When I started this blog, everyone who gave me advice on blogging agreed on one essential element to blogging success: never run out of topics and keep heaping logs on the fire. Least of my worries, I thought. It still is. I have a notebook full of ideas and scribbles for posts, but either haven’t found the time to keep heaping logs on the fire, or haven’t had the desire to burn down the house. At first my goal was to blog and post once a week, usually Sunday night. Then I reached a point where I thought, one post a month. Just one post a month. Come on, you can do it! And then November came and went without a single post. There is a good reason for it. I dislike November. If I had my way, there would be only 11 months a year. Both of my children were due to be born in November but I held out until December for both of them. And December I love. It has such a clear, wintry spirit.

Time to return to that notebook and dig out my scribbles…

Charlotte has tagged me as part of the Five Habits Meme. Thank you Charlotte! I am finally, and truly entering the blogging community.

What was I doing ten years ago? I was living in Beijing, had a darling 6 month old baby boy, and a darling 5 year old son. My husband was teaching at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, and I was working for an American PR agency with an office in downtown Beijing, directly opposite the legendary Friendship Store.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world: Milka and Ritter Sport chocolate, English wine gums, thin Belgian butter biscuits, caramel pudding, and milkshakes.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world: Peanuts, seaweed, raisins, cheese, fruit.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire: Sponsor my husband’s sailing trips; fund exceptional educational opportunities for my children and their friends; hire the Stones to play at my birthday party; drink better wine; move to a bigger house.

Five jobs I have had:

1. Cook for a geological expedition to the north of Canada.
2. English teacher in China.
3. PR consultant
4. Freelance translator
5. Editor

Five habits:

1. Reading the Deutschland und die Welt page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
2. Reading Spiegel Online
3. Having lunch with colleagues from different departments at SAP
4. Crawling into bed to give my son a back rub every morning as he awakes and every evening as he goes to sleep.
5. Playing loud music in the car (Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse).

 Five places I have lived:

1. Almonte, a small town in Ontario, where I was born and grew up.
2. Montreal, Quebec, where I went to university.
3. Beijing, China where I met and married my husband.
4. Heidelberg, Germany.
5. My current home conveniently located directly beside the A5 near Heidelberg.

People I would like to get to know better:

All stolen from Charlotte’s blogroll: Caroline, the Globetrotter Mom, Ian at iansblog2, heidikraut at ginandteutonic, Ian in Hamburg at lettershometoyou.

Mighty relieved I was when a tech blogger at SAPPHIRE told me that the first three months of his blogging experience were horrible. It took him three months to realize the difference between journalism and blogging – the latter in his words being “informed opinion.” My three months are not yet up but I have neglected my poor weblog sadly. I find there are very private things that I want to express in words, but not here. Which might lead me back to a diary, or to fiction writing. And then there are aspects of my job that I want to discuss here (for example, frustration with the performance feedback culture), but am afraid these will break our rules of conduct and our bloggers’s code. Yet that would be informed opinion. I welcome informed opinion on this quandry.

Time to express my thanks to two colleagues and one former colleague without whose interference this blog would never have been published.

First my thanks to former colleague Thomas Otter, who spent the better part of a morning with me in his last days at SAP talking posts, clouds, flickr, igoogle etc. Thomas was supposed to give me the Blogging for Beginners lesson, but instead I got Advanced Blogging. He is an avid supporter and we miss him at SAP. Thomas blogs irreverently on Chucks and lapel width at Dedicated Followers of Fashion and more seriously on technology at Vendorprisy.

Mike Prosceno took time to chat with me from New York about blogging several weeks ago. Mike is a social media expert, and is responsible for the topic within the company’s Global Communication’s department. His blog, Accidentally on Purpose, is a place where experts meet and exchange opinions and ideas.

Finally, I owe acknowledgements to James Farrar, whose blog Wisdom of Clouds, is a collection of penetrating and thoughtful essays on transparency and sustainability. James gave me some good advice about blogging in the bar of the Rey Juan Carlos hotel during SAP’S Field Kick-Off Meeting in Barcelona in January and has been pestering me to publish since then.

Thanks to all three blogfathers for their support!