Getting It Together

Sometimes my projects and bright ideas get ahead of my capacity for organization. Actually, that’s pretty much the story of my life. I have a lot of ideas, I just don’t have much ability to organize them and keep control of them. Creative people complain about this a lot.

Recently I realized that, despite the fact that I spend much of my working time creating web sites for people, my own online endeavors are all over the place. I’ve been trying to address that lately by organizing my various endeavors and putting them in some kind of navigable order. Clients often tell me that they like the way I keep them organized and the way I structure their web sites. I decided maybe it is time to do that for my own sites.

So this weekend I spent most of my time in front of the computer trying to bring some semblance of order to my work. I created an overall web site at KathleenValentine.com, a domain I’ve owned for years but never really used, and grouped my other sites under it. The internet has been around for a long time now and I always tell people that if they can still get their name as a URL they should do it. I took my own advice and then never did anything with it.

So, I am off on this fairly interesting adventure. My first priority was to get my writing projects all organized under the Books link, then my two blogs — this one and the family cookbook. Next I added my businesses. Valentine-Design is the most important, of course. Without Valentine-Design I’d have to get a real life and a job and other such annoying things. And Parlez-Moi Press which, at present, still qualifies for “hobby” status but I’m working on that. It’s an on-going endeavor.

One of the beautiful things about getting organized is that all of a sudden you see things you didn’t notice before. You start to realize you have possibilities you were unaware of. The cookbook blog is still in its infancy but I’ve noticed that it is already getting some traffic from people doing Google searches for Pennsylvania Dutch recipes. When I put my Great-Aunt Mary’s recipe for keuchuls on the site I did not realize that hers would be one of only two on the entire internet — at least according to Google. Keuchels are a St, Marys tradition. They are, basically, fried dough but Great-Aunt Mary’s were to die for — big, gooey wheels of dough that were puffy and chewy around the edges and thin and crispy in the center. Nothing but sugar, fat, dough and air — German cuisine at its finest.

The other thing I realized was that the Mermaid Shawl that I designed and had a knit-a-long for on this blog still gets a lot of traffic even 2 years after its creation. So I decided that the Mermaid Shawl is going to be my next project. There are a few corrections that need to be made in the directions and I want to add another variation to it besides the Gypsy Shawl that I made in recycled Tibetan Silk. I’m going to set myself the task of updating and organizing the instructions, take some new photos, add the two variations and pull it all together in a full-color PDF file that people can download and print out. And I will email the finished product with my compliments to anyone who purchases The Old Mermaid’s Tale from Amazon and emails me their Order Number. After all, the Mermaid Shawl is the perfect garment to wear while reading that book.

I always feel faintly virtuous when I start getting myself organized. Sometimes it lasts, sometimes it doesn’t but I’ve got a good start now and more new ideas than I have time for. That always makes me happy.

Thanks for reading.