State of the Freezer Address - 9 Years Edition

Hey everyone! I had every intention of writing a nice long post about my anniversary but unfortunately the fates aligned and it's now past my bedtime and I need to get going. I could blame my poison ivy or the increased workload from my boss being out of town, but that's just the tip of the ice cream berg. (I'm so tired, I literally wrote cream instead of berg).

This is the chest freezer as best I could arrange it and if the choices look lopsided, well, price chopper was having a good sale on both Turkey Hill and Ben & Jerry's. The upstairs freezer isn't much to look at right now.

Just know that I appreciate all of you who have stuck with me all of these years and hopefully I'll add some more words to this in the morning. Good night!

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Hello! I'm back! For those wondering what else is in the freezer (aka the review queue): More Gelato Fiasco samples! More Perry's samples! also Friendly's reviews (one of which will be nice and negative), and at least two Blue Bunny reviews though hopefully more if I can find a good place to get their new flavors.

Keeping an eye on my instagram account will hopefully give you a heads up about what's coming down the review pipe though technically you can follow on twitter or tumblr if you prefer those platforms (Facebook is just used for when reviews go live but sometimes uses my instagram photos for the links). My anniversary post on instagram pushed me over 3000 followers so that was a pretty cool anniversary present.

As for an update on the 2017 ice cream season, well, it's looking kind of over from this side of the aisle. If you check the product guide, you'll see that I've already covered most of what I wanted to cover at this point. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not spending money on stuff I know I will most likely hate, so anything with booze, coconut, or coffee basically. In the past I may have tried to cover them anyway but what's the point really?

That said, I don't know what the rest of the year has in store for OSS. Website traffic is down over 20% for the second year in a row which means that the site is now running below 2012 traffic levels. I don't do this for the traffic, I do it for the love of the industry, but that hurts. An old fashion blog about ice cream, no matter how long lived, just doesn't fit as well in our modern picture-based smartphone society. I kind of think that the website needs to have an accompanying app but who knows if I can pull that off (though I do have a rough idea in my mind of what I would like it to do).

Oh, one more thing, always remember to be awesome to each other, this includes being nice to the ice cream companies. I worry very much that we live in a world where we think every flavor from a company should be designed to suit our specific needs but we are all very different people. Going forward (and for the last several months), I've been trying to reinforce the difference between a good product and a product that clicks with me. I don't know if I'm doing a very good job with this mission, but I will keep working on it. I've learned a lot in the last nine years but that doesn't mean the battle to be a better reviewer will ever end. (hey, no snide remarks about my writing not improving in 9 years).

Ok, be well and scoop on!