I don't have a niche

Last night, I was all excited about starting a blog.  A blog! Me!  Something new to occupy my time!  As last night was a stinky TV night (my beloved was watching a show about a serial killer who has a cult following of other lunatics, followed by a show about post-apocalyptic, electricity free world.  And he makes fun of my watching Downton Abbey and Call the Midwife?  But I digress) so I decided to go online and look at other people’s blogs.  I was really trying to see how to do things like add pictures to my blog, and add a counter, and add an “email me” link but all the help sites were focused on how to get traffic to your site and all of a sudden I was off chasing rabbits:  still don’t know how to add graphics, but I know how to track my traffic.  For Pete’s sake.

It seems you have to have a niche.  Most of the blogs I was looking at fell into one of four categories: 

Super Crafty Women who can build an entire bedroom suite out of nothing but cereal boxes and duct tape. Yeah, that’s not me.  I once spent an entire afternoon trying to put up a paper towel holder.  If these women are real, it’s scary. 

Super Organized Women who take pictures of their linen closets, pantries, medicine cabinets and closets and then go into detailed, multi-stepped descriptions of how they scrubbed their garbage disposal with an old toothbrush.  They also apparently stopped and took pictures, mid-scrub.  They had before, during and after pictures of bathtubs in need of cleaning and gave intricate battle plans for rotating the beans in the pantry.  I have a feeling these women would pass out if they saw the dog hair in my living room or if they found out I didn’t regularly disinfect my dishwasher using Tang.

Cooking Queens (who all seem to model themselves after The Pioneer Woman).  Now I can cook, but I cook normal people food.  Last night, we had tacos.  They were good, too, but all in all, they were just tacos.  Certainly nothing I was going to photograph and blog about, and … what?  Post a recipe about how to make tacos?  They’re just tacos.  I saw one woman who posted (again, with pictures and a recipe) about her dinner of octopus and eggplant casserole.  True story, google it if you’re curious.  I would post a link but I haven’t learned how to do that yet.  I got distracted by pictures of baby octopi. 

And then there were the Budget Mavens who were living on$14,000 a year, while raising six children. And they paid off their mortgage in 5 years and were putting $10,000 a year in savings.  OK, so I exaggerate, but not by much.  I am all about saving money and budgeting (we are Dave Ramsey people and we swear by his FPU) but the whole “we live below the poverty level” spin on blogging sure isn’t my niche.

So what does that leave? Pictures of my dog?  Yeah, she sleeps.  Right now, she’s snoring on the couch.  That’s not exactly exciting. 

So, 24 hours into my blogging adventure, I was already discouraged and beaten down.  The negative self-talk had begun and because I couldn’t figure out how to post pictures on my blog and I sure wasn’t going to cook baby octopi, then why bother? 

But you know what?  I’m not quitting.  I’m gonna figure out how to post pictures of my snoring dog.  And I’m doing this for me. 

And it’s kind of fun.