So the past few days has been dedicated to stalking, and as it turns out yesterday, of being stalked.

If any of you follow Fat Mum Slim‘s Blog (and if you don’t, you really really should!), you might be aware that every year Chantelle coordinates the FMS Christmas Gift Exchange.  Chantelle created this little project to spread the love throughout her little (well, not so little actually) online community (if you’d really like to see the extent of this amazing woman’s reach, check out her hashtag on Insta and Twitter #fmsphotoaday – more info here).

It’s a lot of fun and it’s pretty simple – we are assigned a secret person to buy a gift for (and someone is doing the same for you!) and then you pretty much stalk the heck out of them to discover what they like and don’t like so you can buy them a gift.  Last year I made two new friends as a result of being involved and I’ve signed up again for this year’s exchange.  And this year Chantelle has used Elfster.com to automate the process.  Elfster matches us up with our secret person and allows us to ask questions anonymously, which means we have another platform in which to suss out our secret person’s likes, dislikes, style, personalities and anything else we can possibly figure out so that we can find/create the perfect gift for under $20USD.  And boy oh boy, has the stalking well and truly commenced – the FB page is buzzing with people putting up their likes and dislikes and dropping little clues for their secret santa – heaps of fun in the lead up to Christmas!

So whilst I spent yesterday afternoon procrastinating and honing my sleuthing skills, it turns out the stalker was also being stalked, and not by a Gift Exchange participant either!  No siree! As I was busy putting off the mountain of work that I needed to do (queue overwhelm – eek!!) and trawling through facebook, I made a comment on The Thud’s FB page after reading Lauren’s post entitled ‘If I should die‘.  The post really resonated with me as it’s something that I have been thinking a lot about this year and is one of the drivers behind documenting my own thoughts and points of view in this here blog of mine.  My comment was brief but pretty much reiterated that I felt the same and as such, I wanted my girls to know about me should I happen to die not be around to tell them myself and ended up creating this blog.  I left no URL or details of my blog.

So by the time I arrived home yesterday evening, I had a little text message to tell me that I’d been busted again! This time, my lovely friend (let’s call her KB) whom I met through my Mums group was the lucky(?) one to find me – she is now the fourth friend who is now aware of my blogging existence.  Turns out she happened to see my comment referencing my little blog, and decided to do a little bit of stalkery action of her own before unearthing it!

So welcome KB to my little rambling corner of the interwebs.  I will warn you that the past few months have seen a dramatic drop in the quality of posts here however feel free to trawl through the archives at your leisure – click on this old one to get you started – enjoy!

Do you participate in Secret Santas or Gift Exchanges? If you only had $20 to spend, what gift would you buy?