November 11, 2008 was the night my husband and I thought we had mice. We both awoke at 3 a.m. (does anything good happen at 3 a.m. other than new babies?). What we heard sounded like baby animals of some kind. Because we live in Florida on a fresh water canal, various critters aren’t unusual for us. But we’ve never been awaken before except by the opossums in the garbage cans. But this noise sounded as if it were in the house and not outside.

Previously that day I found the  puppy cam site about the shiba inu puppies that 3-4 million people watch daily and downloaded it to my PC. I minimized it and promptly forgot about it. I use my PC infrequently throughout the day as I get carpal tunnel in the craziest places because I use a computer 8-12 hours most days. My laptop I use on a portable, adjustable table. The adjustable table is great plus I got a new comfortable chair. The table, the chair, and my handy carpal tunnel brace make carpal tunnel disappear.

But back to the puppies—in the middle of the night, I awoke to some animals in our house. But I couldn’t locate them. Lou got up and went outside and said that they were in the wall. But we don’t have real walls in these homes. I thought they were down in the heat vents. But I still couldn’t find them. So I decided to come out with a flashlight and “trap” them. When I came out to the kitchen with a flashlight, I noticed the light from my computer speakers. It was the puppies—apparently; they love to play at night.

In finding sites like the puppy cam, many of the blogs I read daily for writing ideas have a RSS link—that little orange button you see everywhere. With RSS, I can keep a check on all the blogs I like and only have to read 5 headlines from each to see if I am interested or not.

The 2 RSS readers I use are Google Reader (the most popular) and Pageflakes. I am so obsessive I use two so that I can skim Pageflakes when I like and read Google reader closer daily. I follow about 100 blogs—many of the more prolilic bloggers follow 500-600 daily. But many of the the large blogs also have 5-10 writers to cover a wider field of daily information.

The following list are places you may look for new blogs. Never forget to check the blogs listed on the blogs that you like.

1. Google Blog Search–returns links from machine-made blogs sometimes which is disheartening when they ban bloggers for the same practice.

2.  About.com has a blog search engine page that lists several search engines for blogs.

3.  Webcrawler has links to find blogs. This link page also has good articles for the blog newcomer.

4.  Resource Shelf has links for finding blogs by location.

5.  Blog Catalog lists itself as the blogger social network but also has a good directory. It also has a “rate my blog design” until Jan. 9, 2009.

6.  I use delicious a lot and it has a blog that has a lot of tips for using delicious on your cellphone if you are going mobile. Here is my delicious tags/bookmark list.