Happy 2023!

Happy New Year!

Hello internet friends!

(Yes, I realize it is February, and not really close to the new year, but it was just the lunar new year too, so I can maybe say that’s what I mean?)

It has once again been way too long, but I won’t stress about that too much. In my last post I gave myself permission to do away with perfection, and so I’m going to try and walk-the-walk, so to speak, and publish a post that is definitely not going to be perfect…

When the new year is approaching, I always get excited at the idea of a fresh start and setting new goals. (It was December when I started this blog, way back in 2014…) This year was no different. The end of a year and the beginning of the next always gets me thinking, dreaming and planning. And this year I was fortunate to be on a little weekend getaway for the new year with my husband. (Without the kid too – thank you to the in-laws!) This gave me more time to relax and ponder where I am in life and what things I might want to work on or improve. While I was exploring these thoughts, I started to think about blogging again. It has basically been 5 years since I stopped blogging regularly (if I’m totally honest, I was never blogging regularly, but I was at least putting in a reasonable effort at it). It pretty much lines up with when my kid was born. I guess the extra time that I used to have for myself to do creative things and blog has been taken up by caring for him and doing things with him.

But blogging has always been something that I want to come back to. I always really enjoyed it and it was a great way for me to express myself creatively, while also giving myself motivation and accountability to get other tasks and goals done. So as we move in to a season of life where my little guy is starting to be able to do a few things for himself and is also getting in to activities and playing with friends, I am going to try and take those snippets of time that I am getting back, and put them back in to blogging.

So, what do I have planned? Well nothing too exciting, but I’m going to try and aim for one post a week. And it will mostly probably be about my dabbling in the flylady system (if you don’t know about it, it’s sort of a system for household/life management and organization). To start, I will probably just use the blog as an accountability partner and post about my goals for each week and the results from the previous week.

And with that, I will leave you this week and come back to you next week with my summary from January…

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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It’s hard to blog…

Hello internet friends,

I’ve got something to admit… I find blogging hard… Okay, let me rephrase that a little… I find that the perfectionist in me finds blogging hard. I want my posts to be well written (never going to happen) and to have interesting/worthwhile content (also not likely). So, even though I always have a list of ideas for posts, I can never seem to get a post published… That is because all these ideas generally require me to complete some sort of task outside of the blog, and not only that, but it also generally requires me to document that task. Because of that, one of a few things normally happens to those tasks… either I procrastinate the task until I have enough time to document it “properly” as I do it (which never happens), or I just work at the task piecemeal and never document it, or by the time I think to document it I feel that it’s already so far gone that it’s not worth it anymore…

So, that’s basically what’s been happening over the last few months/years. I’ve had lots of ideas, I’ve been working on all sorts of projects and habits, but nothing has been documented enough or to my “standards” to allow me to blog about it.

The other side of it is that I sometimes feel pressure to be making this blog my life or my job or whatever… And honestly, as much as I’d love to get paid to write about the projects I do around my house, I am not about to quit my well-paying and enjoyable job to “sell” myself online. It’s just not me. But I wonder if that pressure (be it real or just in my head) has held me back from just being my normal flawed person here on the blog… I wonder if it has created this sense that my posts need to be worthy of being on a professional blog to be posted…

Anyway… all this to say that I am hereby giving myself permission to let go of any pretense that this blog will ever be a money making venture. I am giving myself permission to publish posts of half-finished, not perfect projects, and to post things that I didn’t think to document until I was either done or mostly done, because if I want to share it, I should!

So hopefully I will be able to get some posts done in the near future and get back to posting more regularly… with imperfect, but real, content.

Let me know if there are any other previous post topics that you’d like an update on…

P.S. Back in the spring of 2021 I was doing the mins-game… I abandoned that, so I won’t bother trying to finish that specific challenge up… but I have been doing lots of decluttering and I have a lot more to do, so hopefully I’ll find a way to post about my haphazard decluttering…

2020 – Blogging Goals

In my last post I went over my four overall goals for 2020. I guess they were more themes for goals rather than specific goals… So I want to revisit each one with a bit more details, hopefully working towards a “SMART” goal that I can eventually say that I have definitively met.

I’ll start with #3 from my last post because once I commit to blogging, then I can use the rest of my goals to fulfill the blogging goal…

Old Posts & Updating Things…

I have a lot of blog posts that I have started writing, but either they required me to do some more research, accomplish some sort of task, or work through some thought processes before finishing them up.  Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of these may never be finished…

Whether or not it was his intention, a recent post published by Steve over at ThinkSaveRetire got me motivated to revisit these posts…  (I realize that his post was intended to help us revisit posts that have already been published, and it may help me do that as well, but it reminded me that the drafts that are sitting unloved in my WordPress account could still be worth salvaging if I update them to my current status and mindset.)

But… As is typical with me, I always have grand plans but then fail to follow through.  So, I’m going to use you, my faithful readers, as accountability partners.  Here are a few posts that I am now committing to finish up and publish in the next few weeks:

Happy Blog-iversary!

It has officially been 2 years since I started blogging!  (You can read my very first post here.)  I can’t really believe that I’ve actually stuck with it, although I can’t say I’ve exactly been consistent… But, there has never been a month where I didn’t post anything, and I am still really having lots of fun with it.

I never created this blog with the intention of creating a large readership, or worrying about my page views, but I would be lying if I said that it didn’t thrill me to see a post be popular, or to have a bunch of people comment on one of my posts.  And, whether or not it was my intention, my page views have dramatically increased over the past two years.

When I hit my 100th post last fall, I did a summary post to review some of the stats of my blog, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some of those numbers again, over a year later.

This is post #177.

So, I haven’t kept up quite the same pace as I did my first year of blogging.  But I’m not too concerned with that.  Life gets busy and sometimes it just doesn’t work out to get a blog post published.

Let’s go over the same numbers as last time…

Baking Success… Blogging Fail…

On Sunday, when I was trying to get organized for the week, I pulled out a can of chickpeas and my food processor and decided I was going to make some healthy muffins for easy grab-and-go breakfasts or snacks.  The recipe I was going to follow was for these delicious peanut butter and banana muffins that I have made before.  I knew I didn’t have any bananas, but figured I could replace them with applesauce… Which it turns out that I didn’t have either… At this point I had already started putting them together, so I had to figure out how to get my blended chickpeas, oats and peanut butter to turn into muffins.

So, I’ve done my fair share of internet reading on alternative baking (gluten free, dairy free, nut free, vegan… you name it… I’ve read it…), so I understood that the banana in the muffin recipe was probably acting as a binder, an oil substitute, a source of moisture and maybe a sweetener for the recipe… Now to figure out how to replace those with what I had… For a binder, I decided to use some ground flax seed with some soy milk, because I know that can be used as an egg replacement in some recipes.  For oil, I decided to just use more peanut butter.  For the moisture, I added a bit more soy milk.  And finally, for the sweetness, I added a touch more maple syrup.  Then, because it didn’t really have a flavour other than peanut butter… I decided to add some cocoa so that they would be chocolate muffins.

In the oven they went.  I was sort of expecting my concoction to totally fail, but it didn’t.  In fact, they are really really delicious.  Baking experiment success!

And now for the blogging fail… If I had thought about it beforehand, I could have totally taken photos of the process and had an interesting photo filled post for today about healthy (or not so healthy) alternatives that I’m experimenting with… But no, total blogging fail, I only have a picture of the muffin that I ate for breakfast this morning.

If you blog, do you just constantly photograph everything, in case it ends up being blog post worthy?   How do people do this all the time?

Blogging Break…

  
So, you may or may not have noticed, but I sort of lost the regular posting schedule that I was on… Turns out that I had a little bit too much on my plate, and something had to give… And it was blogging… So, sorry about that…

And now I am heading on my long delayed honeymoon.  Yes, our wedding was in August and we are just now heading on our honeymoon… So, I don’t exactly plan to be blogging while I am away, but you never know.  I also realize it is totally not recommended to tell the big bad interweb that you are going on vacation, but we have housesitters taking care of our place and our cats, and it’s not like we are going to be out of touch or not able to check in on things…

Anyway, I hope everyone has a great Easter and I will get back to a regular routine when I am back from vacation.

Cheers!

Nothing to Report…

I wish that I would have something interesting and exciting to post every Tuesday and Thursday that I have set as my posting schedule, but unfortunately I don’t really lead that exciting of a life… I have nothing to report…

I work full time, and I play my sports, I try to eat healthy and stay active, and hopefully work a little bit towards my goals… But really, I’m just plugging along these days… And definitely nothing interesting or exciting enough to report on the blog… That sort of sounds like the something from my first blog post ever… but I know that I am much more mindful and consciously involved in my life now.  That doesn’t, however, change the fact that I don’t have anything to write about today…

I haven’t done any recent decluttering… And I definitely haven’t done any more of the KonMari method that I started with my clothes… Despite my goal of running in 5 races this year, I haven’t done one, or even registered for one yet (though there is an 8k run this weekend that I could register for last minute)… I haven’t actually managed to finish reading a book that I have taken from the library yet.  Which really is quite sad… I have a bunch of small projects on the go, but nothing to any point where I can share them… I’m making use of my bullet journal for my daily to-do lists and keeping my schedule straight, but that’s nothing too exciting… My husband and I are planning our honeymoon, which has been loads of fun, but nothing is set in stone yet, so it’s not like I have anything to post about that either…

Post #100

So when I went to post my post on Thursday, I realized that it was post #99… and so the next post would be #100.  It’s a bit of a milestone for beginner bloggers.  Our Next Life also just posted their 100th post a little while back and did a fun stats & numbers based post about it.  I love numbers… so I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to do a little copy cat (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?) and to a bit of a summary of some of the numbers and stats on my blog to celebrate #100.

Now, to be honest, the blog over at Our Next Life is super well done, much more professional than mine, I don’t really consider them beginner bloggers… and well… their blog is more focused and probably a lot more interesting to read than mine… (If you haven’t checked them out yet, you totally need to do that!  I’ll be here when you get back… if you come back…)

So, anyway, a lot of what they posted for their blog stats don’t really apply to me… for example, let’s take a few of the first stats that they mentioned…

Number of Logos: 0
I don’t have a logo… I should probably design one, eh?  Any ideas for me?

Average Number of Posts per Month: 8
That’s actually not that bad of a stat for 12 months of posts… but the gap between some of my highest month  (March) with 13 posts, and my lowest months (Sept, Oct & Nov) with 5 posts is pretty big…

Writing… and what’s been going on lately…

Hello blog world. Have you missed me? I apologize for my absence, but I have definitely been struggling with a work-life balance the last couple months as I have been away for work so much. I haven’t been reading as many blogs as I would like, and haven’t been posting on my own blog much at all, and I miss it.

Writing…

I really like writing. I thought that maybe this was a new thing, since I started my blog, but after giving it a bit of thought, it turns out it isn’t…