Let me take a second to congratulate myself on a clever title for a post about writing notes to friends. See what I did there? Go, Melisa! When all of the self-isolating (or social distancing, physical distancing, quarantining, or whatever we’re calling it these days) started a couple of months ago, the vast majority of us resorted to doing whatever made us feel better. That is to say, in a time when we’ve had (and continue to have) to do something that is for the most part extremely uncomfortable—staying home most or all of the time—it seems only natural that we would choose to spend our time doing the things…
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#NaBloPoMo 2018: Check!
Today is the last day of November, and that means National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, is drawing to a close. I have attempted to blog every day in November for the last decade. I think I only “failed” once, though I don’t really count it as a fail since I tried my best and I was my only judge and jury. I thought this month was going to be really tough since I was traveling for 14 days out of 30, but I was wrong. I pre-scheduled 3 or 4 posts ahead of our Maui trip because I didn’t know what to expect as far as writing time, and…
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The Lost Craft
Did you know I used to be a crafting wizard? It’s a fairly well-known fact among those who know me that I’m very creative and know my way around a wide variety of supplies from any arts and crafts store, but most of the friends who I’ve met in the past decade have no idea how big my obsession was. (I did craft shows, for goodness’ sake!) I come by it honestly; a love of creating with our hands runs in the family. I vividly remember following my mom into Lee Wards Craft Store when I was very young. At every visit she picked up the supplies she needed for…
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Eleven.
I completely missed my eleventh “blogoversary”, which happened last week, on October 28th. It’s funny how, in the early days of blogging, the annual anniversary of our first post was a huge deal. The community was different back then; each of us bloggers had our own little community of readers within the larger community as a whole. People actually commented on blog posts and we found new blogs to read by checking out the sites belonging to our commenters. Facebook was fairly new back then and word of mouth was how we grew our sites. The fact that I didn’t even think about my anniversary on the day it happened…
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New Blog Design, Who Dis?
My blog is finally fixed: it’s been moved to a new host, cleaned up, and redesigned…and I’m thrilled. Many thanks to Lisa at Gizmo Creative Factory for saving my life–err, my blog’s life–more times than I can count this year. I am absolutely in love with the new look and she got it done just in time for two things: my birthday (which is next week) and NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), which begins today. I make a good effort at NaBloPoMo each year and it renews my writing energy. To be honest, I’m traveling for a bit this month so I wasn’t even going to attempt it for 2018,…
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My Best of 2016: Happy New Year!
It’s (finally) the last day of 2016 and I’m so happy it’s over. So many of us have had an ultra-challenging year personally, and we’re ready to close the door on it and hope for a Happy New One. I wrote 75 posts this year (not including this one) which is, I’m certain, a new low for me. Twenty-seven of them were in the month of November alone as I tried to tackle NaBloPoMo. A couple of years ago my lack of posting really would have bothered me, but this year it doesn’t. Just like me, this blog is in a constant state of evolution. I don’t put all my…
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That’s A Wrap!
Another November NaBloPoMo is in the bag. Yaaaaay me! I feel like I did really well this time: I didn’t have any trouble coming up with things to write about, which was refreshing because I’m usually hitting up my draft folder like a boss. Not this time. I think that I had more fun with NaBloPoMo this month than I probably ever had because I didn’t stress out about “how good” each post had to be, which is a strange admission to make but completely true. After all, if you were to ask me why I started blogging in the first place I would have a couple of answers for…
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The Writing Process Blog Tour!
My sweet friend (and LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER Boston co-producer) Cheryl of Busy Since Birth tagged me for the Writing Process Blog Tour and although I almost always hate being tagged—which is hilarious because my friend Kari from A Grace Full Life just tagged me for another meme just this morning and she’s probably going to read this and go, “GULP”—I’m going to do it anyway. I also have to point out that I absolutely adore that Cheryl sent me a Facebook message BEFORE she tagged me, to ask my permission first because she knows that some people always hate being tagged. (Did I mention how much I hate being…
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I Have A Head For Business*
Although I graduated from high school wanting to earn a degree in Journalism but instead started out majoring in German and then switched to Elementary Education (and carried that through to my Bachelor of Science), these days I tell myself that a Business degree would have been great, too, because I am good at seeing things from the points of view of both a customer and a company. I have excelled at this in every job I’ve ever held, and I believe that my employers notice it about me very quickly. (I have always been proud of the fact that, at eighteen years old, I was given a set of…
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Let The To Do List-ing Begin!
After yesterday’s announcement, I was pretty keyed up and had the absolute worst night of sleep in recent memory. It took me two hours to fall asleep in bed because I was thinkingthinkingthinking, and I was wide awake again after about two hours because I was thinkingthinkingthinking. I came downstairs at about 3:30 a.m., turned on the television and opened the ole’ laptop. I worked on a post, checked emails, and scrolled Facebook–but not for long because my friends were all sleeping at the time and there were few updates posted since I had gone to bed earlier. I finally went back to sleep on the couch and got about…
