12 years of Blog Anniversary

This blog started in November 2011…just after I made the decision to retire. 12 years have certainly been full of new adventures…a satisfying mix of days that were challenging and full of activity … also plenty to savor and enjoy. The blog helped me document much of what happened.

Last year I documented the changes within the blog over the first 11 years so I won’t repeat that. The main change over the past year has been my more regular visits to Carrollton, TX that resulted in a monthly visits to Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge (near Sherman TX), observations in my parents’ yard, and the birds at a park in Carrollton….and subsequent blog posts. There were also 1st visits to many places close to where we moved in Missouri that became fodder for blog posts as well.

I am anticipating that the 13th year of the blog will document our return to attending birding festivals and include more posts about elder care…documenting the journey my sisters and I have with our parents.

Previous anniversary posts: 11th anniversary, 10th anniversary

11 years of Blogging

I started this blog 11 years ago this month – November 2011. It was one of the activities I started as I prepared to leave my career behind….anticipating that I needed new rhythms to take the place of work days. Writing a daily blog was one of the first ideas I had for a new daily rhythm, and it has continued to be an outlet for the evolution of my post-career years.

The broad categories of my favorite activities – reading, writing, traveling, photography/art - have been reflected during the 11 years…with the shifts I’ve experienced over the years evident in the posts:

My reading is almost entirely digital media now – dominated by Internet Archive and website feeds (via Feedly). I’ve gone through spurts of multimedia learning/reading (Coursera courses and webinars with details charts and references) but am in a multimedia lull right now. My interest in botanical prints has continued…with a goal of finding/browsing 20 new books on the topic each month. My interest in climate change has ramped up…and I have taken/plan personal changes; I’d like to leave the earth a better place…or at least not a worse place (that idea is getting more and more challenging).

Writing has been a way to reduce stress for me since the 1980s; I’ve trained myself to ‘write it down and let it go.’ The upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated cultural divisions in the US has been a greater strain on that training than ever before and there was some faltering in late 2020/early 2021. I am realizing now that writing is, again, my most effective way to bolster my resilience to whatever happens.

Traveling for the first few years of the blog was motivated by my daughter’s location (in Tucson) with road trips to and from Arizona and traveling with her to Hawaii…then helping her move to Pennsylvania and then to Missouri more recently. My volunteer work (leading themed hikes with elementary school children, coaching high school teams doing water quality assessments in streams/rivers, etc.) enabled me to discover natural places close to home. Birding festivals became a favorite travel motivation (to New Mexico, Florida, and Texas) in the few years before the pandemic. Then it all stopped. Since the pandemic, our travel is day trips or for family visits (my parents and daughter) and then our moving to Missouri….and it has all been road trips.

My expertise (and equipment) for photography has increased dramatically over the 11 years. I go through phases…most recently an uptick in macro photography (with my phone). I have refined my Zentangles over the years…and going through phases: new tile shapes (other than square), white highlights, coloring (with different kinds of pens). There is a lot more artist creation in my life now than during my career and my blog has reflected that increase over the past 11 years.

That sums up the state of the blog 11 years in!

Here is a summary of the regular posts (weekly and monthly):

Gleanings 1st one was for week ending 12/31/2011…use the gleanings tag to see all the posts

eBook(s) of the week – 1st monthly post was in October 2012 (i.e. started out as monthly transitioned to weekly on October 9, 2020)…use the book of the week category to see all the posts

eBotainical Prints – 1st post with the eBotanicalPrints tag was on December 17, 2018…use the eBotanicalPrints tag to see all the monthly posts

Zoom – 1st monthly post was in August 2013…use the zoom tag to see all the posts

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – 1st monthly post in October 2012…use the celebration tag to see all the posts

Previous anniversary post: 10th anniversary

My Blog’s 10th Anniversary

I started my blog 10 years ago this month. It was part of my transition from being career focused for more than 40 years. And I’ve kept it going – it’s an enjoyable daily rhythm for me. I’m savoring my history of the past decade in this post.

The blog posts from 2011 included a trip to Longwood Gardens and a long road trip to Tucson, Arizona (with photos of rest stops along the way) where my daughter was in graduate school. I stated the gleanings of the week and enjoyed posting recipes and photographs of places I was visiting. The new technology was a Kindle Fire; I was making the transition from physical to digital books…it would take several more years to complete the transition and I’d graduated from the Kindle Fire to an iPad, Smartphone (and laptop) for reading. Some of my favorite posts form 2011 include: Recipe of the Week: Homemade Soup for a Cold Day, Water Lily Pictures, and 10 Cosmetics from the Kitchen.

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In 2012, I started the monthly ‘10 days of little celebrations’ and experienced the trauma of my parents getting older…beginning to experience substantial health problems. We added a bird feeder on our deck – visible from my office window and I started enjoying birdwatching through the window. Some of my favorite posts include: Birds from my Office Window, Gray Day Reflections, Yucca Seed Pods, and Ten Days of Little Celebrations - November 2012.

The next year I started the zooming and free eBooks posts. Over the years my camera’s optical zoom capabilities have improved dramatically and I enjoy using it to get better images. By this time, I was almost completely transitioned to digital books too. We made a road trip to Florida for a satellite launch at Cape Canaveral and I got my first close view of Sandhill Cranes in the Orlando airport cell phone lot waiting for my daughter to arrive. Some of my favorite posts close to that anniversary include: 3 Free eBooks - December 2013, Sandhill Cranes in Florida - November 2013, Herons in Florida - November 2013, and Zooming - December 2013.

In 2014, I started my effort to reduce the ‘stuff’ we had accumulated from living for more than 25 years in our house. My volunteer work has gradually increased…and would be easily sustained until the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of my favorite posts from the end of 2014 include: The Grand Cleanout - December 2014, December Sunrise, and Fall Field Trips.

The big event at the end of 2015 was our travel to the big island of Hawaii…including a day trip to the top of Maunakea. It was an wonderful experience but I find myself wondering if I ever want to take a long flight like that again.

2016 was our first birding festival – the Festival of the Cranes at Bosque del Apache. We also discovered the Bald Eagles at Conowingo Dam, closer to home. I started my monthly Zentangle posts. Here are some sample posts: Highlights of 2016, Conowingo - December 2016, Zentangle® – November 2016, and First Day at Bosque del Apache.

I started the monthly eBotantical Prints posts in November 2017. I’d been browsing historical botanical books in the last decade of my career and was beginning to figure out a way to share my list. At the time I thought that I had about exhausted the supply, but I’ve continued to add 20 or so books every month until there are now over 2,200 books on the list!

In 2018 we attended our second Festival of the Cranes in New Mexico then enjoyed the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival early in 2019.

In the last few months of 2019, there was a last road trip with my parents at Thanksgiving. We enjoyed the Christmas lights near home and planned for a birding festival in Laredo, TX in the early part of 2020.

As we were coming back from the Laredo birding festival, COVID-19 was in the news and soon we were ‘staying at home as much as possible’. By November 2020, we were anticipating that a vaccine was going to become available and the pandemic would end. We were doing virtual birding festivals and otherwise keeping ourselves happy at or close to home.

And here I am in November 2021, still not like I was pre-pandemic. I enjoy many of the same things I have in the past 10 years, but I am not out venturing into crowds…not flying. I am facing a health challenge of my own (cancer). My parents are home bound in Texas, and I have made visiting them my rationale for 3 road trips since the spring when I became fully vaccinated. At this point, it is not the pandemic that causes most of my anxiety, but the changed behavior (sometimes abrasive and violent) of people under stress that has become so apparent over the past year.

The blog continues…it’s a way to document my present….and notice the subtle changes in the way I am ‘living well.’

9th Anniversary for my Blog

I started my blog on November 11th, 2011.

The very first post was about making Pumpkin Gingerbread Muffins. Maybe I’ll make the recipe again this year. Brookside Gardens and Longwood Gardens had wonderful displays for fall gourds and squashes that year. I was doing some photography then, but a good portion of the blog posts weren’t illustrated. Now the majority of posts have a illustrations and sometimes the topic is the illustrations themselves.

Travel has continued to be a blog topic all along…which has made this year different from all the preceding ones; it’s been a year dominated by being ‘at home.’ The most frequent destinations in previous years were where my family lives – the Dallas, TX area for my sisters and parents….and then a sequence of places for my daughter: Tucson, AZ for grad school, Pittsburgh and State College, PA for post doc, and Springfield, MO for faculty position. During some of the years I travelled with my sister…to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Rhode Island. My husband and I discovered Birding Festivals as a travel focus beginning in 2016 with Bosque Del Apache’s Festival of the Cranes. As soon as the pandemic wanes (probably with the wide availability of a vaccine), we’ll be traveling again and the blog will pick up that thread again.

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!

The very first post about little celebrations was back in August 2012 and then I started the listing of 10 each month in September 2012. Noting the joys of life is one of the ways I keep myself optimistic…which I’ve needed more than usual in 2020. Stream through the ‘celebration’ posts via this link.

The blog continues on….documenting my post-career journey. These pandemic and political upheaval months of 2020 have probably been the most unusual – and anxious - of my life; I am looking forward to the new year and documenting the events that unfold – finding celebrations.

YE thinking: Blog Evolution

My first blog post was back in November 2011. I recently went back to look at some of the older posts and did the mental exercise of noting what has changed…what has stayed the same. Some of the early posts started out with quotes like this one from the day after Christmas 2011. There was more text than pictures in those early posts.

The 10 characteristics of a matriarch…and me…haven’t changed. I’m more settled in all of them now than I was 7 years ago:

1. Past the drive to make a living. The prime drive to establish oneself in the world and make an acceptable home is probably from ages 22-55. It can vary but there comes a point in life where the focus on a career shifts to something else much more integrated with everything else life has to offer because the hard work has paid off and the prospect of doing something completely different can take precedence.

2. Children are living independently. Until ones children are living independently, you are a mother rather than a matriarch!

3. Healthy and full of energy. Matriarchs have retained their health through lifestyle choices and care for themselves. They often appear younger than they are because of their attitude toward life and their energy pursuing whatever interests them.

4. Understands herself better than earlier in her life. The changes that occur as children become independent and the long term career ends (usually intentionally) forces a period of contemplation about what is truly important for the next phase of life. The answers don’t particularly surprise our matriarch…she views the time to think about it to be the tremendous luxury of the in-between days.

5. Self-actualized decisions. As a teenager and adult, she may have followed the advice of her parents or mentors or managers. All that was good. Now she is much more in the mode of making her own decisions with inputs from others not being quite as important as they were earlier in her life.

6. Post-menopausal (i.e. past child bearing). The joy of not having a monthly rhythm…feeling great all the time!

7. Knows how to live within her means. Whatever her financial situation, she knows exactly how to make ends meet and sustain her home. After all – she plans to live to be 100.

8. Assertive. She is nice about it, but she is savvy and does not let people take advantage of her unfairly.

9. Lots of self-discipline. She gets up fairly early in the morning because she is enthusiastic about getting started on the activities of her day. Her rhythms of communication with the people she loves are consistent and thoughtful. The interests she develops are wide ranging and shared as she develops relationships with like-minded others.

10. Married. She is known for her long duration relationships….most notably a spouse…although it could be friends as well. If she is widowed she does not live in the past but she may not feel it necessary to form a new relationship that cannot rise to the same level of shared history.

I would add at a couple more characteristic based on my last 7 years:

1. Giving back. Matriarchs are always looking for ways they can be a positive influence in their community and the broader world through volunteering time (and/or money).

2. For the long term. At some point, taking a more strategic view of the world becomes easier. That translates into living my life thoughtful of what will continue after I am gone. It is the way of savoring the present cognizant of the impact on the future of people and the world.

The weekly gleanings posts appeared almost from the beginning but my picks have shifted a bit toward more visual and science rather than technology.

I started a monthly doodle post in 2012 then there was a lull after mid-2013 until I took a Zentangle class in January 2015 and started the month Zentangle post. Behind the scenes prep for the post changed over time from taking photos to scanning then to digital tiles on the iPad using the Apple Pencil beginning last spring.

Coursera came along not that long at a good time for me and I enjoyed courses that I’d not been able to take back in my college days. My posts about them started in 2014 and continued for at least 3 years. Now I am more focused on conferences and travelling than online courses…although I might go back to them at some point.

Photography has become a bigger hobby to me over the past 7 years and the blog is a major outlet for my images. When I travel – it’s always with a camera readily accessible. And then I have the illustrations for what I want to write about and a reminder of experience too.

Travel has always been good fodder from blog posts:

• 2011: road trip from Maryland to Arizona

• 2012: road trip to Shenandoah National Park in April, Tennessee parks in June, state parks in southern New York in October, Dallas in December

• 2013:  Arizona in March, South Carolina in April, Norfolk and Richmond in May, Arizona in June, Utah in October, Florida in November

• 2014: Dallas in March, southern New York parks in May, Newport RI in late September, Chincoteague VA in November

• 2015: Tucson AZ in January, North Carolina wildlife refuges in April, Dallas in July and again in September, Staunton River State Park (Virginia) for star party in October, Hawaii in December

• 2016: Tucson AZ in January, eastern shore MD wildlife refuges in March, Dallas in April, Florida in September, Staunton River State Park (Virginia) for star party in October, Festival of the Cranes in NM

• 2017: Cross country from Maryland to Arizona with a stop in Dallas for my daughter’s conference,  Dallas in March, Pittsburgh in March, Delmarva Birding in April,  Dallas in May, Road trip from Tucson to Pittsburgh in June, road trip from Nebraska for solar eclipse in August,  Staunton River State Park (Virginia) for star party in October, TX for Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival in November, Pittsburgh in December

• 2018: Dallas in April, Dallas in June, State College in August, Festival of the Cranes in NM, Dallas in December

I’m sure the blog will continue to change – nothing stays the same and we shouldn’t want it to.  

eBotanicalPrints

There is a new area of the website – a collection of links to and sample images from eBooks freely available online containing botanical prints; I’m calling it

eBotanicalPrints

It’s accessed from the site menu and currently includes 4 things: a general introduction, a botanical blog (where I’m showcasing sample images and providing more detail about my recent finds), and then links to the books themselves sorted by author and title.

The lists of links currently include the eBooks I found in 2017 but I have at least 10 years prior to that to wade through and add to the lists.

My intent is to use the botanical blog to showcase the collection. Some of the more general ‘how to’ posts will probably be collected into another item on the eBotanicalPrints pull down for References. Once the number of posts gets longer.

I’ve also added

Recent-Posts

To the site menu. That page will list the 10 most recent posts for the Blog and Botanical Blog.

Squarespace 7 after a month

It’s been a little over a month since the transition of my blog from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 7. I am still not totally comfortable with the new interface…but it’s getting better all the time. It seems like it was easier to become accustomed to Squarespace 5 but maybe that is just the memory being 5 years old! We always gloss over the hard parts after we figure out how to do something.

There are more options for formatting pictures in Squarespace 7…and it isn’t necessary to create a gallery every time I want to use a slide show in a blog post. The posts look better on the small screen of my smart phone than the old Squarespace 5 posts.

I’m still grumbling to myself sometimes…but I’ll get over it. It is just going to take longer than a month.

How my blog has changed since November 2011

I’ve been savoring some of my oldest posts and thinking about what has changed – and what has not changed - about my blog over the almost 5 years.  I’ve enjoyed the trip into my past. If you want to look at the old posts, select ‘2011’ from the pull down under ‘blog archive.’

The very first blog was a recipe for Pumpkin Gingerbread Muffins…and it still is something that I would bake although I am not eating as much bread of any kind these days and not posting very often about recipes. Still – in mid-November 2017 – I probably will be in the mood to cook with those spices and with pumpkin!

I was already doing 'gleanings of the week'. There were more posts that were just text since I was just beginning to develop an expertise in photography. My first gallery resulted from a trip to Longwood Gardens; it was still warm enough for the water lilies to be looking good. I still take similar photographs but have a better camera (40x optical zoom rather than 10x) and I watch the lighting and composition more now. Still – that original gallery is not bad.

I still post about new technology. In November 2011, it was a Kindle Fire. More recently it has been my Prius Prime (plug-in hybrid).

Travel is still a frequent topic in my blog just as it was in November and December 2011. I made a road trip from Maryland to Arizona where my daughter and her husband were in grad school --- doing a blog post for each state I crossed. If I used that same rationale for a road trip now it would be to Pennsylvania (where they are doing post docs).

The trend has been to include a lot more photographs and other images (Zentangles, clipped images from ebooks I am recommending). When I started the blog, I was in the middle of transitioning for full time career to post-career. I was thrilled to have so many appealing choices. Now, I’ve made some choices and am savoring ‘now’ – enjoying the variety of activities day to day…season to season…and further out. There are still so many opportunities to pursue and freedom to choose…or not. I’ve become more a matriarch than I was in 2011!

Transitioning from Squarespace 5 to 7

Over the three-day weekend, I upgraded my Squarespace 5 website to Squarespace 7. If you are seeing this post you are seeing my new site!

A screen snap of the last post done on Squarespace 5

Squarespace provides a 12-step process for doing the transition. The first 2 are in the ‘getting ready’ category and then comes the import (step 3). It was significant in my case since I had been blogging daily to my Squarespace 5 site for 5 years. I started the import from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 7 on Friday and was concerned that the import interrupted before finishing when I stopped for the night…then pleasantly surprised Saturday morning that it had restarted and finished overnight. 3 steps down and 9 more to go!

Enabling content (step 4) was very easy for the blog posts…it was all done with one ‘enable’ and then moving the page from ‘not linked’ to the ‘main navigation’ area within the new site. The galleries were another story. Each of the galleries (sets of pictures), were imported as a separate page so they had to be enabled and moved one at a time. They now are in the galleries archive segment of the site. The other single pages were easy to enable too. Fortunately, I did not have anything I needed to manually move so Step 5 did not require any action. Step 6-9 were all about getting the site looking like I wanted and learning how to use the Squarespace 7 interface to add new content. I experimented with several of the templates before settling on Five and then worked to tailor it the way I wanted. The first days of using a new interface are always a little frustrating and this was no exception. I’m still not sure I understand how do everything but I’m confident enough that I can figure it out that I consider myself transitioned to Squarespace 7 at this point.

Step 10 was to upgrade from a 14-day-trail site. That happened on Sunday afternoon and I moved the domain to point to it (Step 11). I was surprised and pleased at how fast the change propagated. I’m waiting to cancel my Squarespace 5 site (which I can look at using the internal Squarespace address) until I am sure everything imported correctly. There are still a few issues related to galleries that I am working.

I’ve been thinking about what has happened to me over the past 5 years as I’ve looked at the content of my blog and the galleries. It been quite a journey! There are probably some blog posts about the trends I’ve noticed that I’ll post about in the next few weeks.

Use the ‘Contact’ button to let me know anything you notice that I need to fix.