Blowing my own trumpet (and 10 other peoples!)

In the second and final part of my reflective expat blog posts, I thought it would be a good time to recap some history of my British expat blog and give some of the positives that have occurred over this time.  Despite having blogged extensively in the past on sites such as Myspace, I wasn’t actually sure what or where I would go with this blog when I started out.  I did want it to have some sort of definite theme that I could hang my experiences around, rather than just writing a general blog about whatever random thoughts came into my head.  I flapped around in some of the early posts, looking for a style and plan.  

For instance, I tried writing about my experience of the K1 fiance visa process as posts, but after a while I decided that they were too dry for a general consumption (unless you have gone through, or are going through the process, you really don’t want to know about the relationship proof requirements for the I-129 Petition, or the financial support documents needed to support an I-485 Green Card application).  In the end, I put my visa experiences in in their own separate blog which I imaginatively named: My K1 Fiance Visa Experience.

Titles were also something that I toyed around with.  The “From Sheep to Alligators” name was actually the third title I tried, but I felt happy with it enough to make up a unique banner header using an old alligator picture and Adobe Photoshop.

Features and Blog Award

My expat blog about living in Florida has featured online in various websites and online publications, including 'The smart-insegors Daily', the online publication of the expat website for professionals, Insego, which I would heartily recommend as a friendly place to visit if you want an intelligent debate, information and advice or just a place to fraternize with other expats.

Australian blogger, Robynne from Robynne's Nest gave me a versatile blogger award, which I will display here below (I guess the term ‘versatile’ maybe fits, as I tend to mix up my blog with humour, trivia and serious discussions).  I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do with the award, but I do appreciate it.  Do I award it to someone else after I’ve finished with it, or just leave it to gather dust on my virtual mantelpiece?

Reddit

Early on, I got into putting links to some of my posts on the Social Bookmarking site, Reddit.  Two of my humorous posts got voted up the rankings and each received over 3,000 straight after they were posted.  I enjoyed the rush of 4 digit viewing figures, but I must admit that I felt a pang of relief when the party was over and my blog stats returned to their normal 15-50 visitors per day!

Google Traffic

I must admit that, unlike blogs that I have written in the past, I have deliberately courted Google traffic with this one, picking my keywords and tags carefully.  The nice thing about Google traffic is that people come to your blog even when you haven’t written anything new for a while (if I was ever to cease writing, I would probably continue to get 20-30 views a day from Googlers). 

The Blogger stats tell me how people have reached me.  It is amazing how many people want to know about Lake Alice, brown sauce and bacon butties!  There are also some strange ones.  Because I have written about the different names for underwear in Britain and the USA and my blog is called From Sheep to Alligators, I get visitors coming to my blog who have typed in Google searches for “sheep knickers” and “alligator underpants”, which strikes me as a little, urm, unusual.

The Google searchers are usually casual strangers, however.  So they crop up in viewer stats, but don’t tend to write comments.  I still like my loyal followers, the ones who like to comment and make some online banter, some of whom I know or have known in person, but many of whom have come from cyberspace and the blogosphere.

Pimping: Top 10 Best British Expat Blogs in USA

Last but not least, I pimped some of the other British expat bloggers in my Hubpages article: Top 10 Best BritishExpat Blogs in USA.  Keep on writing folks!

Underwear, Knickers and Pants

Americans don’t wear knickers.  They just have underwear.  And they wear their pants over their underwear, which kind of makes sense.  Except that I am British.  So underwear, knickers, and pants are all essentially the same thing.  Although having said that, knickers are normally female in the UK, whereas underwear and pants can be for either sex.

Yes, I am getting my knickers in a twist over the differences between American and British English again!

British pants were not always underpants.  When I was a child the word “pants” was normally used to refer to any sort of long trousers, the same way that the Americans use the word.  It didn’t matter what they were made of, denim, tweed, or cotton, as long as they started at your waist and covered your ankles, they were pants.  Then, during the 1990s, something rather strange happened.  Suddenly British people started using the word “pants” to mean underpants.  If you used the word in the old sense, to mean any type of long trousers, people would snigger at you, as if you were committing some enormous “faux pas”, when all you were actually doing was using the same word that everyone had always used in the past. 

My brother lived in Germany during the 90s and returned home to Britain to find that people were giggling when he talked about his pants.  I have the opposite problem to my brother.  I have to keep reminding myself that when Americans refer to their pants, they are not discussing their knickers.

I guess this sort of thing has happened before.  I mean, I remember my grandmother referring to my footwear as “stockings” instead of “socks” when I was a child.  I have no idea when the sock/stocking change happened but it clearly took place during my grandmother’s lifetime, but before mine.

As Americans don’t use the word, “knickers”, I’ll leave you with some of its uses, other than meaning an item of underwear.

1.  “Knickers!” exclaimed can mean “Rubbish!” or “Nonsense!”

2.  It can also mean, “Oh sod it!” and you can say “Knickers to that!” when you are fed up with continuing something.

3.  The phrase: “Don’t get your knickers in a twist!” means don’t get unduly stressed out.