The Icing On the Blogging Cake is Very Sweet Indeed…

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

One thing about blogging and following other blogs is that over time you learn about other people around the world, how they live, their interests,  travels both near and far and sometimes a little bit of magic happens along the way and you build up a relationship with the person behind the blog.

In my own experience this comes about because they take an active interest in your blog, they comment often and visit every time you post.

Generally we follow each other’s blogs because of shared interests like family life, cooking, travel or photography.

We all lead very different lives but there are threads woven into each of them that are shared connections and we can relate to these in each others blogs.

After getting to know these people better, sometimes we chose  few of these people to surprise with a few gifts that are local to us but definitely exotic to someone else on the other side of the globe.

I’ve just received not one but  two of these gifts this weekend and wanted to not just say a BIG  Thank You  to the senders but also tell you about the treats new to me (and possibly to you too!).

The first parcel (photo above) arrived from blogger GH from “Noodles with Butter”  http://www.noodleswithbutter.blogspot.nl/ and contained some beautiful postcards of the region she lives in, a Christmas card and newsletter (not pictured for privacy reasons due to photos of her daughter on the front), two key-rings, herbal tea, two packets of apple chips, some fruit bars,  some chocolate bars and a little plastic bag that contained some Washington Rain which made us giggle.

Last year we decided that when we travelled we would pick up a very little bag of sand or stones from beaches we have visited and I have an old printers type box that has lots of little compartments that we aim to slowly fill, this bag of rain is destined to join this collection.

Our kids love the dried fruit strips, which we call fruit “roll ups” after a favourite New Zealand brand of the same. (the USA version about three times the thickness of the New Zealand version but they are both delicious!)

My eighteen year old oven is currently dying a slow death and it’s temperature gauge is terminally ill so in recent months I’ve been looking for a new oven, one with a specific feature that’s proving hard to find: one that starts in temperature at 30 C instead of the usual 50 C, because then I could use my new oven as a dehydrator and make things like home-made fruit roll ups and beef jerky.

The second parcel (second photo) is from Tracy from MilkayPhoto http://milkayphoto.wordpress.com/  and the contents include Reeses peanut pieces and peanut butter cups, granola (a.k.a. museli where I come from) some marshmallow fluff, jif  peanut butter, some home-made rhubarb and strawberry jam, an amazing array of specialist salts.

(photograph © Kiwidutch)

The Danish Viking Smoked Sea Salt and Vanilla Salt sound particularly  tasty and  whilst I can’t partake due to my mushroom allergy, Himself loves mushrooms and is very much looking forward to trying out the Porcini Salt. There  are candy covered coffee beans (Himself pricked his ears up and grinned a lot at that one), some Tomato Jam, parsnips (I’d mentioned that they used to be hard to get here, but they are more easily available especially in the last year), some Crisco, a sort of baking butter.

There’s bacon spread (we giggled about that one because it sounded rather a strange product  and will look at the website provided on the label for some interesting ideas to use it with) and a vanilla chocolate sweet called the Charleston Chew which it is recommended both by Tracy and on the packet to place in the freezer and then break the frozen pieces to eat.

Since I read that earlier I placed one packet in the freezer and we shared one of the two strips with the family last evening… a total hit! Had I left our children alone with the other two packets, even unfrozen I think they might not  have been there when I came back, such was the popularity of this one!

Being a prudent parent I omitted to tell them that there was a second strip in the freezer … I think that Himself and I can quietly enjoy that one by ourselves LOL. Naturally we haven’t tried everything in both the packages yet and will very much enjoy rationing out the treats, although I predict that the sweeter items will disappear very quickly. A huge Thank You and big thumbs-up to both GH and Tracy !

Both these blogging friends have excellent blogs which I can highly recommend visiting. Of course I blog because I love writing and taking photos and because it’s an on-line journal of all of our Life’s adventures, but the icing on the cake is that I also get to meet some brilliant people from all around the world. And the friendships I have made show just how sweet that icing is…

The Pain of being a Detail Fanatic and separating the wood from the trees…

Confession Time… you know the scenario, you have a brilliant idea, you rush to implement it with more enthusiasm than good sense, and after some time the penny slowly drops that maaayybe you haven’t quite thought things through.

Hmm,  Revise said idea…  Hey that took no time at all, quick fix,  Why didn’t that occur to me before? Yippee.

Happy, done good… worked for a while and the show is on the road, I’ll do a bit more tomorrow. That’s Good right?

Wrong... the gray matter starts ticking over and I realise that I’ve left out a few essential elements.  Really essential elements.

Back to the drawing board.  …Well it’s actually more like back to the 4th draft and the 3rd-work-in-progress since I’ve been messing with part of it already. Now I have to figure out if it takes less time to re-hash what I’ve been messing with or to try and go back to the beginning, …get my drift?

If you are lost by now, so am I… what started out as a brainwave is steadily becoming brainfade, I’ve found myself in a hole and realised that digging deeper probably isn’t the wisest move. I need help. Your help.

“Me???” you squawk in surprise, (or gasp, or squeal or ….insert whatever fits best) oops that last bit kind of came out wrong but you know what I mean LOL.

Yes, your help …   … You.

My problem is a simple one… I need your opinion Dear Reader.

First let me explain the problem… I’ve been working on my Blog’s  “Categories” List. Now obviously if this were a music blog then my list would read something easy and logical like ” 1940′s, 1030′s, 194o’s, 1950′s etc” or ” rock ‘n roll, hip hop, jazz, classical” …

But I blog about  a mixture of things: specialist foods, recipes and recipe tutorials, crafts, The Netherlands, family stuff,  and our travels to various countries and the stuff we find, where we eat, places we visit…

When I first started blogging my “Categories” were vague because I hadn’t posted much, I didn’t foresee back then how the lists of posts would grow… all of a sudden I realised  that some topic headings were hiding whole families of sub-topics within them, heck not just families of sub-topics, but small nations of them.

If I do a filter on any part, I get a long list.. take “United States of America”  per our trip there last year… 25 entries correspond (and maybe more if I didn’t forget to add USA to the category list when I made a post).

So how does an interested reader find the food specialties we discovered,  in an easy fashion from the posts on accommodation tips,  the reviews of eating establishments, the sights we visited, general observations and information etc?

Bear in mind that I travel rather a lot, you may substitute a number of country names for “USA” and in each country I want to try and break down the list so that someone interested in say: Local Specialties only, can find all those posts easily.

So… I  in my haste I started to add “sub-categories… the list swiftly becomes long and I’ve realised that I have so much information to add that even if I manage to fit it all into my front page that it’s maybe looking a bit daunting… Or is it? Have I just been looking too hard and can only now see the mess?

Maybe other WordPress Themes have better ways of making the Categories, so that if you click on “France” then you’d get a separate drop-down menu, with subgroups… but I love the theme and layout I have,  and anyway I’m not convinced that the deficiency is with my Theme, I think it’s with me and my detail fanatic brain.

I think I have been looking too hard and too long, I don’t have a clear enough idea of what the best End Result should look like so it’s like trying to drive your car in pitch dark  with all the lights off.

Clearly there should be a Plan or at least some kind of rough idea where I want to end up.  I’m navigationally challenged in the real world at the best of times,  clearly this deficiency has spilled into the Blog.

I also know that I adore detail, it’s a strength, it’s a weakness… sometimes when I used to draw and paint I’d be guilty of focusing on one tiny part of the artwork, trying to get every detail finished down to the last tiny dot, meanwhile  in my distraction I’d have completely forgotten that the rest of the painting or drawing was in a semi unfinished state or worse, not even sketched yet.

I need your advice.. am I over complicating things? or is expanding  into long lists of sub-topics actually better because it helps you navigate the Blog and find bits that interest you? Should I expand some bits (like everything Dutch) but not others? (all the other countries) At a certain moment ( read “now“) it kind of makes sense to ask what readers want, and yes clearly if  only two people reply and one says “make it  long” and the other says ” make it short” then I’ll have a dilemma, but Ouch let’s not go there, this is complicated enough as it is. Let’s cross one bridge at a time.

So… guru’s of style and readers of Blogs, Please: How would YOU organise my Category List?

All advice will be eagerly awaited and useful interactive ideas between comments welcomed. Fire Away !