Last year I was really intrigued in participating in the #vDM30in30 but there was very little chance of me hitting anywhere near enough posts, plus not hearing or knowing anything about it till we were pretty much already in November meant there was no chance of getting involved.
Firstly what is #vDM30in30? Well during the month of November on each of the 30 days a new blog post is created, there is no fix on what these should be about there can be and have been a range of personal and technical posts come out during the month. If you want to know more then here are some questions and answers from Melissa Palmer a fellow member of the NetApp A-Team and she can write….. over 22k words last year is some effort.
I am already late to the game which isn’t the best start for this but I am confident I can catch up…. I have a few events during the month of November which is either going to really assist on new topics to write about or it’s just not going to happen.
So already the 4th of the month, I have this post plus a technical post that is also being posted today. My feelings though about producing content is that it needs to be interesting. Something that @vMiss33 managed last November every single post was well written and very informative. So with that in mind I would much rather get 20 posts out or 10 posts that help people or inform people rather than writing about something that’s not.
From my point of view I am not much of a writer… I think I have some great ideas around blog posts but it\s generally a time thing to sit down and create that idea in writing.
Something else to add in this post is as well as this challenge I have also started the #BeardedHeroes challenge. To give a little background to this the #BeardedHeroes campaign was formed by The Anaphylaxis Campaign.
This challenge comprises of growing a beard…. not too hard for someone that is pretty lazy when it comes to facial hair tidyness. but none the less I signed up, normally this would be for the month of December, I felt that would be a very normal month for me so I decided to begin on the 25th October where I already had a good healthy showing of facial beardness. The rules do not state that I had to be clean shaven so I just started then and here we are 9 days on.
Normally around this time of year I would take part in the Movember phenomenon, however this year I decided to go for something different. A little background onthis charity,
“Anaphylaxis Campaign is the only UK wide charity to exclusively meet the needs of the growing numbers of people at risk from severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) by providing information and support relating to foods and other triggers such as latex, drugs and insect stings.”
Now the why this charity… just over a year ago pretty much to the day of the 25th October my son was around 6 months old and my wife and I were weaning Jack on all the different new foods in particular we took clear notice of the mid wives advice around separating the different allergens for each feed. Well came the day when we had been through the majority of the allergens we had done the Wheat, Gluten etc but we had not tried Peanut, Tree nuts or Egg. Thinking there should be no problem as we have no background in our families with allergies we proceeded with the peanut testing…. I can safely say that it was the scariest experience so far in my life! within 5 minutes Jack was swelling up and struggling to breathe what we know now as an anaphylatic shock. I was holding Jack for the duration trying to calm him down whilst we waited for an ambulance. It seemed like a lifetime for the ambulance to arrive but it was under 10 minutes, they issued Jack with some adrenaline and then they took him into hospital where he stayed the night.
A year on from that Jack has not had any other shocks, fully tested on 98% of all Tree nuts and Egg and all diary have also been fine as well as seafood. We now carry two Epi-Pens wherever we go with Jack just in case a reaction was to happen whilst out.
The amount of information that we simply did not know about allergies, intolerances and anaphylaxis was scary, this charity amongst many other parents and sufferers across the world with their blog pages and articles on the matter was priceless to me and my wife. understanding safe food suppliers and all the rulings.
I wanted to do something to help not only raise money for this great charity but also raise awareness of this… anaphylaxis is a killer its not an allergy and its not an intolerance and it certainly isn’t a fashion statement. I for one want to make this world the safest place for my son to grow up in, I don’t want any new parents to have to experience what I did on that night.
I could have easily made this two posts and made my month a lot easier but maybe I will dedicate another post just to this topic later on in the month.
One final note on this is if you can spare any money for this charity then please donate to https://www.justgiving.com/Michael-Cade/
Hopefully you find the next 30 posts interesting and learn something from them, please comment away or reach out on twitter always happy to help or chime in on anything.
