Hello, World

After just over a year’s absence I’m more or less here again.  I removed and re-added plugins until finding the half-dozen or so that no longer wanted to play nice, and now I can see the “Add New Post” dialog, you don’t see a 501 server error, and (hot damn) pushing the “publish” button does not result in an error. This is also a shiny new upgrade to WP 2.8.

There are a few smallish things that are missing or a little bit broken, but, for the most part, it’s all here.

One of the really nice finds was that most of the 80-something comments that had stacked up back here were both positive and not spam – very, very cool. Thank you.

And, there are scads of drafted post ideas in there that are still pretty interesting. Yes, this blog already has a garden with working compost heap.

Are you with me? I feel like I’m waving at the house where I lived last year.

It’s good to get this site functioning again.

What’s Next?

Search me if I know!

  • I want a personal soapbox – got opinions, as usual. We live in a fascinating time. Are you up for some editorializing?
  • I need to fix a few things about this site. It needs an updated logo and “About” page, at least, and some replacement plugins, and htaccess will need attention.
  • I’m beginning to feel the need for a place to put creative writing – actual poetry and fiction. I haven’t decided if I’ll start that incognito until I get used to the idea, or if it will be a pen name thing for the duration.
  • I want to redesign QuoteSnack, to make it easier to expand and add services – been having a ball there, and on Twitter.
  • I may split the AbleReach WordPress stuff off onto a site of its own, or the non-techie topics may be better off with their own home, or this could be all-in-one moi.
  • And there are a couple other projects I’ve wanted to start. A couple? A few? Hell, I may need to admit I’m up to however many “fews” it takes to make a “lot.”

So much to learn, so much to do. How’s a gal to choose?

Hello May 31st!

I thought I’d better let everyone know that I’m putting my twice-a-week WordPress project on vacation until Thursday.

You see, I’m busy moving to a new host – yipeee!

I’ll be back in a few days, reloaded with promised humor. In honor of brunchy balance, I may also give myself a couple days off – what a concept.

I feel like I did not give enough this this week, because I had plans I didn’t finish. Looking back, I have to give myself credit. I had more server outages, after all.

Even so, I did the big stuff. I feel just great about WordPress Wireframes, and my Big List of Green Web Hosts is a resource I am satisfied with and can build on.

I am eager to get to the next steps.

I can’t stop from thinking thinking thinking, and there are some ideas I’m excited about and have been working on, and, goodness me, I have to stop myself, or I’ll enthuse myself straight past that break I wanted. Must… resist… temptation.

Heh. The temptation passed.

Was that a tease, or self-preservation?

Whatever you say, dears. :-)

Life is good.

A Six-Month Checkup

Today is my six month anniversary of starting to blog at AbleReach.com. At first, I thought I’d give myself six months to get comfortable, and then re-assess. About six weeks into it I decided I’d get more from the experience by pushing harder. “Comfort” is over rated. Sometimes, ya gotta break a sweat to get work done.

It wasn’t long before I realized that six months is too long to go before re-assessing. A personal goal that is within my control can turn on a dime: add a set of clear standards to a personal goal, pay attention to an experience, and stir.

Blogging by Candlelight?

Speaking of stirring, over the last few weeks I’ve had unusually awful server outages, a week without broadband, and, yesterday, in the middle of polishing a guest post for SEO Scoop, a power outage. Crazy.

When little disasters seem like they’re happening continuously, I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something. I have an image of God perched above me on a cloud, looking every bit like a member of ZZ Top, trying to get my attention by pelting me with marshmallows, or slightly harder to ignore things like progressively larger water balloons.

If I had to hazard a guess as to any message behind this recent set of “water balloons,” it’d be that writing ahead of time could set me free. LOL. And, here I am putting on another pot of coffee at an ungodly hour so that I can finish the SEO-Scoop post, and I’m not panicking. I feel at home — though I’d like it better if I was sleeping tonight. I feel comfortable.

Earlier this week I was telling someone that my to-do list is long, but also 80-90% made of things I am looking forward to, like finishing that guest post. :-)

Life is good.

Cre8Green: Small Steps for Big Causes

On Thursday last week I mentioned having a secret. By now you’ve probably figured out that my clue-comment about “cousin Cre8asite in the kitchen with the team” had something to do with cooking up the idea for Cre8Green Week.

A few days ago Kim Krause Berg, our fearless leader at Cre8asite Forums, had an idea. She wanted to loosen our no self promotion rules for Earth Day, to allow us and the community to discuss freely any and all sites, SM networking sites, and projects (profit or not) that relate the day.

I had four reactions:

  1. Oh, I like our Kim.
  2. How can we promote this?
  3. When is Earth Day? That soon?
  4. Good ideas never have enough lead time.

Actually, there was another thought in there: gee, does this mean I’m going to put off my stats/benchmarks post again? Nevermind. Back to business. I have a few ideas to share.

Ideas come at a time of need, not at a good time to start getting ready for the need. Thinking in small steps that are reachable and definable can put doing something about the Big Need Stuff into the realm of the everyday. It’s not like most of us would think, “today I’ll get caught up on the laundry, and tomorrow I’ll be the next Martha Stewart.” Why should that kind of attitude apply to making a difference for a cause?

Real life is more like, “yesterday I brought my own cloth grocery bag, and today I’ll start sending notes to those people whose Stumbles I’ve been reading.”

Goals are about results, but life is about the experience of living. Living is doing, interacting, deciding, and more often than not, going for it though the pieces of a master plan are a little half formed at the time.

I surrendered to going for it.

Soon, I was wrapped up in thinking about community, and how to draw in some of the people I’ve connected with through SU. Some have privately mentioned enjoying participation in Cre8asite in the past, or even having enjoyed my posts there, which is kind of sweet.

Living online can create an invisible extended community, and I was curious about what I could do to bring invisible “friends” into our Cre8asite Earth Day conversations. Even if very few people come out and post, those few will have an encouraging effect.

Social media is about the conversation. I got that one from Li Evans – hi Li! It’s a no-brainer that Social Media is more like face-to-face networking than keyword-driven Internet marketing.

Networking is about relationships. I sent a lot of Stumble messages last week, and this week my extended community has a few members who are less invisible. Life is good.

Marketing is by nature selfish, as far from generosity as East is from West. That’s not to say there aren’t generous connections that can happen in tandem with marketing, for both marketers and “target” audience. Go East enough in this big world and you will end up at West, or some friendly middle place, in the company of marketers who have at some point in the marketing process ever-so-generously connected with what is important on a human level.

Marketers are idea people, and ideas need cross-fertilization. Enter Social Media, and the drive to share.

Real communication is always personal. When I communicate online I imagine shaking hands in a face to face situation, with a real interest in eye contact. This can be disconcerting on my end. I never know if I connect, unless someone takes the time to let me know, and getting people to let me know is hardly the point. It’s not about me.

I think the same can apply to work done in support of a cause: sometimes you just do it, and believe it matters. It’s not about you, and you may never know what effect you have on others.

And…

…one of the charms of an official holiday for something like Earth Day is that the day becomes a public party for those of us who do whatever the cause is about in little ways year round. It’s cool.

So, here’s a shout out for Earth Day, and marketers with heart, and invisible friends of all stripes everywhere.

Breaking, Building and Leaning Into Limits

Nature fumbles all the time. Things break. Early sprouts freeze and die back. Erosion takes down hillsides, even hillsides where humans have not clear-cut. In the long run, our trying to catch up with nature is what ends up looking more damaged. Nature has built-in ways to compost and recycle what falls. We humans sometimes skip the recycling and head straight into rebuilding. Are we determined to live on the wet hillside with a view, or the ocean front flood plane?

I think it goes deeper than that. Maybe we need the possibility of “faux pas.” Maybe it’s part of an instinct for leaning into challenges.

I was thinking about inconvenient instincts this morning while watching my cat play with my bath water – such a joy. He is *fascinated* with the reflections and movement of water, *almost* to the point of wanting to get in on purpose. Once in a while there is a great scattering noise as he does whatever is needed to recoup his balance, but in a few minutes or less he’ll be right back at it.

When I pull the plug and the water has drained to about the last 1/4″ he often jumps into the tub: 1/4″ to 1/2″ is his kitty cat faux pas wet paws limit. He cringes a little as he lands in the wet bathtub. Fascination overpowers cringe almost immediately, as he races to watch the last of the water go down the drain, and then stalks and pats at water droplets rolling down the side of the tub.

I am like that when it comes to programming. I know how to do a few very small things with php, and it fascinates me. If I lean in too far, or get in over my head, it’s chaos. Wet paws are just enough, over and over again. I like patting at those water droplets.

My php tolerance has gradually increased. I remember when I felt the same way about html, and later on about css-based layouts. These transitions would not have happened naturally, without my encouragement, any more than it was strictly natural for humans to create culture protected by dikes and levies in Holland and New Orleans – but look at what we can accomplish. I like it, I work at it, and I protect it by building on what I’ve learned. I build my own version of dikes and levies – I look at what I can accomplish, and it makes me happy.

Lexi and iamlosts’s comments on my post, Sympathy for the Technology Avoider, led me to wondering about what makes us tick when we go for it anyway, whatever “it” is at the moment. As Jenn Osborne’s Blog Strategy series is on my mind this week, and I had planned to respond to her last post about coming up with blog post ideas for challenging industries, my next post is going to be about blog post ideas, with a little twist. I’ll be looking at how to approach blog post ideas for the technology avoider.

Ironically, I’ll be writing as it rains. We’re at the not-so-nice edge of Spring here, and I want to be doing outside things in between rain drops. I’m not going to glue myself to the computer until the sky is falling. When I’m outside I’ll be avoiding the rain. When inside I plan to glory in it.

Sympathy for the Technology Avoider

I have a friend who is not a fan of things computer. For a long, long time, I’ve been encouraging him to put his business online. He is very good at what he does, and he’s no dummy. After hearing two or three unfamiliar terms from an explanation of how a web site can help his business, he will turn a little green, as if his brain is about to melt. His web site is stuck at one really bad page, and I want to fix it. This week, all on his own, he arrived at a solid “maybe,” though the resistance and disorientation remains.

Take a few steps away from the web-comfortable niche of most of the people who are likely to read this blog, and I firmly believe you’ll find that his reaction is not unusual. You and I are different. We have different comfort zones. We can speak a different dialect, more than we know.

For most of the world, “search” means “to look for,” not the first part of “search engine” or “search term” or “search industry.” Most people don’t automatically check to see it they’ve closed their tags – they struggle with it, they avoid dealing with it. We’re a little different from the average bear. Trust me on this.

Here’s another example from someone else. Last week I got a very shy phone call from a very intelligent someone who asked if I could explain, again, how to make a link. He’s been blogging, though rather hesitantly, for over a year now. I know for a fact that the problem is not that he hasn’t had it explained before, simply, with both text examples and screenshots. So, what is it? What’s the disconnect? I think it’s a wobble of paradigm.

Have you ever made a faux pas in an unfamiliar language? I’m talking paradigm wobble like that, more than just not knowing words.

When I was a teenager my dad was stationed in Germany. I’m an army brat. I grew up with the reality of the Berlin Wall. My first TV memories are of Viet Nam war dead on the evening news. Different time. Different wobbles. In Germany, to my grandparent’s generation we were the valiant guardians who kept the Russians out of Western Europe. To many Germans of my generation we were the “amme,” Nato’s chosen “wet nurse.” We were walking, talking paradigm shifts.

At that time there were three ways to approach being American military in Europe. You could be unabashedly American and live and shop “on base” most of the time, or you could soak up the culture in “Germantown” out “on the economy” and be a part of where we were living, or you could do some combination of the two. In the two places where we lived when stationed over there, we did a little of everything.

One evening my brother, mother and I went out to eat at a little restaurant “on the economy.” My brother asked, in German, for “the bathroom.” The waiter shrugged and barely made it to the kitchen before breaking into a giggle. Now, in the restaurant, the boy wanted to take a bath? Hilarious.

In a few seconds we figured out that the problem was that my brother wanted to ask for the “WC,” but had fumbled while trying to remember how to say the German letter “w.” Instead, he did a direct translation to “bathroom.” Bathroom and restroom are more usual in the US, as we prefer not to say “toilet” as publicly. We have a slightly different communication paradigm.

I think that some people who are used to communicating online have a different communication paradigm, too. We may see web technology as a bridge, a set of tools, or a natural language, whereas the two people I mentioned at the start of this post see it as a barrier to get through. Re-explaining something may not work, at least at first, because the paradigm is different.

When the same people want to know, again and again, how to make a link, offer them a little good-natured pantomime in the form of a tutorial or a Dummies book. Though there’s nothing like a little understanding and patience from a human being, a web-hesitant reader will know that a book won’t giggle on the way to the kitchen.

Motivation From Nature

I have a love-hate relationship with living in Western Washington. Six months of the year we’re wet and gray and I am a poster child for S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder,) unless I’m glued to my computer, and then I forget about everything. I emerge from my cave about this time each year, squinting at the sunlight. Someone with my disposition should live closer to the equator. At the same time, there’s nothing like home. The other six months of the year I am ecstatic about our green greens and our culture. I love Puget Sound.

Eastern Washington is second cousin to the midwest – hot, dry Summers and frozen cold Winters. On the western side, especially near Puget Sound, we have (chilly) rain forests and more mold than you can shake an asthma inhaler at, mitigated somewhat by not freezing as deeply or as long as areas without our sheltered pocket of inland salt water. Also, we have some of the most beautiful Springtimes that can be found anywhere.

Yesterday we had our second day in a row of truly Spring-like weather. Today, after three, all is forgiven, even though the rains are due to return on Friday. Tuesday I saw my first hummingbird of the year – amazing. Last week it was freezing at night. Tomorrow we may be back to gray and dismal for another few weeks. This changeability reminds me of three things:

  1. tempus fugit (time flies)
  2. carpe diem (seize the day)
  3. making hay while the sun shines

Sorting the “Somedays”

Do you have 110 projects, lurking in the shadows of your imagination, camping out on 101 back burners? How many “someday” domains lurk in your account? How many “remember to” things are years out outdated, no longer even applicable to today’s real life?

When thinking of writing this post a thought wafted to the surface that one day I’d have to get the chocolate fudge cookie recipe. Chocolate fudge cookie recipe? That to-do was 25 years old, from when I was the baker for a cafe that has been out of business at least 20 years. Crazy. On the other hand, I do have a couple of wanna-do domains registered and waiting for food-related web sites. A cooking site would be a wonderful project to get going during the next wet, gray Fall. For Spring and Summer, there’s a local goings-on site I’d love to get off the back burner: tempus fugit and carpe diem, because that mellow weather won’t last forever.

When is the last time you took a hard look at what’s silly not to be doing? It’s nonsensical what gets back-burnered. Health. Family time. The “somedays” that are good for you, for which there really is time after all. Projects that are back lit by honest-to-goodness, heartfelt this-is-me.

Sometimes, I think we put off the good stuff because there doesn’t seem to be enough time to follow through in a thorough and complete way. We may be happy to chip away at a problem, while leaving the good stuff for some time when there are more days in a week. Why? Why not chip away at the happy task?

Life is short and time flies. Decide if a “problem” project really needs to be solved, then fix it or forget it. Pick a few wanna-do projects and get them started. Seize the day. Let the rest fade away, or get drastic and chuck ’em: there will be more where those came from.

What I’m Doing Instead of Attending SES-NY

Dazzlin Donna has inspired me. :)

…let’s pull this baby back to what I was originally talking about. Content. Giving users what they crave. Right…now we’re back. I’m going to spend a fair amount of time on just this one topic, and I’m going to give my visitors lots of content to quench their thirst for information as well as great graphics to please their visual souls. Once I’ve satisfied this craving, I’ll go back to the analytics reports to see if they are craving something else that I could provide more of. And that, my friends, is what I’m doing instead of going to the never-ending carousel of search conferences. What are you doing?

What I’m Doing Instead of Attending SES-NY

Here goes…

Getting Used to Writing More Small Posts

~ or ~

Perfectionism Gets a Day Off

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I decided to start this blog in backwards mode. I am blogging about finding my brand before I consciously choose one. I am creating content before considering what I want that content to do, before considering my audience or who may be my intended audience. I am starting with “me.”

It’s hard! A to-do list based on actionable goals may look longer and heavier, (and use more big words – dontcha just love “actionable”??) but in reality, there is no substitute for a map.

Now, you’d think that the informality of how I decided to start this would mean that I’m already comfortable writing short, informal posts that help us keep in touch. Not so. I am a perfectionist. I am the worst kind of perfectionist: I procrastinate. Perfectionism plus procrastination equals paralysis, and don’t you forget it.

When I saw Donna’s post of today I knew what I had to do. Perfectionism gets a day off, and we’ll just see what happens next.

I Like Networking

Later today I’m meeting three different people from three different places in this great wild world of ours, online, in chat sessions, mainly to discuss projects. This happened because I like to brainstorm, we’re all on StumbleUpon, and seeds of ideas like the light of other ideas. One person talks to another, and another, and sometimes something very nice starts happening. It has nothing to do with trying to get the other guy to click on your widget. Repeat after me: there are enough clicks to go around.

If SU ever becomes a bot-infested quasi directory link farm I’ll be in that part of the trenches marked “community first,” wearing my brand evangelist hat and swinging the biggest stick I can get my hands on.

Writing About Print Style Sheets

This evening I’ll be putting the finishing touches on a tutorial about print style sheets. I’ll also install one here – LOL. If you don’t have a print style sheet yet you’re in good company. There are some pretty impressive blogs out there that either don’t have print style sheets or have really bad ones.

If you’re one of the Famous Few or just some lost blogging wannababe who’d like a clue or two, tune in here in a few hours, because this is EASY, folks. Quick and easy. I’ll have tips, 1-2-3 how-to’s, and cautions.

Making your own print style sheet should take under half an hour, unless you are both a raging perfectionist and have a lot of inline styling to futz with. If you’re totally unfamiliar with code, you may need more time. If you need help with that, leave comments here or head over to Cre8asite and send up a white flag. The theory is that my tutorials will help people who want to learn, and may need to figure out where the how-to books meet the blog template that’s in their hot little hands, right now, as is.

Caution: given that my “evening” can last until I go to bed at 2am the next morning, depending on your time zone you may not see my post about style sheets until tomorrow.

Road Testing Action Plans, as a community-building activity

This is new. On Monday Jennifer Osborne of Search Engine People started a five part series on blog strategy. Her first post was How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy. I’m going to take her plan and apply it to my blog. She’ll be posting weekly for another four weeks. At some point after her posts come out each Monday, I’ll blog about how I am applying her strategies.

The topics:

  1. How to Sell your Client on a Blog Strategy
  2. How to develop a Blog Strategy? What makes it a ‘Strategy’ versus just implementing a Blog?
  3. How to Come up with Blog Post Ideas for Challenging Industries
  4. What are realistic measures of success for your Client’s Blog?
  5. How to get your Blog Traffic to Convert

My reasons for doing this are many.

  • First and foremost, I encourage others to blog. They’ve got their own resistance that has nothing to do with mine. If I am putting my energy where my mouth is, I think it will help me help them.
  • Secondly, I like how Jennifer thinks and I think I can use the way she combines her ideas with pragmatic, “actionable” planning.
  • Third in line and probably the most meaty in the long run, I like how the web connects us, and this is a way to take that in and grow with it. I want to test and demonstrate my belief that the Internet has changed the way we can be community with each other. Creating a popular list of resources is “only” creating content. What happens next?

    IMHO, blogging is part of a communication revolution, in the sense of “The” revolution, the revolution to change the world that many were so hungry for in the 60’s.

First Things First

First I’m going for a walk. Though weather reports promised us two weeks of rain and cold, for some strange reason the sun is shining. I’m treating it like a reverse of that cartoon of the guy who always has a rain cloud over his head. This is my sunshine, baby, and I’m not going to stay inside and miss it.

………..

A p.s. for the two curious souls who wondered if my peas are sprouting: the answer is yes. Each of my six pots of possibilities is showing the heads and shoulders of several vigorous sugar snap pea sprouts. I can hardly wait until the leaves start to unfurl.

I Can Haz Onion?

Peel an onion and what do you get? More onion.

Peel me and what do you get? More than one kind of layer, that’s for sure, except…

…I hear it’s good for a site to have “focus.” (wink)

I’m the boss, this is my mother ship, and for here and now, what you’re going to get is onion a la Elizabeth. The “kids” are going to have to share elbow room.

funny pictures
moar funny pictures from icanhasacheezburger

My interests are pretty web-centric, or maybe it’s that I’m interested in how the web can overlap almost everything. Also, though too much diversity can kill in a not-good way from a marketing perspective, I like the idea of having a one-home-fits-all place for the art me, the nerd me, the me who is still having cravings for a certain fat fighter’s fried shrimp sandwich and the me who could live on organic oranges and spinach forever and ever.

Once in a while I see comments from people who wonder why there aren’t more artists who are also into geekery, or women who do tech as well as girlyness, or girly girls who can also use a saw, and I wonder if so many of us humans could possibly be so one-dimensional. Maybe we’re being market-smart and keeping our incongruous parts in separate public entities.

I think I’ll pass.

Elsewhere I can make targeted content for a specific audience. Here I want to push myself to turn over the compost and see what grows. The longer I stew on it, the more sure I am: I don’t want to make ablereach.com be that thing that looks like a web site and has the requisite web site parts. I want to keep digging into how my personality and priorities marinate with the flavors of the Internet.

And W00t. You know what this means, don’t you?

funny pictures
moar funny pictures from icanhasacheezburger

Yepperz. Blogtreetz.

  1. Interviews. I love, love, love talking to people about what makes something jive. The topic could be almost anything. For this blog I’m starting an ongoing series based around using the Internet to build community. Dazzlin D’s interview about community was a delight for both of us. The next two are in the works, and I am a very happy camper.
  2. Online Education. Have plans, will spill. Soon.
  3. WordPress. Have plans, will spill. Wednesday.
  4. Stories. Just because. You liked this and this. Me, too.
  5. Play. I posted about going pink. I owe you one about going green – my hair, that is.
  6. Introspection. I like introspection that feels like a workout, and leaves me wanting to go exploring.
  7. An open door for more.

Search For the Holy Grail

Join me, dear reader, for an evolving tale of irreverence and punny pink-ness, as we undertake a journey inspired by charity and oddly shaped snacks.

First, I need to make a point that is vital to our mission.

This is not the holy grail.

Fluffy Coffee

As discovered by another intrepid prospector, fluffy coffee is not an essential building block of a meaningful life. Really.

The Adventure Begins

Earlier this month, after I spotted spotted uncommon uses in the wilds of Feedburner, I was inspired to begin a quest for signs of intelligent blogextraterrestrial life lurking among the statistics.

uncommon.jpg

I knew I had to look further.

Investigating Analytics

Finally, at the far reaches of on my trek through remote tables and graphs I found mysterious alien tracks.

Mysterious Tracks

I followed them to the edge of the encampment of the fine folks at seosfightfat.com.

At seosfightfat.com I found pages and pages of SEO’s fighting for good. Some were battling carbs others calories. But whatever war they raged, oh do they rage!

Malware Discovered

The source of those heart shaped tracks became clear to me. I followed them and eventually found the culprit. She was a sticky bit of malware of a sort that is common only in February.

Malware

Oh, the humanity!

My Fingers trembled as I sought to start-up my Anti-Malware software – but it was to no avail. I could hear the machine whirl in pain as the hungry virus chewed up my resources.

What happened next is a blur. I do know that as I vanquished her she laughed with caloric glee, and afterwards…

Vanquished Malware

…in the middle of bookmarking my place in the encampment I lapsed into a sugar coma. Don’t worry. It didn’t last long.

I slept, perchance to dream, and dreamed of marvelous things – amazing feats of willpower, and finding Pandora’s box, twice:

Pandora’s DoughnutsThe first Pandora’s Box was overflowing with donuts. It was labeled “David Doesn’t Live Here Any More.”

Pandora’s PistachiosThe next, brimming with pistachios, was labeled “Jeff has Moved On.”

Shaking Off The Sugar Hangover

I awakened feeling bloated, twitchy, pasty and irritable. Though the vanquish of malware can be rich and good, as a snack they are worse than unsatisfying. Certain vital nutrients are missing. I was left with an aimless hunger that had to be addressed. I shook off my grogginess and began to look around.

Nearby, several SEOs were relaxing by a campfire. Expecting to see marshmallows browning over the campfire, as graham crackers and chocolate await nearby, I was surprised to see fruits and nuts instead. What? What kind of crazy extraterrestrial campfire treat is this? After a delightful honeycrisp apple, I felt refreshed and was inspired to explore the flora and fauna of this brave new world.

Inhabitants Of The Habitat

Suddenly, a large unordered list of Stumbling and Sphinning SMOs darted by, clicking and commenting. They were resplendent in their mating plumage, as can be seen by green thumbs held high. Perhaps the SMOs were hot on the trail of a newly ripened feed of long-tailed link bait. I had to see for myself.

As I followed their tracks through the flora and fauna I glanced down and saw a dozen oddly shaped turtles. What caused these turtles to appear so different than their real life cousins? Could it be the nut filled creamy caramel covered in dark delicious chocolate that caused this phenomenon? My first thoughts were to rescue these pitiful creatures but I had no pockets. Thinking quickly I shoved them into my mouth and trekked deeper into SEOsfightfat.com.

What do you think will happen next?

Leave a comment and check back later today.

Comments I like will be added to the post, like that game where each person adds a line to the story. Or, I may make a series of posts. I don’t know, because the story has not been written.