Blog friends

I've mentioned in previous blog posts that I love reading other peoples' blogs. I have many friends who have blogs, and it is so fun for me to be able to catch up on their lives through their blogs. That is important since I'm way over here on the other side of the world from most of them! Something else I've done while visiting friends' blogs is click on the links to blogs my friends recommend. By doing this I've discovered a couple of blogs that I now visit directly. One of them is blog that I enjoy reading, but the posts are very infrequent and comments aren't enabled so I am just a lurker. The other is a blog that is funny, fluffy, thought provoking, sometime crass, and highly entertaining. I lurked for a while and then a question in the form of a blog post was asked by the blog's author. "Do you prefer Cheez-its or Cheese Nips?" I felt compelled to respond. This person didn't know me, but did that really matter in the grand scheme of cheese cracker survey results? No. As long as I wasn't a relative of someone who worked for or stood to make money from either company my opinion was just as valid to the survey as anyone else's. So I gave my response...Cheez-its all the way, baby! Several posts later I felt the need to respond again. So I did. And since then I've commented on various other topics. The blog author's interest was peaked when through a comment I invited her to Istanbul to help satisfy her dream of traveling to Europe. (She hasn't taken me up on my offer...yet!) Since then she's looked at my blog and made comments as well. And then yesterday I was tired, hadn't slept well for a couple of days, but had to be awake, so I read her blog. Her newest post intrigued me so I did some research and then made a comment. She commented back with a request that excited me. I was telling Erica, who is 14, about this and she said, "I thought you said we weren't allowed to talk to people online that we don't know." Oh, yeah. I don't know this girl. So funny to me. But I do have to say she seems like a pretty open book on her blog. She seems to just say what she thinks, how she feels about things with nothing to hide, and I love that. Maybe because it reminds me of myself. You read stories about my kids, my days, my thoughts, my frustrations...almost everything that goes through my head makes an appearance in some form or another on my blog. My readers get the good, the bad, and the ugly. Just telling it like it is.