Mama Needs to Regroup… A Long Explanation

Hi everyone…

The wieners have taken over the keyboard today because Mama isn’t feeling well.  Okay, really it’s just me, Li’l Girl.  Austin’s not very good with pawing the keys.

What?? Write a blog post for you? Sigh… can’t you see that there’s a stuffie that needs gutting?

Anyway, Mama has been having a very difficult time lately and is feeling very discouraged.  She has been trying to put on a good, happy face and keep things in order, but it hasn’t really been working.

She thinks she needs to take a break and regroup, because nothing is going right.

She says that we are suffering because she is chained to her computer all day and is not spending enough time with us.  She says the house is suffering because she’s not spending enough time cleaning, organizing, or remodeling (our house needs some work).  She says she is suffering because she is stressed out that she can’t make it all work.

She says that for all the time she spends online, she hardly gets anything accomplished.  She gets very frustrated and has a hard time writing posts here because she spends so much time trying to keep up with reading and commenting at other blogs.  She says that there are many great bloggers who blog every single day AND manage to keep up with tons of other blogs – she knows this because she sees their comments everywhere.  She doesn’t understand how they have time to write their own posts, keep up with tons of other blogs, stay active on all the social networks, and somehow fit in spending time with their dogs and managing their personal and work lives.  Clearly they have excellent time management skills, and she doesn’t.  That makes her feel very bad about herself, because if they can do it, why can’t she? She says she notices that some bloggers don’t ever comment at other people’s blogs. They just write their own blogs and that’s that. Boy, that would be much easier, but she says the people who do that don’t get very many comments at their blogs and sometimes none at all… even on really good posts. They don’t engage themselves in the blogging community, so no one really engages with them either. They keep on blogging away, though.  Maybe they still get a lot of visitors and that makes them happy enough to keep going.

She says that most days, even if she felt she had more time to write posts, that she gets discouraged not knowing what to write about.  She says that there are a million things in her mind, but she doesn’t know how to bring them to paper.  Or the screen, as it were.

When she started this site, she had no intentions of it being a blog.  It was just going to be an information site for people looking for good healthy chews to give to their dogs instead of rawhide.  I wouldn’t say that she was on a crusade against rawhide – she just wanted people to know that rawhide can be dangerous and there were a lot better things out there to give their dogs.  So she got busy writing about a bunch of chew options, and she set up a number of affiliate accounts and hoped that people would buy products through her links sometimes (you get small commissions for that).  She wasn’t really thinking about making a lot of green paper, a few pieces of it here and there… maybe enough to cover web hosting expenses and buy us some treats donate some to rescue.  To get more people to her site, she knew she would have to establish a presence on social networks, even though she has severe social anxiety and being social is her biggest weakness.  But hey, being social on the internet is not the same as in person… she could do this.  But getting on the social networks suddenly put her in a whole ocean’s worth of dog people, and more specifically, a whole lot of dog bloggers.  Hmmm… a dog blog?  Could she do this?  As she read more and more dog blogs, she thought she could.  She learned about neat resources and events such as BlogPaws, BarkWorld, etc.  A whole world of pet bloggers!!  A big community!  This was all new to her, but it sounded pretty pawsome, so she decided she’d try.  She might never go to the big events and meet people, but just being a part of the pet blogging community sounded neat.

As she started visiting other blogs, people started visiting us here.  She soon realized that her site would have to change… a LOT.  For one thing, these pet bloggers are already well-informed and are already trying to feed their dogs the most healthy stuff they can find.  They don’t need to be told about the dangers of rawhide, and they already know about all the healthier alternatives.  Uh oh!!  Mom never had any idea that dog bloggers would be reading her site… she thought it was just going to be regular folks, so to speak.
Hmmm… what to write about then.  Well, Mom has a big, huge butt from sitting around so much heart for animal rescue, so she thought she’d keep a focus on that.  The woman is batshit crazy about loves Dachshunds (wiener dogs, sausage dogs, long dogs, whatever you want to call us), so she’d focus primarily on Dachshund rescue, but make it a point to support the rescue, rehabilitation, and rehoming of ALL dogs.  She says to mention the kitties too.  Sigh.  Cats.  Who needs ’em?  Mom says to be nice because she even though she’ll never understand cats well enough to be a cat person, she has developed quite an appreciation for them through reading the kitty blogs.  It turns out that cats are a lot sweeter (and funnier!) than she thought before.  Anyway, back to the point.  What to write about.  She has written a few funny posts and a few useful posts and a few poignant posts, and even a couple posts that caused a little ruckus (she had NO idea that would happen).  But truthfully, it’s fair to say that she hates being serious and writing useful posts.  But Mooooom, when are you going to write about US?  This is called Words With Wieners… WE are the wieners… write about US!  [Note: we changed to Dachshund Rescue List in Nov 2014] She says that she doesn’t know how much people would want to read about us.  We are not very exciting, but that’s her fault (and don’t worry, she knows it and feels guilty).  So we try to tell her things to write about, but she says that people have already written about all the things we tell her, and better than she ever could.  She said she wants to write about us but also needs something unique… something different.  But she wants to keep it simple and sweet.  She said that she doesn’t want the blog to be all “commercial” (whatever that means) even though we have some ads here.  She said that she just doesn’t really want to write any posts that tell people what to do or how to do it… in other words, no serious “useful” posts, unless people ask for them.  Mom and Dad have been through a lot with us, and she’s a 100% Grade A expert in the field of her own wieners (BOL!  A field of her own wieners!  This is what she gets for letting me behind the keyboard!), but has decided that she’ll leave all the expert doggy advice to others.  She says it’s okay to share what we use or what we do, and if that’s helpful to someone, then that’s okay.  Just no “Hey, do this ‘cuz it’s better than that” posts.  She especially can’t tell you a thing about training.  We train HER!  BOL!  Either way, we think that we will just take over the blog for a while while she figures things out.  We probably won’t post very often, maybe once or twice a week… it just depends.  Mama will be back.  She just needs to get herself sorted and figure out how to keep the blog going in a way that she can feel good about… a way that she enjoys instead of stressing her out.

In the meantime, she will still try to keep up with other blogs as much as she can and will probably still use Twitter (knowing her, we’ll have to take over that too!)  But on Sunday, she went crazy downgrading herself from Member to Follower in all her Triberr tribes.  She says that means our posts won’t show up in the Triberr feed for other people to share.  She says she wants to be able to share other people’s posts without them feeling any obligation to share our posts.  She says that you should only share stuff that you really like and really think your followers will appreciate, not just share it because someone shared your stuff.  She says that not all of her/our posts are good enough to share, so she doesn’t want people to share them “just because”.  She says that Triberr tribes have a maximum member limit of 50, and some of them are full with waiting lists to join.  She says it’s not fair for us to take up space while she’s having a “crazy break”, as she calls it, when there are there are active bloggers that deserve our spot.  We just hope Mama hasn’t done something too stupid and the tribe chiefs are understanding when she asks to be a member again someday.  Geez Mama, you wouldn’t have to worry about that if you didn’t make such rash decisions.  Anyway…
She is no good at Facebook, and since we had to start all over with our Facebook account recently, we only have 15 Likes :(.  She says it seems pointless to post much on Facebook when no one is reading anyway.  She is also really no good at Google+… she doesn’t understand it.  It seems like a more dull version of Facebook… very business-y.  Mom’s not very business-y, so she and Google+ just don’t get along.  She doesn’t really know what to post there except for sharing the blog posts.  She might just get rid of it.  She will definitely keep Pinterest because you don’t have to be social there… you just get to pin away and share stuff!  We only have a few videos on YouTube, but she says she is keeping that because she really intends to take more videos of us, even if they are not high quality.

She knows that when she comes back, our goal will still be to promote animal rescue, adoption, and advocacy.  That’s where her heart is, and we’re pretty glad about that since we’re rescues.  But she says it’s tough to write about that every single day, because even when you try to keep it positive, it bums people out.  But she said she’s going to try to figure out a way to support rescue and be positive at the same time.  Truthfully, she just wants to blog when she feels inspired to, not because she feels obligated to crank out a post x days a week.  That’s the part that overwhelms her and makes her not want to post at all.  If you haven’t figured it out by now, Mama has “issues”.  Only a crazy woman would make me write this much about taking a break.  I tried to tell her that no one cares… but she says that’s not the point.

Anyway, she hopes the break won’t be too long.  She says that she hopes people can put up with our nonsense in the meantime.  She says if we do a good enough job in our temporary positions, she might just make us permanent!  What??  No way, Mom!