Taking The World On With A Smile!

I prefer easing into technology. My cell phone doesn’t get the Internet or email. There are no Facebook or Skyping “apps”. I can talk and text. That’s it. It’s not that I’m technologically challenged, on the contrary, I love all forms of communication and am fascinated by the whole new social media arena. I recently took a blogging class and managed to set up this blog site myself. A few months ago I set up a Twitter account. (Follow me @midmomlife!) I’ve been tweeting a teaser or two of my upcoming blog each week and have, to my great astonishment and satisfaction, figured out how to connect my blog to my Twitter so that my blog automatically appears as a tweet on Twitter. Phew! As a part-time working, soccer and tennis practice shuttling mom, my free time is late at night, time. And while I’m totally on board with 45 being the new 35, this 46 year-old mama, gets tired by midnight! It’s a lot of work reading, creating, tweaking, uploading and embedding; teaching myself the ins and outs of all these new formats, trying to find my niche and knack!

Needless to say, I had a moment of pure discouragement earlier this week when I heard about the Bronx Zoo’s missing, Egyptian cobra and all of her instantaneous social media success.

Ironically, if there is one animal that really gets under my skin, it’s the snake. A snake nearly ruined a barbecue celebration I was having in my backyard once by blatantly slithering right up to the party.

When I saw it, I jumped onto the nearest chair and screamed bloody murder! My then, 60-year old aunt, God bless her, started screaming also, in German, but not because of the snake. She was screaming at the snake! She had sprung into rambo style action, grabbing a loose brick from an outdoor grill and proceeded to bash it, mercilessly, to bits, in a matter of seconds, in front of family and friends. The woman is truly, FEARLESS. For many years she owned a bakery and has often been likened to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, only she’s a woman, blond and instead of soup, it’s chocolate torts and apple strudels that people lined up for while she made the snap determination as to whether or not they were worthy. A few weeks after the barbecue incident, my aunt’s son, was sitting in my backyard when he spotted yet another snake, this time, it was swimming in my pool! Like a repeating nightmare with a new twist, he followed the snake along the perimeter of the pool until the moment was just right, reached in bare-handed, pulled it out and smashed it on a rock! Ohh-kaay. Dare I say, something truly unique runs through the blood-veins of that side of the family.

I am scarred and I digress. Back to my moment of discouragement.

Have you heard? The missing snake from the Bronx Zoo not only setup her own Twitter account hours after her escape but gained thousands of followers, literally overnight!

According to Mediabistro’s FishBowlNY….

In its first tweet, @BronxZoosCobra wrote: “I want to thank those animals from the movie ‘Madagascar.’ They were a real inspiration.” (“Madagascar” is the 2005 film where animals escape the Central Park zoo). The cobra now has over 43,000 followers, and under location it writes: “Not at the Bronx Zoo.”

That was Tuesday. According to oObly, as of Friday, @BronxzoosCobra had over 200,000 followers. How does this happen? Here I am plugging away, hour after hour, night after night, week and month after month, tweaking and tweeting since November and I have a whopping 5, that’s right, count-em, 5, followers on Twitter! One of my faithful 5 (and you can follow me on twitter @midmomlife to verify this) doesn’t even speak English! I have no idea what language she speaks or why she follows me!

This sneaky, snake slithers onto the scene and three days later, BOOM over 200,000 followers!

I totally get being trounced on Twitter by that actor whose drug usage recently took him to new heights of insanity but a snake? Seriously? Alas, as of yesterday, that sneaky, slithering, snake is back in its cage!  And according to Jim Breheny, the Director of the Bronx Zoo,   “…the snake has been found well and alive.”

Ahem…um, yep, we knew that. She’s pretty much been saying that all week!

What we want to know is, will she keep tweeting?

Tell me, do you Twitter?

Photo Credit #1: © Technorati, Inc  Photo Credit #2: Twitter via Mediabistro