Wait, I’m on WHATT now?

Snapchat is my Friend

Wait, I’m on WHATT now?

(or What Am I Even Doing?)

The past few weeks felt like I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster and the end’s not near yet it seems. Why? Well, apart from this BIG thing, becoming Nana, It felt like mentally I’ve been reaching the end with all the covid shit. And I know it’s really bad, when I don’t even want to listen to some music. Though those moments where but a few…Fortunately, things seem (!) to be going back to normal, though I am still very apprehensive about being outside, seeing as how many people are going wild. I mean, I totally get it, we all want things to get back to normal – for as far as it’s even possible – but it means things could get out of hand any time.

Steve had his first jab, though apparently I still have to wait until I’m a year older – not too long from now – to qualify, crazy… Anyways, it’s happening. Can I just say I hate needles, had enough of those as a kid. It freaks me out though, to hear people say they will go out and do EVERYTHING, after they’ve been vaccinated. Get real will ya.

**It’s closer than you think. As is X-mas after that.**

It’s why I’ve been lagging in the writing department: that rollercoaster has my head spinning. Such a weird and unnatural thing, to at the same time feel like I’m empty, totally unlike myself. One of our slogans for life is: ‘You can’t give anything when your empty yourself’. Well, makes perfect sense doesn’t it. So it went from feeling empty one day to spinning the other, aaand back. Pffft. It’s tiring that’s what it is and then feeling guilty about feeling tired. 🙄🙄🙄, life.

Anyways, things are opening up around here and I finally got properly out of the house a couple of times last week. Man did I need it! Feeling alive had never been a thing before, but yeah, and since the weather seems to agree, it’s all the nicer for it. Still I had a hard time deciding on what to write about, so I might just stick with whatever comes up – nothing new here – and at the same time update you guys on a couple of things. Definitely something new there.

First of all: being Nana is GREAT and it feels like our grandson has been part of our lives forever, even if he’s just turned three weeks old yesterday. We never were the parents who would go on and on about their kids – never had any pictures on us either when people asked for them – so I will do my best to not go all mental about our grandson now 😂 But yeah, honestly? He is such a sweet one, hardly cries, sleeps and eats a lot and is an overall happy baby. Oh and did I mention he is GORGEOUS hehe. The peeps who’ve seen the pictures know I’m not lying. Just Sayin.

We had been trying to mentally prepare for our lives to be turned upside-down by his birth, but everything just flows so naturally and why should it not? We had our first ‘babysitting session’ a couple of nights ago and since lack of sleep is normal to me, it was a joy to have him. So many memories from our own kids are now flooding back, which is really nice too. Y’all know my memory is seriously lacking most of the time, but triggers always help. It’s crazy all these little details that are now coming back to mind. Seems my hard-drive had it stored somewhere after all. Recovered data and all that.

You may have noticed the announcement about my blog having its first year anniversary this month, the 16th to be precise. I’m wrecking my brain about doing something special – because YES! – and although I could always do another Spotlight on YOU (loads of new peeps!) something new is more appealing. I’m kind of proud of how far the blog has come, I’ll share some statistics on its birthday 🤐 However, I must say, the Spotlight section seem to have captured a lot of hearts and is still threatening to take over completely. I won’t lie, I really love doing those articles.

In a way you could say music has taken over my life – I said ‘in a way!’ – and the time spent on these articles are always a big challenge: Will I make sense commenting on their music? Will they even like the article? Etc. One of the Spotlight artists decided to give me a nickname, based on my taste in music and my – at that time – profile pic: Disco Mafia Don. If you’ve followed the spotlights, you know who I’m talking about, since I was about to spill the beans there and then. The name has me smiling every time.

**Disco Mafia Don – pic by a bff, you know who you are** – **still one of my favs** 😂

And yes, things have been happening on the music side, I’ve gotten involved in stuff I never thought I would ever get involved in. If I thought expanding my social media was a big thing, 😜, more the fool me! You know I have a couple of fav artists/bands, which I am in pretty close contact with. I already had my first Spotlight 2 (the sequel if you like) and at least 2 are waiting to be written. My last Spotlight was about an absolute amazing band, Cool Million, with a bigger audience than most previous Spotlights. It was such an encouragement to hear their enthusiasm about the article, it just helps me remember why I am doing all this, when circumstances are trying to get me down.

Having – FINALLY, sigh – discovered the apparently big difference, between publishing a ‘page’ or a ‘post’ – believe me, even Steve said they do Not use the correct/IT-accepted terminology here, which confused the heck out of us – I now also see my number of blog followers going up. See, the ‘follow’ button finally works now, so you actually receive an email when I publish something. This was a struggle for real. Never too old to learn, though we still have to look into some stuff ‘behind-the-scenes’. If you’re one of those geeks, you should have noticed it in the URL’s I’ve been sharing…other than that, for you readers nothing has actually changed, except I have a few more – read: nicer – options now, regarding to coloring and stuff.

Though I’ve started all this for fun and to satisfy my craving to write, it’s absolutely amazing when a new follower is added. No big numbers yet, but hey, I was late to the party as they say. At the same time I also added the little ‘leave a comment’ box at the end of every post, so please, use it?! So far I got some really nice comments – which y’all can read for yourselves – as well as some spam. After my IT job you would think I would have thought about it, but it took me a couple of weeks to discover my blog actually has a spam folder. Well good morning to me 🤓

Where ‘normal’ comments will appear automatically, spam will have to be looked into and marked as non-spam, to allow it to be public. This is a good thing, since there’s some weird people out there sending the most amazingly awkward stuff. Yeah, wouldn’t you like to know. Luckily, I can delete those immediately and permanently. Case closed. There are also a couple of comments I just had to go like: Wait WHATT now? Sounds like Google-translate-fails to me, but hey, if the intention is nice, I take it. Tbh, I am not 100% sure my translations are always all that, even with 2 spellchecks AND Google translate. Sometimes I just rather write my way around things. Life of a blogger uhuh.

I will always try to improve, though I will also keep my focus on an easy-to-read site. Fortunately the most heard comment so far, is that people like my layout and how clear and readable the articles are, which makes me really happy. I myself hate it, when I visit a site and they make me go in circles for the most simple stuff. I usually give up after about 3 minutes 🤬 – if even – and try another site if I find one. It’s obviously a rush to read that some have marked the blog as a favorite on the other side of the world. Humbling really.

The blog seems to run itself, meaning, even if I wouldn’t share the publications on social media, which I’ve been toning down by half, there are always visitors. I said I would give it a year before deciding if it would be ‘worth it’, to go on and apparently it is. The ‘new’ posts, show previously published/related, articles, right above the comment section, which helps a lot too. People are just 1 click away from the next story. Now, talking about it being ‘worth it’, has nothing to do with any revenue I am receiving, because I can write out loud, that’s 0.0 until now. I have the opportunity to ask money for anything and everything I publish, but I haven’t felt comfortable with that yet and although I may never be, I’m just giving you a headsup that things MIGHT change in the future.

The one thing I need to keep doing of course, is publish. There’s still the adrenaline rush right before I click that big blue ‘publish’ button, I can tell you that. Not so much anymore for my personal articles, since I write about me and I’m pretty sure I know what I’m about. Yeah. I’m sure 😳 But the Spotlights are a bit different. Listen, I could just go ahead and publish – almost – anything I wish about any artist and their music, but that’s not what I wanted and somehow I developed my own recipe to cook up. If you haven’t tasted it yet, it’s good!

More and more people are reading both ‘sides’ of the blog – thank you all for reading anyhow! – but it’s funny to see my audience is mostly split in 2 different groups. Or maybe it’s just a logical effect, depending on how you look at it. We’ve been talking about splitting them up for real, but decided that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, or ever. They seem to work together pretty well so far, so why change anything when it’s not broken. Unfortunately for you guys who don’t give a fig about the music. Then again, nobody is forcing you to read anything and crossovers will be happening once in a while. Read: today.

Because it’s again music that has brought some changes in my life. Steve and I have been talking about expanding my YouTube channel before – and I am really considering starting to use TikTok as soon as I get over myself – but it’s quite a bit of work, so progress is slow. Besides, as much as I love a challenge, y’all know to actually take that step takes some preparing and stomach ache 😬 In the meantime I’ve gotten so involved – read: have been fan-girling about – one of my fav artists and one thing lead to another. Doesn’t it always?

For those of you who don’t know, as much as I do love all my Spotlight artists, there a 2 that just take the cake and I am going to introduce them a bit here. The First is Funk LeBlanc. He is one of the main reasons the Spotlight section came to life. It doesn’t happen too often, you can find an artist/band, and love all their music and Funk LeBlanc is one of them for me. A couple of months before I started the blog, I found him and got ‘lost in music’. You can read all this is My Kind of Music 1, My Kind of Music 2 and of course the Spotlight on Funk LeBlanc. Though we had been in contact from the start, he only followed me back since February this year. It had me screaming, since I really, really, LOVE his music. However, he is not the one who triggered the latest, biggest changes…

The other is Discoholic and without trying to fangirl too much, he unintentionally got me involved in things that caused new stuff being added to my already full music schedule. Both artists have one thing in common and that is wanting to stay anonymous, which means hardly anyone knows what they look like in real life. Funk LeBlanc manages this, by simply not posting a lot at all and when he does, you’ll never see his face. Discoholic manages by either wearing a Discoball on his head, or more recently, using a Snapchat filter, created by himself, in the form of yes, a Discoball on his head 🌐 I am sure you’ve seen several post passing by, where I mention one or the other. Where I was already a big fan of Funk LeBlanc when I started the blog, I only fell in love with Discoholic’s music while writing his Spotlight. So much so, this one song, ‘Liftoff’, was streamed 817 times on Spotify, by me last year. (in only 4 months time) You can all read that in the special, Spotlight on YOU.

In short: this mutli talented guy started his own streams on Twitch and recently got his own Discord server, for all ‘his’ discoholics. Now I was not a total stranger to Twitch anymore, since I’ve been following more artists there while joining URL shows, which I enjoyed very much. However, Discoholic’s streams are all about the music: everybody can send in their song requests and we all listen together and have fun. Sounds simple right? But for someone like me – and apparently a lot more people – it is really enjoyable. I’ve said it before: there’s so much fun in sharing good music! It’s also a great way to discover new artists, which is a win/win for me. Meeting new people is a bonus and since last week there’s even a ‘banger scoreboard’ to see who comes up with the biggest hits. I was the first of course. Just Sayin. (There’s way more, but I’ll leave that for Spotlight 2! 🤞)

While I’d added the Twitch app just a couple of months ago, the Discord app was downloaded by me right at the start of my blog, but not used yet… Being married to an IT nerd, the sweetheart, who has been using all of this stuff for years and years, I shouldn’t have been surprised when he took the next step for me, after I ‘FINALLY, sigh’ joined a Discord server (that’s right, Discoholic’s one – the things I do for Disco) He set me up with my own Discord server last week, specifically for my blog. My reaction: ‘Wait, I’m on WHATT now? WHAT AM I EVEN DOING??’ 😱

For someone who came from a-technical, a-social media, a anything online, it has come to THIS. Yes, I am figuring things out along the way and half of the time I may not have any clue what I’m doing, but one of my young Twitter friends told me, I quote: ‘That’s half of the Discord experience!’ Well Alright Then. Anyways, here you can find all things Colorful Expressions, you can drop by and share your thoughts about any article, give feedback, criticize, offer new ideas/improvement or just chat with me and others. I’ll share the link with you here:

Colorful Expressions on Discord

Again, we had been talking about expanding, but this came out of the blue for me too! There are enough ideas, but working them all out takes time – mostly for me 😅 – and tbh, I’ll probably never feel like I’m ready for any of it, so I just have to take one leap at the time I guess. I hope you all join me in this new adventure, don’t leave me hanging now, I’m counting on you guys!

Well that’s about it I think. Again, if you have ANY questions or comments you’re dying to share and you don’t want to do it here, look me up and let’s have a talk, I am still very much interested in what you have to say. This would also go for that awesome idea you might be having for my anniversary special! I’ll give any idea a serious thought, though please keep in mind time is of the essence here.

Thanks again for reading, I love you all!