I Lost My French Lady

I seem to have lost one of my French ladies. I was utterly tickled to have acquired two new followers in France (how chic and cool is that!)--both terribly talented jewelry designers, too!--but alas, I lost one. She has disappeared from my list of followers. Where did you go, Lilibulle? What did I say? I have pondered for days what I could have done to alienate my French Lady #1. Perhaps the French are very sensitive about Humpty Dumpty and I was treating him too flippantly? Were the boat photos just too graphic? I even went back and looked at comments I left on her blog (was I obnoxious?)--I raved rapturously (did I cross the line into creepy obsequiousness?) about two of her gorgeous recent creations. Nothing inappropriate that I could see, and many other readers had left similar comments. Is it one of those language barrier things? Like I inadvertently used an English word that has really insulting connotations in French? Like, "stunning" is generally interpreted to mean "blindingly ugly" in France?

Or maybe (this is my favorite) it's a Blogger glitch and my French Lady #1 didn't really leave at all! If so, Hi Lilibulle!! Or maybe Blogger is randomly unsubscribing people from blogs without their knowledge. That would be a Bloggerly thing to do. At least I still have one French lady left. French Lady #2, the very talented jewelry designer and polymer clay artist, Veronique Perez. This is one of my favorite bracelets of hers. Check out some of her amazing polymer clay pendants HERE and HERE. THAT is what I was thinking when I bought a bunch of polymer clay several months ago. Hautes fauxtiquites.

It might seem like I'm overreacting, but this is a continuation of a disturbing trend that started last week. I seem to be losing followers. I was congratulating myself on having broken through the 30-followers-barrier ("yesss!" I hissed), and then my little bubble burst then next day when it went back down to 29. Who did I lose? I scoured my list, but couldn't pin down for sure who had left (I think it might have been Joyce Richards--she let me know she's diverting energy from her online presence to deal with health issues; maybe she deactivated her Blogger account--I can't remember if she was following me on here or not!). I wondered if I had said something offensive in a recent post--I wracked my brain and looked through my posts, but apparently I'm too insensitive to figure out what it was I said. Did my "Rode Hard" post offend my transvestite readers? (By implying that having a voice like a transvestite was not a desirable thing?) Or my middle-aged/smoker/mid-western readers? No offense intended to any of these demographic groups. If I actually WAS a middle-aged, mid-western smoker I would be proud of my voice; I just don't feel it is representative of me at this time. Maybe in 10 years I will have moved to Michigan and become severely addicted to unfiltered Camels, but it seems a little premature right now.

Or maybe these readers had dipped into my archives and found something unseemly in there. Really possible. I can't even remember what's in there now. Or maybe I said something wildly inappropriate about crepes or something in another social networking venue. Very possible, that would be like me. But I don't recall encountering many of my blog readers on Twitter or Facebook. Or maybe the recent dearth of actual jewelry-related posts made my blog seem like the old bait-and-switch. You THOUGHT you were signing up for a jewelry blog but you got all this other crap instead about bad garage bands, transvestites and fiberglass. *SIGH*, sorry. I actually have been making stuff (I made SIX pair of earrings in two days--who put the meth in MY coffee?), really aMAZing stuff, I just haven't listed it yet. I sort of want to do a deluge thing on Etsy where I take up the ENTIRE "recent listings" page. Doesn't matter what you click on--for a solid 20 seconds, you're going to end up in MY shop.

For several minutes I was deeply afraid someone had hijacked my Blogger account--Mozilla had a security breach and I had recently purchased Firefox so I scoured past posts for unauthorized donkey sex or Aryan nation posts or something similar but found nothing. I continue to cling to the hope that it was yet another Blogger bug and French Lady #1 still likes me.

Come back, Lilibulle!