Gazing at the navel

When I should be gazing at my pillow… I am gazing at my navel, or rather, the navel of my blog, the top-secret site that tells me how y’all got here and what you want from my creative writing output. After all, we aim to please!

Well, okay, no. Secretly, I aim to lure people in here with whatever ridiculous keywords will suck in the suckers… and then send everybody home convinced of the stunning spiritual authenticity of our kinda-crunchy eco-conscious crunchy-con religious Jewish life. Secretly, I just want to turn everybody into ME.

Barring that, however, I aim to please! And it seems like I am doing a pretty good job!

First, a couple of searches over the last few days that my blog could NOT help with (sorry, everybody!):

• siddur text of omer counting… umm… I am a bad sinner when it comes to Omer. Maybe next year.
• liberal mikveh jerusalem… nope!
• mikveh blog … well, I do post about the mikveh occasionally, but for privacy reasons, not when I have recently been to the mikveh. And not often. Maybe ‘cuz I don’t go often!

But on a happier note, most of the searches actually are dredging up stuff from my blog that is at least kind of relevant… such as:

• shabbos menu! Yes, we have Shabbos menus! Lots more of them where that came from!
• easy praline recipe! Yes, very, very easy.
• pretty siddur ! Yup, I have a new one right here!
• Anything to do with coleus… yes, indeedy, step right up!
• Mysteriously, there is the odd person looking for spider swarm video… and yes, I have one! (but it’s kind of tame if you’re expecting to see people DIE in the spider swarm or anything)
• It’s always nice when someone is right on target, like if they’re looking for parve cholent. Cuz I’ve got that! Or rosée sauce evaporated milk – which I also have in its simple, tasty glory. See? We’ve got a bit of everything here!
• Another bang-on search: the person looking for artscroll who also got my new Koren Sacks siddur review instead! I’m not saying nobody should buy artscroll anymore… just happy there’s now a choice.
• And then, of course, there’s the old favourite… windows live photo gallery vs picasa. And yes (sigh) I do still have that infamous review up.

There are a few things that are important to me that I weirdly WISH people would find at my blog, but that they are not… things like homeschooling, ASL, parenting; not many parenting-related searches at all, unless you count fracture clinic cast. What can I say? I guess I am not an expert on those things, don’t write about them often enough, or don’t write about them compellingly enough for Google to send people my way.

Some searches make you want to reach out and FIND the person and get to know them better. Like the one looking for “where to buy golden tansy.” Because I love my golden tansy so much, and consider it perhaps the best $10 I’ve spent on my garden… ever. Here is last year’s ode to my golden tansy (no, a regular-coloured tansy just won’t do)!

If there is anybody out there in Google-land that I could actually embrace, it might be the person who correctly spelled and searched out persicaria amplexicaulis. I hope they enjoyed the picture of mine! Another garden bargain, by the way. I bought one plant at Humber Nurseries last may, but noticed it was very crowded in its pot. So I divided it before planting into TWO plants and both have come back with amazing vigour this spring. Looking forward to a lot more of its lovely delicate firetail wands this summer.

But sometimes, when it comes to folks who stumble in from the search engines, there is absolutely nothing you can do to help. Like the person searching for “what is a animal that is brown lives in water a mamaland kinda small?”

They, too, landed on the pareve cholent page. Which is probably a healthier outlet for their fascination in any event.