**Edited to correct linky stupidity on my part!
Sweetney formed a Flickr group called “Truthiness in Self-Portraits”.

Basically? Point and click when you aren’t glammed up, primped, curled, powdered and pressed and let people see “You”.

I mainly lurk at Sweetney, but when the awesome Mrs. Flinger slapped her photo up, I thought strongly about participating. When two of my crushiest of blog crushes posted their morning glam for the internet I knew that I was going to be a big, fat lemming and participate.

Personally, I don’t mind having touched up self-portraits of myself on my blog. However, I also have thousands of grody “ACK!” photographs for every shot that is so pretty or amazing that it makes me want to make out with myself, so I think it is a good thing that the un-gussied up me should be brought to the surface from time to time.

So, here you go:

I took this photo a couple of months ago before I got my hair dyed and cut for the King and I. I am fresh out of bed with no make-up.

I know that my mouth isn’t showing and that this isn’t the worst photo I’ve ever taken. It’s not a bad photo at all, actually, (that would be this one) but there is a very specific reason that I chose it. For one, I actually do roll out of bed like this a lot of the time and for another, this photo illustrates one of the flaws that bugs me the most.

No, it’s not my nose (Although, that is something that bugs me. It’s large and crooked from being broken.)

It’s…

My forehead.

Or shall I say, the vast canyons that are running across my forehead. I don’t have crows feet, a double chin or laugh lines. What my super-special aging trait is giving me is the strong resemblance to a bassett hound with each progressing year.

I don’t play around with photoshop all that often. Usually I just use correct levels, etc. I DO use the clone stamp if I have an unseemly zit or cold sore, but the thing that I fix on my photos the MOST is my forehead lines. (Well, that and I often “Wax” my eyebrows if I am channeling Burt from Sesame Street.)

Don’t get me wrong, I do NOT feel like I need to wear a bag over my head. I think I’m definitely ok looking. We ALL have our “Things” and looking like a hound dog with a biggish-nose is mine.

So? Do you have a thing or feature you do or would photoshop and correct if you could?

**OOPS! I didn’t realize I was supposed to linky! Check out these other babes in the morning:

HBM
Sweetney
Breed ‘Em & Weep
Missus Mamalogues
Mrs. Flinger
Ms. MotherBumper
Izzy
OTJ
Loralee
CamiKaos
Petroville
Redneck

There are three people that have been key to this blog being what it is today. Do you have moments in your blog or people who have been involved with it that just CHANGE everything?

I do.

First, I have to say that I love blogging.

In fact, blogging has to be one of my favorite hobbies of all time. I have obsessions where I focus intensely on something, but also tend to get over it fairly quickly and move on to the next “Thing”. Blogging seems to be an exception; Two years later and I am still going strong.

I don’t think that I have ever done ANYTHING with total consistency for two years.

I think I am a much better singer than blogger, but you couldn’t get me to go to a vocal conference without payment or threat of pain. I cannot WAIT to go to BlogHer this summer and learn everything I can about making this blog a better place.

I heart it.

Looking back on my blogging life, I realize just how far I have come.

It seems like everyone has a “When I first started blogging” story. There are lots of people who say, “When I started blogging I had only read one or two blogs and had no clue!”.

I can wipe the floor with these people.

The very first blog that I ever read belonged to my college roommate, Amy and her husband, John.

(She’s adorable, isn’t she?)

It followed the process of adopting their little girl from China.

I had never even heard of a blog before Amy and John wrote theirs.

I thought that the whole “Blog thing” was pretty sweet! I loved the fact that there there was somewhere you could write about important life events online.

My life was horrible at the time.

Matthew had been dead about 18 months, Jonathan and I were separated and almost every single thing in my life had fallen apart to shreds. I thought that everyone was looking at me and screaming, “WRONGDOER!” in their heads.

I was literally unable to get out of my bed.

I desperately needed SOMETHING GOOD to do and occupy myself with.

Plus, one of my closest friends was deploying to the middle east for a year-and-a-half and I thought it would be a good way to keep in touch.

A blog was born.

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, “THAT is the horrifying blogging story? It doesn’t sound all that bad! I mean her life sucked and I wouldn’t want to build a summer home there, but the trees are actually quite lovely!”

(Or whatever.)

Point is, you may be thinking the blogging part wasn’t awful, just the life-suck.

Right?

I’m not finished.

Ehem.

Because the one and only blog that I read covered a three-week span during an adoption and then ended, I thought that you had to have A SEPARATE BLOG FOR EACH BIG EVENT IN YOUR LIFE.

So?

I had a blog covering a really great Memorial Day Weekend. I had another blog that documented my trip to Montana with my friend Michelle. I had a Halloween blog.

Not POSTS.

BLOGS.

(I know.)

Finally, my sister-in-law, Nooncy, said, “I keep checking your blogs to see if you update them, but you never do.”

WHAT?

YOU CAN DO THAT??????

Well, don’t that beat ALL!

(I know!)

This was fabulous! Wonderful!! Marvelous!!! I had a way that I could update my life on ONE BLOG!

YAY!

I hurried over to Blogger and created yet another blog.

I titled it “The Ultimate Drama of Loralee’s Life!”

(I KNOW!)

I used Blogger Minima Black because I somehow managed to hit that button when I registered and couldn’t figure out how to change it. I slaved and toiled and cursed as I learned how to use Blogger. Three weeks went by and then came the day where I decided that I was advanced enough to choose one of the other templates offered by Blogger.

Not.

I deleted my entire blog.

Gone.

Poof.

Just like that.

I was devastated. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I thought about just throwing my whole blogging project in the toilet, but I really liked it and my friend was still over in a war zone, so I decided to try again.

I decided that my first blog title was a little stupid (YOU THINK???) and so I thought long and hard over what to name it. As my life pretty much sucked buckets of hideousness and I had been incorrectly diagnosed as being bipolar, I decided to call my blog “Loralee’s Looney Tunes” because I didn’t take the label very well. It seemed perfect. If I called MYSELF crazy FIRST, then I’d beat everyone to the punch! I also sing, which made the “Tunes” fit nicely.

I still think that it weirdly fits me.

I still sucked at blogging.

I was using Picasa to upload photos to my blog and I couldn’t figure out how to use multiple photos per post. I THOUGHT EACH PHOTO HAD TO BE IN ITS OWN DAMN POST.

(Again…I know.)

The beginnings of this blog are a cross of hilarity and mortification. I shudder in absolute revulsion when I see people reading the start of this blog on my stat counter. I even put a warning label on my archives to try and prevent the bleeding of the retinas that must surely be the result of viewing such drivel.

Despite all the suckage, I kept going.

I think that maybe three people read my blog at this time. Most of the time I would have no comments at all and if I did it was usually from my friend, Karen and my sister, Linny.

Till January rolled around.

I couldn’t remember my blog url (Actually, I didn’t even realize that URL was its proper name.) so anytime that I wanted to find my blog I just googled my name.

One day I discovered my blog name in a search that I didn’t recognize.

What?

What was going on????

I clicked on it and was taken to another blog.

It belonged to the lovely JES.

As I perused her blog, I found out that Jes was a brilliant junior in English who read Jack Kerouac and went on bike rides around “The Lake” with friends and sipped on wine while writing poetry.

She was also in a “Blogs & Wiki’s” class at Bemidji State University in Northern Minnesota and wrote a post comparing my blog to the world-famous Dooce (Who I had ZERO knowledge of at this point. I know.).

HOLY FREAKING DOUBLE MOO COW!!!

Somebody I didn’t know actually read my blog and wrote about it!

I know it sounds stupid, but for the first time it really “Clicked” that, um, people could find and read me.

It opened me up to the fact that I probably should start writing for a larger audience than my family and friends. Once I got over the total heart failure that the ENGLISH DEPARTMENT was reading the blog of one who sucketh a duck at grammar and uses CAPS!!! EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! EMOTICONS!!!I started reading Jes’s links and their links and so on, and so on, and so on.

It’s how I met “Photoshop Dave”!

I loved reading about their lives. I loved laughing my ass off at their writing. And cat tossing. I loved that they commented on my blog. It THRILLED me. I think that is one reason why I comment as much as I am able on blogs. Comments meant so much to me and still do.

I met some GREAT people and ended up having my very first “Bloggity Meetup” when I helped move my brother to Minnesota last year.

It was an amazing night with wonderful people.

Jes will always be my first fan that didn’t know me in real life.

She rocks.

So do all the people I met through her.

I HEART Bemidji State and always will.

It totally changed my blog.

(If I left anyone off the linky list PLEASE forgive me. I am totally on Nyquil today. Yup. Sick again.)

As my traffic kept creeping along, I started exploring other blogs.

One day my friend Amy called and told me that I should read the blog of this really funny woman from Idaho who wrote about her mom making her a satin, teal prom dress complete with butt-bow and puffed sleeves.

Enter the lovely Jessica of “Kerflop”.

I clicked over to her site (Which was “VeryMom” at the time) and read the prom dress post. Then I read her post about how she has hideous eyebrows and so in an attempt to cover them she cut herself some bangs and inadvertently made herself look like Jennifer Love Hewitt from “The Ghost Whisperer”.

I was hooked.

I decided to comment and say “Hello”.

THEN I decided to write about blogging and commenting on my blog. I said that people who didn’t talk to their commenter’s bugged me. Then I pouted that while she was better than most bloggers her size about talking to their “Peeps”, Jessica didn’t say hello to me and I had commented TWICE!

See, I was UNAWARE THAT IF YOU LINK TO PEOPLE THEY CAN FIND OUT ABOUT IT.

(No…I had zero clue about tracking or technorati at this point. Sigh.)

She came by to apologize and said in the most gracious way possible that she was sorry she didn’t say hello to me and that she, um, gets ELEVENTY MILLION EMAILS AND COMMENTS and that I really should take that into consideration.

(I KNOW, KNOW, KNOW, KNOW, KNOW!)

I still want to stick a fork in my eye about it.

I have around a third of the traffic she does and feel like I’m drowning a lot of the time trying to keep up.

While I deserved to be blacklisted and (Possibly) stoned to death, she was lovely and gracious about it and decided that I didn’t suck the Casbah. She reads and posts from time to time and gave me the next turning point in my blogging life because she had her own URL and her page was so pretty!

I hated Blogger Minima Black.

SO? I tried to create my own webpage. By trying my hand at HTML and tweaking an existing template!

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think that it had about 800 errors in it. It also randomly changed fonts and colors on me. Jessica said that it “Hurts me sometimes”.

I don’t blame her.

She kindly suggested moving the freak away from Blogger because it is of the devil.

(Ok, most of that is my wording, although I do think that she said, “FRIC! and FRACK! at least a couple of times.).

SO, last March I took the plunge and I moved to my own URL and over to WordPress.

I also used a template designed by Jessica, which she customized for me because I FRIGGIN SUCK at all things “Technical”. She even let me come to her house and held my hand while I talked to a guy in India named “Emile” that I could barley understand.

She gave me a “Diet Coke” icon without me even asking her to do so and I heart it.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times (Anyone remember the U-DAHO blogging conference?)and she is responsible for a LOT of my traffic. She’s how I got hooked up and interested in BlogHer and I have found a lot of amazing blogs through her links.

Because of her I realized that I wanted to “Take my blog up another level” and got some amazing advice and ideas about what I would like my blog to be.

I adore her with the power of a thousand burning suns.

So, there you go-The key moments of this little place from very humble beginnings, to something that I love and am proud to say is mine.

Everyone here has their own little influence on the happenings of this place, but without these three people, this blog would not be what it is today. The triggered events and meetings that changed EVERYTHING and I am so grateful to them.

There are much bigger and better blogs out there, but I love Looney Tunes and hope that it keeps growing and getting better and better.

SO?

What about YOU? Why did YOU start blogging? Did you have any key moments in your blog that changed things? Do you have any “Beginning Blogging” stories???

Spill it!

See that badge thingy over in my right sidebar? No, not the Flickr one. Go down further.

No…It’s in the middle of my lovely, clickable advertisements. You know, the badge with the profile photo that looks like I am a cross between a ninja, The Man in Black from The Princess Bride, and a burka-wearing eyelash model.

Yup! That’s it!! You found it!!!

Good job!

Some of you may be wondering what the freak “NaBloPoMo” is, exactly. Well, let me tell you.

National Blog Posting Month.

Which is in November.

Which is this month.

Which means that I am going to be posting every day in November.

Simple.

That’s all it is. No shock. No awe. (Well, SOME awe. If only because I’m a wee bit narcissistic and secretly think that people should stand and sing “The Hallelujah Chorus” when I enter a room.)

I had grand plans to write something profound today to kick off my month of regular posting but there has been a lot of worry and sadness going on in my little house. Without going into a lot of details that aren’t mine to share, my brother-in-law was admitted into the critical care unit of the hospital yesterday. He is very ill, but it is expected that he will make a recovery. My husband is down there with him and so that leaves me and the boys by ourselves for awhile.

Blogging isn’t a top priority at the moment (You should see the woeful state of my house), but the routine is comforting to me and since I have had such little social life lately, you all are a comfort to me, too. Especially when it’s the middle of the night and I’m all alone and trying not to think that every little sound I hear is a rapist or an R.O.U.S that escaped from the fire swamp to hunt me down in Logan.

Since I can’t sleep, and since life is a bit crazy, I thought I’d ask the internet for advice on the upcoming month.

Is there anything you’d all like to know? Clarifications that you need?? Just dying of curiosity to ask me a question??? (Ok, I know that nobody is really that desperate to know about me or the minutia of my life, but let’s pretend you are for a moment to spare my ego.).

Any views you would like to hear from me? Stories?? Subjects???

Tell me what you’d like to read this next month. After all, I do take up a few minutes of your day. You might as well have a say in what that entails from time to time, right?