Coffee Share 181006

This is a Weekly Coffee Share.
Our get-together is hosted by: Eclectic Alli.

Alli manages a weekly list of posts from any who want to just stay in touch, chat about blogging, writing, travel, photography, children, pets, work, life hacks or just about anything else that might be of interest.

Here’s the link for last week.

Here’s the link for this week.

For the photo above, I want to thank: Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash (a great place to find free, great quality photos.

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Good Saturday morning.  Let me pour you a cup of whichever hot drink you prefer.  The coffee is hot and we have the normal spread of taste-enhancing contaminates plus my daughter confessed to buying one of the weirder flavors of those Torani Syrups, the Gingerbread flavor.  I’m not sure what she was thinking, but as a homeschooling parent, I try to never discourage an honest and reasonable experiment, so there it is.  She tasted it once and pronounced  suitable for public consumption, just not her’s.   Okay, that said, you are welcome to try it with me.  So far, if one is really looking for or desperately in need of real coffee therapy – you might want to avoid it.  It’s fine for what it is, but I doubt I’ll be back for more myself.  This seems to be one of those flavors that should not be drinkable.

Alli asked us if Fall is taking hold where we’re at, and here in Sonoma County, the answer is, “Thankfully – YES”.  We even had our first decent rain.  “Decent” in regards to rain here is any reasonable amount over one inch and we had 1.5  a few nights ago.

On a different front, I’m giving up securing a nice photo of our backyard reptiles, the diminutive alligator lizards.  They remain healthy and happy looking, but every time I set foot into the backyard, both young and old scatter if I try to get close enough for a photo and, their favorite lounging spots are all on either a rock wall we have at one end of the yard or on our aggregate patio and path.  This is no wonder, because all cold-blooded critters like the full sun on a surface that allows them to sun their tops while the concrete and rock bakes their bottoms.  Both areas give them a camo background from which to do their sunning and have ample ants that wander by, and ants are apparently the equivalent of marching Hersey’s Kisses for lizards of this size.

Even the young’ins can simply lie anywhere along the march and snap up as many as desired as the ants try to maintain order in the ranks and keep on marching without the lizard needing to move much.  What a gig they have going.

Anyway, I got a couple of photos to share, but decided against putting you through an explanation like, “see, he’s a bit left of dead center on the path.  That stick-looking thing is his tail.”  If you have to explain a photo to this degree, best save your reader the grief of trying to make sense of it.

It works much better to find a great public photo like this one and be publicly grateful for the work of a great photographer.  A big lizard for this breed is about 5-6 inches and the offspring are  just barely 1 inch – so not scary at all.  There are large breeds that look otherwise identical and are large enough to try to bite a finger that gets too close, but that side of their family doesn’t live in my back yard.

On the writing front, I can’t clam to have gotten much done this week.  Work has been hard with several of us trying to solve a problem of our own company’s making, but it’s hard to understand and, given our systems strategy, is going to be even harder to fix.  Much of the week I was left thinking being out on medical leave to two months was so much more pleasant.

I do have one idea I’d like to throw out for any feedback/discussion.  With a blog, we have the option of posting a story, collecting reactions or feedback and returning to it anytime to execute corrections, clarifications or full blown changes.  I have a short list of stories in my collection that go back before I knew much about packaging a story for a blogging audience, and I still label myself as an amateur in this demographic. When I don’t feel I have the time or inspiration to produce something new, I can easily clean up what I already have, making it a better product for any viewers that are newer to the collection.

I’ve flagged a small handful of early essays for upgrade, and I got one of those out this week.  My tale, “The Bridge Toll Incident,” is now a much better story and was rewarded with a quick doubling of the original viewership numbers.  If you enjoy the image of a young man embarrassed and getting something of a chance to return the favor – this may be a great 10-minute break in your day.

But, of course, you’re always welcome to grab a glass of good Chianti, sit back and tour the full, 43 story, collection using the link below.  They represent the accomplishment of  an idea my daughter gave me just over 3 years ago, but as a working, navigable blog site, it’s not quite a year old and I’m still finding ways to make it easier to use.

One thing that is coming up, is finding a better way to reach readers than via Facebook.  Reach is good, but any feedback is easily lost in the relentless feed of food and cat pictures, so quickly becomes useless for study or staying in touch with readers and Facebook has some magical connection to my google search window.  You noticed above how I decided to add that photo of the Tarani Syrup to this coffee share.  It took Facebook less than an hour to snap up that search event and target-market me via my newsfeed.  Gracious, what exactly are we doing to ourselves here…?

That said – I’m off to review your coffee share articles.  Hope all is well with you and the incoming arrival of which ever season is only weeks away.  Blessings all.

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