I got the nicest surprise the other day that was almost as gratifying as watching my Greys suck down about a pound of “Chop” right after I make it:

I was zipping through my email while simultaneously slurping down coffee and putting on makeup for work when I came across this email:

blog: Parrot Nation

Your blog on blogville.us has been approved.
Your listing can be viewed here:
http://blogville.us/parrot-nation-address73712.htm

Your blog has been made an editors choice pick! (less than 1% of blogville blogs are editors choice).

I almost dropped my makeup brush into my coffee. So I hurried on over to “Blogville” and took a “look-see” at what was going on. Whoaaaah! This is what “Blogville” is all about:

“So how is blogville different than other blog directories? Keywords. Your blog can appear on many different pages throughout blogville based on the keywords used in your blog listing. Your blog does not have to fit into a cookie-cutter category structure used by most blog directories, you can choose whatever keywords that are relevant to your blog.”

Turns out, these people hand-select blogs to include in their directory. In other words, they actually read the blogs before they decide to include them in their lineup of featured blogs. Talk about some work! Jaysus! I was very happy and very gratified. I was surprised because “PN” is really a rather specialized blog that may or may not be of interest to your average reader. After all, I’m not Helen Philpot, the 84 year-old brilliant blogger who began blogging on “Margaret and Helen“ during the last election and got a huge following based on her outlandish, brilliant and very colorful posts about Sarah Palin, Anne Coulter’s big feet and posting letters to her family about Thanksgiving:

Nevertheless, the staff at “Blogville” seemed to like what they saw. And they not only accepted my blog for a listing, they gave it “Editor’s Pick” status. So it was a huge honor, (Well, to me…) and a confidence boost as well. But I had other stuff to do, like, well, fly to Ecuador. So I moved on with my day and got to the next thing. But it made me happy just the same.