Updates & A Request

Greetings, blogland!  I hope if you are reading this, you enjoyed a healthy and restful Thanksgiving holiday.  I had a nice trip to visit family, but I have to say that I was itching to get back to D.C. for once in my life.  I am just ready to get this semester of grad school wrapped up and put away!  Several things have been on my mind, so please excuse the hodgepodge and please jump in to express your opinion if you'd like to!

• I've noticed lately that it really gets under my skin when bloggers repeatedly publish spelling or grammar errors in their blog posts.  I know that I'm not perfect and I do not expect anyone else to be perfect.  I can forgive an occasional mistake. Even though I proofread, I know I will sometimes make mistakes too and hopefully, as my readers, you can forgive me.  That said, I think I may need to unfollow a few blogs based on mistakes made over and over again.  I think this standard applies even more to bloggers whose blogs are monetized.  I do not make money off of this blog but I know that plenty of bloggers rely on their blogs as their secondary or primary sources of income.  I support those blogs by reading them so clearly, I have no problem with this. However, if I made grammar and spelling mistakes all the time at work, I wouldn't have a job.  The fact that some bloggers are so lazy that they admit to completely skipping the proofreading process all the time drives me crazy!  (I'm sure we all skip that process from time to time, but some people make a habit of it.) If you blog and make money from that blog, your blog is a professional activity for you.  As such, you should treat it and your readers with the same professional courtesies as you would treat your "customers" in the workplace- whether those customers are internal to your organization (your boss or coworkers) or external.  I will get off my soapbox now, but I just had to get that off my chest!  For the record, if you ever spot a mistake in my blog posts, let me know! 
• I am gearing up to put together some gift guides for the holidays.  I did this last year, but I'm hoping this year's guides will be even better.  I've decided to focus 100% on gift guides for women as I'm basically worthless when it comes to knowing what a guy might like to receive for the holidays- I buy my dad and brother the same things year after year. 
• For these gift guides, please let me know if you'd like to see gift ideas for a specific person! I've realized that in the past few months, I've provided several people with advice on birthday gifts, holiday gifts and hostess gifts.  I love trying to think of something that the recipient would like and most of the time the ideas I come up with work quite well!  One of my friends likes to joke that I should abandon my professional pursuits and become a personal shopper- haha!  Anyway, if you have a friend or family member who is crazy difficult to buy for (I am in this category myself) let me know about her and some of the things she likes and I'll see what I can come up with!  Feel free to let me know a budget too.
• The SEC Championship Game is this Saturday and boy am I excited to see LSU whoop up on Georgia!  (Yes, "whoop up on" is a technical term...)  I took advantage of the Cyber Monday deals and ordered a new television.  I currently own a 22 inch tv and I will be moving to a 46 inch tv.  It may be far too big for my apartment, but we will see!  We will definitely feel like we are AT the game when we watch it on tv!
• Is anyone else just not really into decorating for Christmas this year? Normally I jump right on it, but since I'm only going to be in DC until mid-December this year, it seems almost pointless to me to decorate.  I do have the decorations taking up prime real estate in my closet though, so I'll be pulling them out sometime this week or weekend.

Hope you have a great week! Thanks for reading this word-filled, pictureless post!