Hi, my name is @orangegirlnz

I heart @TeamXero

I tweet @Xero

Recently the company made a promo video and asked Tweet4yourtee wearers to join them in Wellington to take part – of course I couldn’t be there and was so disappointed, but have always sent them photos of me wearing my t-shirts (from both sides of the globe it turns out!) and if I could’ve joined them I would’ve!

However, I got a really nice surprise today when the promo video promo was released as a teaser …

Then the real video was released a few hours later

Famous me! Am getting a spot up the front when they do it in a year – I wonder how many tweeting t-shirts will be around by then?

We get on at 33rd Street

Then stop at 28th Street

23rd Street

14th Street – Union Square

Astor Place

Bleecker Street

Spring Street

And get off at Canal Street

I stood there in, paralysed, not quite sure what I thought I’d do with my phone, in my nightee with no shoes on so I couldn’t stamp on it – except I didn’t want to stamp on it because of the crunch and the egg thing. Then it got onto the floor and began darting here and there, man it was fast, and I had to do something – there was no way I was going to sleep with it on the loose. WAAAAAA. I grabbed The Mister’s magazine from beside the bed, but still had the squashing dilemma and it was onto me every time I moved and disappeared under the bed.

I made the decision to leave it alone while I went to the cupboard under the sink to see if there was some fly spray deciding that I could spray the bedroom, shut the door, block the gap under it and sleep on the couch. But no, it was back on the light by the time I returned with a can of spray  (so old that it was made of metal and had an actual lid). I put on rubber gloves and gummies and I was good for attack. Except that every time I stepped my boots did a silent little pfffft and a puff of air shot up the back of my leg giving me a hell of a fright thinking the roach had gone up the back of my leg!!

So on with the spray, well there was no spray, it was a stream and after a couple of false starts I managed to get a good jetting mini fire hose going and in a crouching slo-mo interpretive dance type move I guided the stream with one hand, magazine held at the ready in the other hand as I guided the squirting stream around the bedroom, out into the hall and into the spare bathroom where it finally started to show signs of weakness behind the door. Suffice to say I finally got my chance with magazine and boot, and yes there was a crunch – don’t want to think about it.

With the escaped eggs playing on my mind I mopped up the whole kill area with paper towel and disinfectant then had to set about washing the floor in the bedroom, hall and bathroom to get rid of the fly spray – then everything went down the rubbish chute to the basement 30 floors below where any rebirth could be someone else’s problem.

By this time I was roasting: adrenalin and still 30 degrees out and muggy and had to try and sleep without worrying about another one flying in the window to take revenge! Next day I went out and got a new tin of spray, one that actually sprays and is for use around window frames to stop them coming in in the first place. Fingers crossed.

The Mister tried it out today for his flight to SFO and we’ll be giving it a workout as we push our luggage limits to the limit in 3 weeks on the journey home. And his has pounds and kilos which is very useful!

We were up one level this time looking straight down to the game and quite near the ‘cheap seats’ where the fans have matching ‘bleacher screechers’ t-shirts, chant, sing, heckle the opposition, get sun burned, fight and drink a lot.

It was stinking hot when we arrived with the setting sun blasting straight at our seats but once it set it was a gorgeous evening. The Mister had sliders again but he got me a slice of good old New York cheeeeese pizza and it was delicious, followed up by ice cream in a little plastic bowl in the shape of a Yankees cap.

It’s still amazing to me the extent fans go to, and when there’s 49,200 of them in a 55,000-seat stadium it’s truly awesome to see most of them decked out in Yankees gear. There were a few Mets fans in the crowd, a couple in our row and some further up including some that started a fight when the Mets scored and started goading the Yankees fans – there was blood and cops and hand cuffs!

Another great night but such a shame the Yankees lost. And thank god there were none of those FIFA world cup vuvuzelas drowning everything out – so good to hear the crowd cheering and oooo’ing and ahhhh’ing and calling out to the players to get them to give the crowd a wave.

Until we meet again Jo (and tell your Mister that all that orange is not so bad, mine said he could’ve carried on chatting for hours)!!

So for 2 days in late April I attended the NYC 140Conf - a conference about social media – aptly named 140 Characters (that’s how many characters are available to you in a tweet) where 140 people spoke for 10 minutes only, or took part in a 15 minute panel, over 2 days. A very engaging format – sure some people were a bit boring and by the end of it we were starting to hear the same things again and again – but still a very cool way of presenting a conference.

It was an extremely full on 2 days – 8am-6pm both days with a half hour lunch slot each day otherwise people just came and went and got coffee and networked out the back – unless you were me and didn’t know how things worked so stayed rooted to your seat, nervous of drinking too much water in case a toilet stop was needed and then what did you do with your bag and how did you make sure your seat in the overflowing 500+ auditorium would still be there when you got back given all the networking comings and goings?

Miss America opened the 2-day conference!

Aaaaaanyway, some notes I took/things that people said that sparked my interest, for me to look back on, and some of you might be interested in (I think I’ve captured every speaker’s name (as in their Twitter name) correctly so apologies if I’m incorrectly attributing people):

• @JohnBorthwick: currently the average length of a tweet is 77. So people aren’t using all the characters they have available. People are thinking shorter. Night before his talk, the most mentioned person on Twitter was Obama and the most used hash tag still Michael Jackson
• @acarvin: it’s all very well having a large Twitter account with millions of followers, that’s good for broadcasting but you get more conversation and better relationships with people when you have a smaller account – if you can manage your user base you can more easily let your audience get to know the face/person behind your account.
• @TheKotel: poeple can tweet their prayers and a team of people via Twitter voluntarily co-ordinate the printing, spooling into scrolls and delivery of the prayers to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where the original tweeter can’t go themselves. An old sewing machine has been turned into the prayer spooler! One guy started out doing it by himself, just an idea, not his job and now he’s seeing it pay forward as other people are approaching him to help.
• @Donny_Deutsh: don’t sell out your brand by leaping into new media trends. Never lose your brand and stay true to it. Everything is changing but fundamentals like your brand shouldn’t change on a whim. You’ve got to give something – everybody wants something so don’t just broadcast hard sell.
• @IvankaTrump: if you’re trying to build a platform or a personal brand you must be consistent. If you’re direct and honest, then be that way always, across all your platforms and personas.
• @1000TimesYes: Chris Weingarten – “good writing is dying at the hand of search engine optimisation” [GREAT point!] People can’t write well any more and Twitter contains a lot of rubbish as everyone is basically stringing together keywords and mentioning things that will get good search results or clicks because everyone simply wants to be first. In the context of bands, good musicians are basically no longer artists, they have to be keyboard (as in computer keyboard) geniuses. Musicians don’t want to worry about being viral, they just want to be good musicians!
• @AndreaSyrtash: we should worry less about trying to impress people and take time to let people impress us. We need to be present and alert, people can’t connect with you if you aren’t. Don’t try and change people, it’s OK to challenge someone but don’t expect them to change. Don’t confuse immediate gratification with long term fulfillment – ask yourself “am I a good version of myself online?” – don’t worry about the number of followers you have, worry about who you are.
• @lizstrauss: monitoring and listening aren’t the same thing – monitoring just flattens the data we have where as listening is gathering intelligence. Using the example of a traffic camera at the red lights – monitoring the data might show that x number of people ran the red light where as listening might show a good reason some ran the red light.
• @jeffjarvis: why do we only allow comments after we’re done what we’re doing? [I especially liked this point as it relates to work, as a late-comment-bloomer myself I can see that when you're building a product that permitting your customer base to communicate with you is going beyond pure lip-service to their feedback.]
• Lots of discussion and commentary on various industries using social media to get out there and spread the word for doing good in real-life communities and in times of crisis. Lots of ‘keeping it real’ – social media despite common belief is still about meeting people and people online aren’t in fact hiding there.

So that explains why The Mister is sneezing a lot and why some mornings I feel I have a really sore throat and worry I’m catching a cold but it disappears by day’s end.

Check out the transition from brown to green out our window:

Mid-March

Late March

Early April

Mid April

Late April

The green bit that’s most fascinating to me is the lovely soft looking wall of ivy just slightly below mid-centre in this last photo. I guess it’s going to change through amazing colours in autumn.