i will be in charlotte and in tampa next week, but i seemed to have missed my opportunity to pick up swag at the conventions–you know, like baseball hats and bumper stickers and seamus the romney family dog plush toys.

in 1983, with five sons, a wife, some luggage and dog, mitt romney made the decision to put seamus in a dog carrier strapped to to the roof of the car for his 36 hour drive to a family home in ontario. bad political move! and since everybody’s seeing seamus’ mug on facebook, couldn’t we get a better shot of him?

in tampa, i will bake a facebook cake with my facebook friend jennifer. it will be the first time we have met, but i already know i will like her. for real, not just with a click!

but missing the conventions doesn’t mean that i won’t have a bit of politics hanging on me like a piece of tissue on my shoe as i leave the ladies’ room.  people everywhere are a little guarded in their comments about the upcoming elections and the ones who aren’t make me go quiet and start counting fibonacci numbers in my head.  while nodding in agreement. zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one, uh, thirty four, fifty five, uh, let me think now. . . eighty nine!

on facebook, it can get pretty annoying when somebody posts something to your wall.  it can also make some of your friends start comment wars.

she’s beautiful, she’s witty, and i like her. but roughly half my friends are going to have smoke coming out of their ears if one of my friends posts this on my wall.

so while i intend to vote — and i have a substantial bet with my ex-husband on the outcome of the election–i am here to advise on how to get rid of politics on your facebook page.

1.  install socialfixer.com and figure out the key words you don’t want to see on your page.

2.  status updates:  go to social fixer’s options in the blue bar at the top of your screen, then click filters in the right sidebar. Under matching text, type what you want blocked, looking like this: /romney|obama|republicans|democrats/i. Putting the “i” at the end ensures that the filtered terms aren’t case-sensitive. After that, click hide and save.

3.  links.  we’re so tired of people posting links to their favorite rant, so why should you have to suffer?  go back to options and click add new filter, putting text similar to what you don’t want in the matching selector box a[href*=”obama|romney|republicans|democrats”].  no more see any links that have these words in the URL.  there’s going to be stuff that gets past it, but not so much anymore.

you can use socialfixer.com for all kinds of things like cute/inspirational/puppies or chicago/cubs/aren’t/ever/going/to/win/the/world/series/ever!

i just got this on my page this morning. socialfixer won’t get rid of this picture, no matter how handsome he may be, but i’ve been asked to “like” and for all my friends to “like”.  i might like this guy, i might not like this guy, but if he gets reelected i feel honorbound to “like” him. 

i think facebook needs a “i respect your opinion and your thoughtfulness in sharing” button!