Resurfacing- really long!

In 2005, I was asked to join the staff of the Lynchburg, VA blog. The person who had started the blog belonged on the Lynchburg Freecycle group which I was the owner and moderator of at the time. He asked me to join his writing. I had connections with the Homeschool Group in the area and I guess he liked my moderating style. I worked on the Lynchburg Virginia blog for about a year, but it became too time consuming. We became obsessed with getting our ranking up and producing material others wanted to read. We were near the top of pack, and I was feeling overwhelmed with having to come up with something new and intelligent every day, so I gracefully bowed out. That blog is still up and though noone has posted on it since September of 2007, it still has a page rank of 3. Not too shabby.

About 4 months after I quit writing for the Lynchburg Virginia blog, I was on vacation in Williamsburg. My mom and stepfather have a timeshare there and the kids and I were chilling out, enjoying the history of the area and enjoying relaxing before the fire. I have been compelled to write since I was in elementary school - poetry, stories, newspaper articles for school, and in almost every job I ever held, there was room for me to use my creative writing skills. I missed blogging and I missed having people come by and tell me I had written something interesting...soooo....I found HSB. I don't remember how at this point, but I fell in love with the community here. I got to make friends from around the country and learned a lot of interesting tidbits about homeschooling and how there are so many ways of doing things. But, then I grew frustrated. HSB was growing by leaps and bounds and as they dealt with upgrading their system, I often had problems with writing posts that would not get published and would vanish into nowhere. Or I would try to comment on others blogs and then get thrown off. I didn't have a lot of time or patience for this, so my hubby fixed me up with my own blog and my name was the URL. I was pretty pleased with that! 

So Melissa's Idea Garden was born. Actually it was Yesterday's Hopes at first because I gave it the same name as my store name on eBay.  I was big into eBay there for awhile until all the changes and the declining profits. Then I changed my blogs name to Melissa's Idea Garden. I also started writing adds for various online companies that pay you to do that sort of thing...you know write and ad with hyperlinked text in your post. I can't even say there names here, because after I had done that for about 4 months and was up to making 1000.00 a month (no lie - but I worked hard for that), Google did a big smack down. Anyone who was working for these sites had a page rank drop to 0. I was a 5 at the time on my other blog and I had worked hard to get it up there. I was frustrated.  I ended up deleting all of my ads and all mention of those paying websites and only now am I back up to a page ranking of 3. It would be higher if I put more effort into, but life ebbs and flows and I haven't been in the mood to blog lately. Maybe it is because I blogged daily on our fabulous trip this fall to Australia and New Zealand. Or maybe it was because I had friends who  got me addicted to playing Farmville, Fishville and some other games. I was having so much fun with that, I spent all my computer time there.

My 9 year old daughter, however can't play FB because I won't let her put in a fake birthday. It astonishes me as to how many people do just that. And like me, she is creative. She loves to write and she loves interacting with others. So I had a brain storm yesterday....why not set her up with a HSB blog. I knew it was a good community and an easy blog site to use now that the kinks had been worked out. So last night, we got Kat's Korner up and running.  It made me look around my blog and make some updates and remember how much I enjoyed being here. So I am back. I am not sure how exactly I will keep up with two blogs, but I know when the writing is flowing, I must follow along!