Mystery Blog Swappers Revealed

So, did you guess who was swapping with who?

Cuntychopalops swapped with Curly and Candid
Pants with Names swapped with Phantom Kitty
All About Us and Such Like swapped with Geekymummy
Sandy Calico swapped with Bumbling's Blog

Did you guess?

Thank you so much to all the swappers!!

So....This Mystery Blog Swap Business...

It seems there were some people foolish brave enough to sign up to my rather flippant idea of doing a secret blog swap.

The way it is (hopefully) going to work is this - below is a list of blogs participating. They'll be posting a guest post by another person (to remain unidentified) on the list over the next couple of days. For anyone not participating that is game, you then have a couple of days to try and see if you can work out who has swapped with who before we reveal whether you were right or not. Special kudos to a) the person who guesses the most swaps correctly, and b) the swappers who are most successful at hiding themselves. If it goes well I might even see if I can rustle up a prize or two...

So, without further ado, the list of participating blogs is (in alphabetical order)

All About Us and Such like 
 Bare Naked Mummy 
 Bumbling's Blog
 Cunty Chopalops' Font Bukkake
 Curly and Candid
 Diary of a Frugal Family 
 Domestique Goddess 
 Mochabeanie Mummy
 Muddling Along Mummy 
 My Mumdom 
 Pants With Names 
 Phantom Kitty
 Sandy Calico 
 The Hairdog Chronicles

Eek, here's hoping it doesn't all go horribly wrong...

On Being the Old New Girl

I may have mentioned a while back that the company I work(ed) for was about to be taken over. For various reasons, this never happened at the end of last year, as originally planned, but instead happened at the beginning of last week.

I therefore now find myself in the rather strange situation of working for a new company without actually having changed jobs. Of course, the first working day of last week was a bank holiday in the UK, so really I have only been employed by NewCo for 4 working days.

In a lot of ways nothing much has changed - I still have the same team reporting to me, I still have the same manager etc. The changes are much more subtle. There's a whole new intranet to find my way around. To say the organisation structure is complicated is an understatement. I need to apply for a new corporate credit card. Expenses are handled different, and there's a fancy new employee discount scheme - all those small, seemingly insignificant things that end up taking up too much time and detracting from the business in hand.

Still, a change is as good as a rest as they say, and I'm looking forward to learning and discovering again.

The Mystery Blog Swap

I do sometimes wonder whether thinking out loud on Twitter is the best idea... There I was the other day, nosing in on a conversation between Jay and Nicki about hijacking other people's blogs, when it dawned on me that we haven't really had a "guest post day" in blogland recently (or at least, not that I had seen, which, considering how little time I have spent on blogs recently might not necessarily be representative - for all I know you're all permanently guest posting...)

I'll be honest, I'm a bit ambivalent about guest posting. However, I thought it might be fun to have a guest post day with a bit of a twist. The way guest posts normally work is that two people swap blogs for the day, in the hope of discovering new readers and new blogs. With The Mystery Blog Swap we won't be publishing who has swapped with who when the posts go up, but instead I will publish a list of all those participating here and we'll have a light-hearted game of trying to guess who has swapped with who, with names revealed at a later stage.

To make it fairer, I will limit the number of blogs involved to the first 50 people who pop a comment on this post (assuming that many people are even interested - for all I know I'm the only one who thinks this is a good idea). As a prompt, pick a random day in your life and write about it - it could be a memorable occasion, or just what you have been up to on that day.

I'll leave until midnight Friday (13th May) for anyone to sign up, so that I've got enough time to pair people and contact them to let them know. Posts will then be published by the following Friday (20th), with guessing and unveiling of results taking place by Monday 23rd.

This may make no sense to you whatsoever...or you might think it's a terrible idea, but I'd love it if one or two of you wanted to give it a go!

(And yes, I'll try and work out how to make a badge by next Friday...)

#SilentSunday - 1st May 2011