To blog or not to blog

It has been over a month since I started blogging regularly.

So what have I learned:

• Although I was tempted NaBloPOMo,  I decided against it in the end.  Blogging everyday seemed like too much work. 
• I don't think anyone regularly reads this blog ( Holler if you do. You will make my day!)  Page hits go up when I post a link to my rant post on my Facebook page. But, otherwise the hits are usually less than 10 per day. 
• Most of my page hits are from people searching for wattalapam recipe.I didn't realize wattalapam is so popular.
•  I am pretty confident about my technical and business writing skills. But, I am not so sure about my non-technical writing skills. It is also hard work for me unless I am all fired up about Kitchenaid!
• I'll never feel comfortable about mommy blogging writing about topics that is too personal.
• I'll also never become rich from blogging (See the point above about less than ten hits) That means I don't have to spend a lot of time with the esthetics of the template. 

I think I am going to continue posting at least until my life start getting busier( i.e until I start working full-time)

My goals are simple.  1) Improve my non-technical writing skills. 2) Record my childhood memories for my kids. We lost all our tangible childhood memories when our house in Sri Lanka was destroyed seventeen years ago. I will never be able to show my beloved doll or my favourite books from my childhood to my kids. But, I can tell them the stories about my childhood. And they love hearing these stories because my childhood is very different from theirs. I have been telling them these stories as their bed-time stories. If I write these stories down, they will have these stories with them for ever even when I am not there with them.

Three of my favourite blogs

A month or so ago, I gave myself a timeout  from reading blogs because I felt I was spending too much time on blogs. I haven't started reading blogs again ( except when someone posts a link on Facebook, it is too tempting not to read! ) But, I thought I would post about 3 of my favourite blogs.

First of all disclaimer: I don't personally know any of these bloggers. I just like their blogs.

1. Ben and Birdy : I started reading Catherine Newman's blog when she was a blogger on Baby Center ten years ago. On her current blog, she posts recipes and book and toy recommendations. I like her recommendations because her two kids are a year or two older than my two kids. I always get great gift ideas for my kids from her recommendations. Some of her recipes are way too complicated for me. But some of them are great hits in my house. Two of the favourite ones are Crack Broccoli and Maple-lemon Tofu. 
2. Obscure Can Lit Mama : I am simply in awe of this woman. She is an author. ( I read and liked her latest book Juliet Stories. It is one of the finalist for Governor General's literary award for fiction ) She is a triathlon athlete. She is a mother of four kids. FOUR kids! She makes awesome meals for  kids. I feel like such a slacker when I read her blog. 
3. Writing as Jo(e) : Her blog name is the inspiration for my blog name.  I am very original like that. She writes under the pseudo name Jo(e).  I love her writing. Her house sounds like such a fun place to be with her kids and their friends always getting together to play music, celebrate birthday parties and eat home made pies. I wish she would adopt me as one of her kids or one of her extras. 

So there you go. Three blogs by smart women who write about their families, work and life. I also just realized that all three of them are writers.

If you can read Tamil you can also read my nephew's blog.This kid can write. I am sure he got his writing genes from the other side of his family. 

Do you have any favourite blogs?

Thavika? Kavitha? Who are you?

I signed up for a  blogger account in early 2008.  I used a pseudo name because I didn't want to be dooced.  Being a non imaginative person I used the pseudo name "thavika", the three syllables of the name Ka-vi-tha written backwards.  I wrote a few posts, but I didn't think anyone actually read the blog since it wasn't linked anywhere else. A couple of months after I created the blog, my brother emailed me and asked if I am thavika? I used a brand new gmail address to sign up and didn't use that gmail address for anything else. So, I didn't think anyone would link the blog to me. But, google probably informed my brother about my new email address as someone he might know. Sheesh, One can't keep anything private from the big brother! 

At some point, my sisters also found my blog. I can't exactly remember how they found it. I may have told them the pseudo name or they figured it out from twitter id. By then, I lost interest in posting and promptly forgot my login credentials.  

Couple of weeks ago Kitchenaid made me so annoyed and I wanted to share my experience with others, not just Facebook friends. So I retrieved my login credentials and wrote a couple of blog posts about my Kitchenaid woes. The blog is no longer anonymous since I posted a link to the blog on my Facebook page. I think I am ok with it.

Now that I've started blogging, I want to continue. Writing is hard work for me. I am never sure about grammar rules or punctuation as you can see :-) I am hoping that regular blogging will help my writing skills. 

I hope that you continue to visit my blog. I don't want to be lonely here.  I promise that not all posts will be about fridge!