NOVEMBER (AND DECEMBER) NEWS

So much to do.

Do you feel that way?

Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the “holiday” season for most of us and life gets very hectic and busy, causing anxiety and a general overload. Who agrees? In our house we have always tried to downplay these holidays. My birthday lands just before Thanksgiving and my husband’s is just after and yes, this can cause us additional angst. While I love to celebrate my day, he is just as happy to barely have it mentioned. No, I am not kidding. No mention of that day would probably be fine with him…but, of course, I just MUST mark the day in some small way. I remember when we met he was just turning 30 and his Mother had a birthday cake delivered to his apartment. Was he happy? Indeed not! So, I learned very early on to not make a big deal of the day…

To add to the potential “whirling dervish” syndrome, I have been enrolled in a fabulous, wonderful, enriching course given by Holly Becker of Decor8Blog. The course is:
“Blogging Your Way: Intention and Style”.

While I can’t go into details about the actual course (you will just have to enroll!), I will tell you all that I have learned SO MUCH. In the first week we had to choose a partner to work with for that week’s homework assignment. Yes indeed! There are hundreds of students from all over the world in many different time zones…and yet Holly is able, very easily, to make it cohesive and non-time sensitive. Anyway, in that first week our partner was to critique our blog. Not an easy assignment and not always easy to be on the receiving end, right?

One of the many things I realized is that in my “About Me” click through I do not say where I live. I mention having moved to the Hudson Valley years ago, and then I sort of drop the subject. So one new friend had no idea at all that I now live, and have for three years, in North Carolina.

I’ve rearranged some things on my sidebar, thanks to my new friend’s advice. I am also
(are you ready?)
moving the entire blog over to WordPress.org (self-hosted). For non-bloggers this may not mean
much anything; but for bloggers, you K N O W what I mean! It’s a
B I G D E A L

And then, once we are moved in mid-December, I am redoing the entire graphics on the blog.
New header
New sidebar
New fonts
New colors
etc. etc.

I can’t resist.
Here is a very, very rough preliminary layout I did for the new header!
Believe me, it will not look like this but you get where I’m going. In any case, it is totally different from what I have now.
I’m excited to be working (finally) on this and adding some pizzaz to the site!