Why Hello There, Old Blog

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted. After three weeks off with my family, I thought I’d be ready to get back into blogging and devote myself to yet another year of this, of writing and posting, planning and scheduling. Even though I decided at the end of last year that I wanted to spend more time writing and editing this year, leaving behind this blog was never something I would consider. It just needs to evolve (again) with me.

But I’m not here today to specifically talk about yet more changes I’m making to this blog. No, it’s more of a check-in. I’m still here, and I’ll be more back to it than I am this week. After three weeks of noise and demands, I just really needed this week to re-center myself and, honestly, take a bit of a vacation. I adore my children, but teaching them to be bored so they can figure out what to do with themselves has been an uphill battle for their entire lives, and I was foolish to think I could accomplish that in three weeks.

There’s more to it, though, because isn’t there always when it comes to life? Back in the fall my husband told me they were predicting a La Nina winter for California, which means a dry, hot winter for us with a small chance of rain. Of course it was a bit troubling because this would be the third (?) in a row and my area had entered a severe drought designation, with extreme drought creeping closer. Imagine our surprise when we spent most of those three weeks off drenched! The storms still continue to pile up, one behind the other. We’re actually in for rain for the entire three day weekend, as though almost an entire three week winter break wasn’t enough. This comes after a major storm (I heard the sinkhole in Chatsworth made the national news), which followed a few days after a major storm that had officials warning of power outages, which followed after, well, more rain, though it was nice how Knott’s Berry Farm emptied after the rain began because lines got a whole lot shorter and, when you’ve got young kids waiting, those serpentine lines can be a killer. Anyways, I’ve lost track of how many storms we’ve had, how many days of gray and rain. Yes, we desperately need the rain, but it’s also had some unfortunate side effects on me.

Now, I’m a SoCal girl born and raised. I grew up in the sunshine and spent summers at the beach. With all this rain has come clouds. Of course. Of course there are clouds that come with rain. Which means very little sun, because, between those storms, it’s been cloudy, cloudy, and more cloudy. When I was in college, I spent a fall semester in Denmark, completely underestimating how dark it gets there in late fall. The snow was pretty, but, when you see your classmate from Minnesota not coping well with the lack of sunlight… The feeling starts around my eyes. A tightness and weathered feeling. There’s a squeezing around my forehead, and a sliding feeling will start traveling down to my nose, my mouth, my chin, all the way until I feel like my face is going to slide off. I’m at the tightness and weathered feeling around my eyes right now. I look fine, but the lack of sunlight is taking a toll. So I’m finding it very hard to get myself going. I need my sun.

It’ll be a slower start to get back into blogging than I thought, and I think I’ll start with just reviews and my First, Middle, and Last Impressions and then go from there. But I am planning on taking a much more fun (for me) approach this year. First, I’m doing away with The Lily Cafe Digest. It just became too cumbersome to put together and I wasn’t very good at bookmarking the posts I enjoyed reading, so I felt bad about that section and kept delaying breaks until I just couldn’t take it anymore. Since I’m taking a more relaxed approach, I don’t anticipate taking actual, scheduled breaks since my goal will be to drop in as I feel like it, which is totally against the blogging advice of blogging consistently, but, after 5 years of doing this, I don’t much care anymore. I don’t even look at my stats anymore, haven’t, really, since…early December? Since I want to have more fun, I’m planning on restructuring how I do reviews. Many of them will probably be the same format I’ve been doing, but I want to give myself the option of doing something different with them so I actually feel like I want to write them. I’m also planning on doing a little weekly or biweekly post on my writing and editing progress, mostly to make sure I’m keeping on track, so that’ll be more for me than anything else. Lastly, I want to take Fridays, most Fridays at least, to take you home with me. By that I mean I’ll take a more casual approach to just talk about what’s been going on and, really, whatever else I want.

And as for what’s next, I’m hoping to get some reviews up next week. I’m already onto my fourth book of the year, which means I’m even further behind on writing them. At the very least I’ll have my Impressions post on Wednesday. See you then!