total beauty summit - home again

I'm back home after spending three amazing days in Los Angeles with blogger-members of totalbeauty.com What a fantastic experience this has been! The sumit was officially over on Sunday afternoon, but since I had a Monday flight, I wandered downstairs in the evening to get some dinner and go to the Starbucks. I wasn't wearing any makeup, and had on my exercise duds. Of course I thought no one would see me, but I broke the golden rule not to go out in public, unprepared. In the lobby, I ran into a group of much more elegant beauty bloggers(including Erika Valente at Total Beauty, Elke von Freudenberg (Beauty Blog Network) and Julia (All About the Pretty) who were getting ready to head for the airport...each with a huge box of "beauty booty." I wasn't was prepared as these savvy ladies, and had to stuff my loot in every nook and cranny of my suitcase, purse, and laptop bag...but it was worth it!


I am having some difficulties with my blogger program today, although I want to post more photos of the totalbeauty.com blogger's summit, and this is a bit frustrating, but I'm hoping all will be resolved shortly. I am hoping to get the "before and after" photos of my hair makeover that I was amazingly fortunate to get during Saturday's summit at Intelligent Beauty (courtesy of celebrity hair guru Dusty, whose reality show we all cannot wait to see when it starts in the Fall). I did have two photos on my cell phone from the beauty blogger's brunch on Sunday that I managed to upload to Flickr.

www.flickr.com Foffner's bloggers brunch photoset

We were at the Ayres Hotel, sitting in the sun (but with umbrellas to protect us at least a little bit from the sun's rays), enjoying a lovely bruch and getting to know one another a little bit better. Sitting with me: celebrity makeup artist Agostina from makeup2beauty, Marsadie from Frappelattes, Cailin from The Beauty Bunny and Phyllis Li from MakeupForLife
. Thanks to Chloe from Totalbeauty.com for taking the photos from my blackberry pearl-pinch-hitting as a camera

Best Part of the TotalBeauty.com summit? Meeting all these amazing, beautiful, intelligent, entrepreneurial and charming women was the absolute best part of the weekend. There's nothing better than meeting people who love to do what you love to do (in this case, write about beauty) and who are talented and friendly. I got a chance to chat a bit more with Agostina (in the hot pink top from Makeup2Beauty) who won a special achievement award from TotalBeauty.com for the work she does as a celebrity makeup artist, and a blogger; Annie Fritz (jet Set Girls--with red hair still much prettier than even Dusty could make mine); Phyllis Li (Makeup for Life); and the adorable Calin Honeycutt (The Beauty Bunny) who gives Texas women (and the rest of us) a special view of beauty. I hope we will all find ways to keep in touch, as we come from all part of the United States and Canada.

I have a mountain of things to put away, and lots of email to answer...so more, later!

trying one more time!

After a few days of burning the proverbial midnight oil, trying to figure out what I did wrong when I moved this blog from the old blogger format to the new one, I finally, after literally hours and hours and hours of experimentation, am able to publish posts again.

I have to say, NO THANKS TO BLOGGER and GOOGLE. True, the third party software they offer is generally user-friendly and it is free, but I would have paid right up front to have five minutes (that is all I needed) to have someone walk me through my settings so I could fix the small problem that stopped me absolutely cold.

Blogger and Google: if anyone on your staff ever finds this blog and this post, please be assured that I think your programs are awesome, but if you are going to put software out there for the general public to use, wouldn't it be reasonable to stand by it, with a help desk? FAQ's are great unless you get stuck and just don't understand it. To refuse even an email address to write to is so, well, irresponsible!

Ok, I know: you would be inudated with people if you just put yourself out there for free and 24/7 for assistance, but I'd have been happy to pay, by the minute, if necessary. I knew I'd only need a few minutes to fix what should have been obvious, but wasn't.

To my readers: What I have learned from this entirely frustrating, time-wasting, unproductive and unpleasant process is that either you have to figure it out yourself (which ain't easy, folks) or give up entirely, or throw yourself on the mercy of user groups (great bunch, but they can't be spending all of their workdays helping people with the same, relentless problems either, and sometimes they do not give accurate direction because they are not profesionals, just folks who know a bit more than the average).

Note that while I was making changes I didn't want, I made one I did want: instead of the old title: askalisonsadvicesistersblog it's now Advice Sister Alison's Guide to Life, Love and Happiness.

I hope you like the change, and I hope this is the last test post I need to make

alison