach we were sweating like pigs! Well, actually, that’s a bit crude – horses sweat, men perspire and women glow…. so I was glowing like a pig!

It didn’t help that I’d bought the boys two cute bags to keep their colouring books, pencils and Nintendo DSs in, so I wouldn’t be lumbered carrying all their gear as well as my own… the only problem was, I’d asked my sister-in-law to nip into the Pound shop and buy them a nice little colouring book each and she’d bought them two each. But they weren’t the slim volumes I’d been expecting, they were… well, one can only describe them as being the exact same dimensions and weight as the London Phonebook!!

So we arrived at Swifty Nifty car rentals, the boys skipped lightly off the bus and my husband and I not so lightly as we were suffering from heat exhaustion and chronic lumbago after carrying their phone directories for them!

Iffy Shifty car rentals were very nice people and were mortified when they had to ask us if we objected to being upgraded to a 7-seater people-carrier-van-type-thang. “Oh, no”, we said, “that’s just fine, we’re just happy to be here”.

So off we zoomed in our articulated people transporter, huge carbon footprint stomping behind us, sat nav plugged in ready for that calm and sexy sounding woman to direct us straight to the house we had rented in Kissimmee. The only problem was, she was far too efficient and it took us a couple of days to get used to the fact that she would say “right turn ahead” about 10 minutes before the right turn, then she would say “after 800 yards turn right” and then when you were right on top of it “TURN RIGHT”.

So for the journey home, not being used to her wiley ways, as soon as she said “Right turn ahead” we would screech on the brakes and immediately turn right… not knowing that she would give us several warnings before the actual right turn. As you can imagine, this sort of behaviour caused several screaming rows, particularly when we drove in a circle around a Wal-mart car-park, oh, at least 5 times!

And because I was laughing at the total ridiculousness of it, my husband accused me of tampering with the sat nav (because I am computer-minded, he said) and doing it all deliberately. Wish I had been clever enough to think of it, but I really just wanted to get to complete our 35 minute journey in less than 4 hours.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth and cursing and swearing at the still calm and sexy but by now rather irritating sat nav woman who insited on repeating “MAKE A U TURN, MAKE A U TURN”, we eventually made it to our holiday home, just as it was getting dark.

And there I must leave it for today… I need a little nap again… how long DOES it take to get over jet-lag and cabin fever? Jeeez, it’s floored me.

I’ll add another embarrassing “The Bretts on Holiday” installment tomorrow, if you can take it. Does anyone else have ridiculous things happen to them on holiday, or is it just us?

I actually woke up this morning and forgot it was April Fool’s Day! Not that it’s ever been something I particularly set out to celebrate, or anything.

But, of course, my D9 business partner, Dan Thompson, can’t resist it — he’s like a big kid.

First of all, he told me that one of our sites had been hacked – doh! I was proud that it only took me a beat to say, yeah yeah, OK.

Then he tried to convince me that Robert Mugabe had been voted out as President of Zimbabwe – now that WAS ridiculous (a bit high-brow for that time in the morning too )

On and on it went, but there’s no flies on me — he couldn’t get me — so he decided to turn geeky and sent me a load of links to look at and I have to say that if I’d have come across some of them myself I would have been none the wiser!

http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html seems geeky and feasible enough to me

But my particular favourite April Fool’s site this year is this one

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/pteq.html, just click on the order button!

Thank goodness, it’s all over now — it’s gone midday — phew, I can relax! Dan told me “I think I used my time well” Hmmmm!

Have you been caught by a particularly good one this year? I’d love to hear about it

I got together with a few internet marketing colleagues the other day, and we had a brainstorming session to see if we could come up with any new ideas.

Click Here to see what we came up with