Last week I was all excited because I had 15 Follow Friday (#FF) shout outs on Twitter. When all was said and done it actually turned out to be more like 17.

I thought that was totally impressive and it blew me away, but this week’s #FFs annihilated last week’s number. It set a new record. One I’m not sure will be touched for quite a while.

33!

SHAZAM! (And that wasn’t including the few people who for whatever reason #FF’d me more than once, or RT’d other #FFs that had @HauntJaunts in them.)

What happened to make it spike so much? Do I even know? As a matter of fact, I do.

I was well on my way to at least getting close to last week’s number on my own. I had 12 #FFs when I checked early on in the a.m. But when I checked back later around noon…whoa. I saw a slew more. And my followers number had leapt up too!

All because Autumnforest had shared her contact with me at Ghost Adventures. (I used to actually have a contact there, but I didn’t follow up with them and ended up losing him. It was actually serendipitous Autumnforest was as generous and selfless as she was to share her contact like she did, and I’ll be forever grateful to her for doing it.)

Anyway, the GA contact sends out advanced info for bloggers to blog about. Then, if you send him your link, he’ll Tweet it.

With something like 14,000 followers following GA on Twitter, that’s pretty decent exposure.

Autumn had suggested I make it something snappy. Something to make people want to click. Because when she does it, she sees a HUGE spike in her numbers.

Well, easy for her to say “clever.” She’s insanely clever. (She did a funny one about a song, “Sunglasses at Night” and how it should be Zak’s theme song. It was really good.)

So…I did the best I could and came up with a short quiz about what does Ghost Adventures and Princess Bride have in common to tout the extended version of the Poveglia Island episode that was on last night. Then I gave clues in the form of quotes and a picture.

Ghost Adventures did Tweet it, and my bit.ly stats for that link also set a not-likely-to-be-topped-anytime-soon record: 536! (I average about 6-10 clicks per bit.ly link. In the teens is good. Above 20 is great. Once I hit 50 something and that was the record holder.)

So that’s how I know it was the GA tweet that helped me so much. (That and a lot of my new followers have GA twibbons on their avatars.)

But it also didn’t hurt that A&E (as in A&E on cable TV) included me among those they gave #FF shout outs too also.

So Friday January 22, 2010 will go down in my record books as an absolutely marvelous and fun, not to mention record-setting, Follow Friday!

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Last year around this time one of Wayne’s co-workers gave him a Magic Bullet. Well, it was intended for the both of us.

I had just started chemo. I couldn’t eat much. I didn’t feel like eating much. However, I had a hankering for banana shakes. Not with ice cream or anything. Just a simple blend of bananas, milk and a little bit of vanilla sugar.

However, I didn’t always have the energy after whipping up one of my banana shakes to clean out the blender. Wayne was doing most of the dishes at this point.

Along with working his day job, taking care of cleaning cat boxes and walking Murph three times a day, picking up groceries, fixing dinner, doing laundry, cleaning the house…I wasn’t able to do much back then. Cleaning out the awkward blender left him belly aching.

Well, his answer was just to throw the parts in the dish washer. But fat lot of good that did me when we weren’t running it every day. I’d have to ask him to help me clean it. (My left arm was useless and trying to do things one-handed drained what energy I had that much faster.)

His co-worker Rosemary had the answer: the Magic Bullet.

I’d seen them on TV and thought they looked neat, but I was wary because it was being peddled in infomercials. Can’t trust what you see on TV and all that.

But Rosemary had bought one and loved it. LOVED IT! She said we absolutely had to have one so she ran out and got us one.

It didn’t take but one use for Wayne to see why Rosemary had been raving. No awkward pieces to clean up anymore!

And he quickly started whipping himself up his own version of Slushies…just juice or Gatorade with some ice. He was making those from the moment he got up until he left for work, and that was among the first things he’d do when he cam home at night.

Yes, we’ve greatly enjoyed the Magic Bullet ever since. It’s a Happily Ever After Small Appliance story.

But I got to watching the infomercial again the other night. They were doing all sorts of things with the Magic Bullet. Including grinding coffee.

Not that I’m a coffee connoisseur. I only drink it occasionally, and always decaf. (It doesn’t seem to upset my tummy like regular coffee often does.)

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to grind my own coffee at home and then brew it. Just to try it. Mostly because anytime I can play with my food I’m on it! Grinding looked fun!

Sure, I can use the grinders in the store. But to have one at home would be neater. Plus, then I could see if it really does brew a fresher cup.

So when I saw that was one of the things we could do, I bought some decaf beans and went hunting for the other blade. (Wayne had stashed all the parts that came with our Magic Bullet because he was the one to unpack it.)

Anyway, I found it PLUS all the other shaker tops and stuff that came with it –which I also saw demonstrated the other night and didn’t even know we had!

WOOHOO! More playing with my food to come!

And how was the grinding process and the resulting cup of Joe? As fun as I’d hoped (maybe even funner) and DELICIOUS!

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