Hiding Something So Well you Can't Find It

I do this a lot.... buy a gift, or something you need to hold on to for awhile before you use it, so you hide it from yourself or others, and then it vanishes  crawls into a corner of your closet you didn't know you had. Then I forget about these things and when I am moving or doing a spring cleaning I find things stashed away and it is like Christmas morning mid-year.

Today was like blogging Christmas for me! I discovered a huge and important thing that I had squirrelled away so well, that I not only forgot about, but didn't even remember hiding!

Now you are going to laugh. I laughed. Then I teared up a bit.

So, when I decided "Let's do this!" regarding the blog (i.e. continuing to write and post on my own terms) I created a separate email account thinking it would help me stay organized and assist in any "branding" I ever wanted to do. Well folks...it kind of helps if you remember that you set-up a separate email and if you checked that separate email and if you knew that you linked your blogger profile to that email. Epic. F-A-I-L.

So here I am reading over Allie's post on making friends in blogworld, thinking to myself "man I would LOVE to have those awesome connections with all these greater readers out there!". Reading her post, I decided to check to make sure my email was attached to my blogger account and the BAM! I found that hidden treasure.

Oh looky here...an email account I forgot I had. Oh and an email account full of emails from readers!!! Say WHAT!?!? These people like me? They really really like me!?

(This is where I pretty much flipped my chair over standing up so fast to do a happy dance)

Needless to say...that blogging community I have been wanting to build for myself. It is there! All neatly categorized and tucked away in my lonely email account!

So this is a HUGE "thank you". Thank you to the people who have emailed, started conversations with me, asked me follow-up questions and generally just have kept reading. This is also a HUGE "I'm sorry" for doing such a good job of hiding this gem from myself and not taking advantage of all you wonderful people!

I am pretty excited about my discovery! Hopefully some of you don't mind some really delayed follow-up emails as I try to restore my dignity by digging through these emails!

Now for all of you...how do you connect with the blogworld? Do you have a strategy for emails/comments/tweets etc. to keep everything organized?