Books have also been a blog topic all along. The trend has been toward eBooks which are now about all I read. The botanical eBooks list has grown to over 2,000 volumes at this point and is still growing! I’ve become more interested in images of all kinds – photographs, paintings, etching, sketches – and I appreciate viewing them online rather than in a museum or physical book; I like to take my time, sometimes enlarge a particular portion of the image, view them on just about any device and almost anywhere!
I have made pattern-like doodles for as long as I can remember, and they have been part of the blog posts for most of the 9 years. Now they follow the Zentangle tile process – most of the time. I’ve diverged in several ways and that will change over time. At present I am making tiles in black ink with the idea of coloring them….adding white highlights as the last step. I am not using a pencil at all (for strings or for shading).
Gleanings have also been in the blog for most of the 9 years. My feeds have changed slightly but are still skewed toward science related topics. One trend I noticed is that the solutions to address climate change have matured over the past 9 years. There are a lot of effective technologies available to choose from (see Project Drawdown) – which add some hope to an otherwise dystopian future for the Earth and humanity.
My outdoor volunteering ramped up over the 9 years and I enjoyed writing about it…then that aspect of life came crashing down with the pandemic. I am hopeful about it starting again sometime in 2021. Giving back to the community, interacting with schools on field trips and people visiting Brookside’s butterfly exhibit is a joy I’ve missed in 2020.
I’ve been in my same home office for the entire 9 years and the view through the window is always fabulous – out to the bird feeder/bath on our deck and back into the forest. The view is inspiring and pictures I take through the window often make it into blog posts. Probably my favorite sequence is of bluebirds bathing from back in February 2018. I collected a sequence of ‘through the window’ pictures from 2012 through 2019 for the slideshow below. The feeder was added in 2015 which was a big attraction for November birds. I also noticed that the zoom on my cameras improved over the time period!
