What makes a blog post popular?

Your guess is as good as mine. I've yet to really figure out the formula, but I do know that, on this blog, the most popular posts are dessert ones.  If you click on the Popular Posts page, you'll see that the one with the most pageviews is Hot Fudge Brownie Milkshakes.  My favorite dessert thus far, Cake Batter Rice Krispy Treats, is also on the list.  I attribute a lot of this to Pinterest, because I do pin my desserts onto a blog board.  Some of you have been kind enough to pin my recipes too, so thank you!

However, when I was coming up with this new design, I thought, "I want to read through my blog, find the posts that mean something to ME, and then put them somewhere YOU can find them".  So I threw my favorites in up there too.

Reading back through my posts, I came to realize that Alaska made me a better writer.  I'm more amused and/or impressed by the posts I wrote when I was stuck in tundraland than I am by anything I write now.  Is there a connection?  Probably.  My best stuff came out, I feel, when Scott was deployed. Most likely because I had no one to talk to, no one to vent to, and no one to listen to me.  My creativity was simply overflowing (or something like that).

Now that I'm in a place that's not Alaska, it's interesting for me to think of other army wives as NOT having lived by themselves in Alaska.  Every army wife in Alaska went through deployment and made it through the cold, dark winters and the bright, happy summers alone.  It was a fact.  Here, that's not the case.

People ask me what Alaska was like.  I don't even know where to start!  How do you sum up almost 4 years of your life in a few sentences?  You really can't.  I usually just shrug my shoulders and say, "There was good and bad to it.  I saw it in a different light because I spent half of our time there by myself...it was kind of isolating."  Or something like that.

(It's also worth mentioning that I find it interesting to meet army wives who've not dealt with deployment.  Everyone in Alaska had been through it 2 or 3 times.  I try to be encouraging when I hear of an army wife facing an upcoming deployment, but it's hard to remember what life was like before Alaska and the army came into our relationship.  The truth was that I thought I was special and unique for dealing with deployment right out of the marriage gate.  That's not the case.  Almost everyone does it and, honestly, I think you become a better person because of it.)

So that's where we are.  When I wrote a lot of those posts I did not want to remember them. I recall that it was difficult to even publish them because I really thought I'd come off as annoying (many never made it past "draft"). I wouldn't even re-read the things after I posted them (see: Really?!).  Now, I'm so glad I have them. Which is why, of course, I want to share them with you.

Flowers from one of my students on my last day