Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
January 19, 2010 @ 5:42 pm | Filed under: Blog, Blogging
This blog will be five years old tomorrow (Wednesday the 20th). Five years, 1928 posts (this one makes 1929), over eleven thousand comments. That last figure does not seem possible but my dashboard is telling me 11,495 comments approved. Which speaks to exactly what has kept me enthusiastically blogging these past five years: you. Thanks, all of you who visit me here, sharing your humor, your insight, your warmth.
A lot has changed since I wrote that first entry.
The children. These days the girls are calling themselves Jane, Rose, and Beanie. Well actually it’s Jane and Rose calling the youngest one Beanie, but she answers to it. And then there’s the baby, whom we affectionately refer to as Wonderboy. Their ages are 9, 6, almost 4, and 13 months…I write. Scott writes. Both of us, here at home, in this messy office with my photocopies of 18th-century Edinburgh all over the wall and his comic-book-hero statues staring at us from atop the shelves.
I miss that office! Now I write sitting on my bed, on this laptop, and the hero statues are in storage. New comics art ornaments Scott’s office walls but that isn’t here at home anymore. And those little girls, oh my. That nine-year-old was in a heavy Jane of Lantern Hill phase and “Jane” was her make-believe name of choice, that month. Beanie’s about to be the nine-year-old now. Wonderboy has become the big brother. How can Rilla be the almost-four-year-old? How can Huck be past a year?
When I began the blog, I thought it would be a time-saver. (I will pause until the laughter dies down.) I was spending lots of time answering email queries back then, questions from all sorts of readers about the Martha and Charlotte books, children’s book recommendations, a whole gamut of topics. Not that I was (or am) so full of answers, but when it comes to books I usually have a thing or two to say. 
I had a primitive website on which I was attempting to answer the book questions, and I had begun reading blogs and was impressed by the possibilities. A blog seemed a likely place to post answers to the kinds of questions I was hearing most often.
What you don’t know until you start blogging is that a blog takes on a life of its own. It’s a conversation, not an essay collection. You meet new people; your world expands; you keep encountering new things to be interested in and you can’t help but share the discoveries.
So I won’t claim that it has been in any way a time-saver, but it has certainly been a joy, in so many ways.
One unexpected element of blogging, something I didn’t foresee at the beginning, was what a treasure this record would become to my family. Our stories are chronicled here, not just our major life events but the small moments, the funny ones, the extraordinary ordinary. I’m grateful to this blog for getting me in the habit of writing down these things down. Huzzah for the searchable archive!
But mostly I’m grateful for you. The 11,495 things you’ve said, and the quiet readers among you as well. Thanks for making Bonny Glen a place I love to be.
UPDATED! I got to Melanie’s comment below and let out a whoop—I hadn’t realized our blogs shared a birthday! The Wine-Dark Sea is one of my favorite places on the web: I can always count on reading something smart, thoughtful, and full of insight. In the unscientific labeling system that is my attempt to organize the subscriptions in my feed reader, Melanie started out in “thinkers,” quickly moved to “favorite reads,” and now resides in “pals.” All three descriptions fit to a T. Thanks, Melanie, for the way you consistently exercise my ponder muscle. Happy blog-birthday!
It’s also the actual birthday of my real-life friend Laurie of Seaglass Hearts. Happy day, my dear!
January 9, 2010 @ 1:09 pm | Filed under: Blogging
A quick list of post topics I have in the hopper, lest I forget.
• the ways I use social media and how I might improve/streamline
• making chicken tikka masala and naan for the first time—so yummy!—and a couple of questions I have
• I have more to say about The Kitchen Madonna
• TBR pile crackdown
• kids’ sewing books/kits—I never did do the series of reviews I was planning on this topic back in Lilting House days
• my favorite gardening literature
• I have such a great interview with author Julianna Baggott waiting to be posted! Planned it for last week but more kids got sick. And so it goes…
Feel free to add suggestions in the combox. I know I’ve missed some questions here and there that I meant to answer. 
September 19, 2008 @ 6:01 am | Filed under: Blogging
I’m not sure when I became a contrarian—I don’t think I started out this way, but my parents could speak to that better than I could—but I cannot deny that the pattern in my adult life has been that if I sense myself being ushered toward a box, I make a sharp left—or right, you can’t pigeonhole me that way either—and dash away from the box as fast as I can. Even if—no, especially if—I’m the one who created and announced the box.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me that the very moment I declared on Bonny Glen Up Close that my fabulous new notebooking system had rendered that poor little side-blog obsolete, I would find myself compelled to post there more than ever. Big long chatty posts such as I’ve not written there in a long time, or maybe ever. And now that I’m calling my own attention to this shift, it’s entirely possible the chattiness will dry right up. Except that now I’ve called my own attention to that possibility. So there’s no telling what will happen.
September 13, 2008 @ 9:10 am | Filed under: Blogging, Family
The wise and gentle Ann of Holy Experience has a post up this morning about some blog-related questions I, too, have grappled with, am always grappling with—this summer more than ever, as I’ve wrestled with the question of how much to say about a new diagnosis my son received, one that was not exactly a surprise and yet was certainly a lot to take in, and which I very much want to write about (can’t imagine NOT writing about) for a number of reasons, but I have made myself tread slowly while I ponder the question of where the line is between frankness and invasion of privacy.
(Boy, how’s that for a run-on sentence?)
Ann explains why she shares secrets. Her reasons are very much akin to my reasons. Examining our lives helps us see them more clearly, live them more joyfully. Recording our stories is how I know I’ll remember them: the small moments that are so important because they, like the tiny pieces of a mosaic, are what come together to form the big picture of our lives.
And sharing the struggles, the successes, this is how we mothers help each other. Seeing the ways other women handle the broken tiles, the sharp corners, the dropped pieces, helps me to better discern how to sort through the jumble of tiles in my own hands and scattered at my feet.
Thanks for articulating it, Ann, and thank you for welcoming us into your kitchen, your fields, your good times and bad, so that we may be inspired by the mosaic you are piecing together with such tenderness and love.
January 20, 2008 @ 11:45 am | Filed under: Blogging
This blog is three years old today. I guess that means I’m entering my senior year of blogging?
I was going to do a whole big retrospective thing, but I can see I’m not going to have time. So I think I’ll just commemorate the occasion by pulling some highlights out of the archives. Oh, but first, I wanted to mention a few changes in the sidebar. If you read Bonny Glen in a feed reader (I just typed "feader"—is that a word yet? Nope, looks like it’s just a surname) you may not have noticed the tweaking I’ve been doing. I moved all the stuff about me, my family, or this blog itself to the left sidebar, and below that are some link lists and booklists.
In the righthand sidebar I’ve added a section called "Recently Read," which is subdivided into Books (my GoodReads widget), Links, and Posts. The Links section is a widget that posts my del.icio.us links. More on that in a sec. The Posts section is my Google Reader "recently shared posts" widget. These are posts from blogs I subscribe to, posts which have particularly caught my eye.
So if you want to know what I’ve read on the web lately that I found especially thought-provoking, moving, funny, or interesting, the Recently Read links and posts section of the sidebar is where to look.
But I know most people nowadays seldom click through to the actual blog! I know I rarely do, for blogs to whose feeds I subscribe in a reader. The reader is what makes blog-reading remotely possible for me in these days of many demands on time and too much good stuff to read. There are a few blogs that are such tranquil, lovely spaces I do always click through to read "in person," but for the most part, I am glued to my Google Reader.
(Of course some of you bloggers out there don’t publish full feeds, only excerpts, so I have no choice but to click through to read your entire posts. I don’t hold that against you. When I blogged at Lilting House, ClubMom required me to publish excerpts only. They needed the page views to generate revenue; ad sales, of course, were what funded their whole MomBlog program. So I understand about blogging for income and needing those click-throughs, and I’m happy to click through and help. If you’re a for-love-not-money blogger, however, and you choose to publish full feeds to the readers instead of excerpts, thank you thank you thank you.)
Anyway, since I know many of my readers probably only click through once in a while, I’ve decided to try out daily auto-posting of my del.icio.us links. That way I can share good stuff quickly, easily, and no one has to actually click through to find out what interesting web-goodies have most recently jumped out me. Enjoy!
Back to the sidebar. Below the Recently Read bit is my big category cloud—and yes, I know my categories are something of a mess right now; when I imported Lilting House into this blog, I realized I’d used slightly different category names over there, so now I have redundancies like "Special Needs Kids" and "Special Needs Children"—doh!) and below that, some assorted tidbits including the Cybils widget. Below that comes the Tidal Learning nearcircle widget, and that’s pretty cool because it updates regulary with chunky excerpts from all the blogs in the circle.
So there you have it. There are lots of other odds and ends tucked into these old sidebars, but the Recently Read section is my favorite.
When I began blogging here three years ago, my intention was to have a central place to share answers to the questions I was getting swamped with via email—questions about my books and questions about homeschooling curricula and methods, mostly. I quickly discovered, as so many bloggers do, that this medium is wonderful for capturing family memories: the quick funny story, the poignant moment, the killer one-liner that you would never remember if you didn’t write it down. So it wasn’t long before my children took over this space: more than anything, this blog is about them. Us. Our family.
My favorite posts are the funny ones. Those are the ones I go back and reread quite often. These people really do crack me up. The woset in the cwoset thing makes me burst into giggles at random moments. Of course "Who’s on Surp" is probably the funniest of my funny kid stories. "Ha! I surped!" is still an oft-heard triumphant exclamation around here. (Along with the aggrieved outcry, "Mom, she’s smugging again!"—as in, ’she ’surped my spot and is looking smug about it.’)
This post narrated one of my favorite Rose and Bean moments.
This was a pretty exciting moment.
I see I’ve been complaining about long doctor’s-office waits since 2005.
Once, just once, I served cherry cobbler for breakfast.
Sniffle. I just got all nostalgic over this "day in the life" post from March of 2005.
I answered people’s questions about writing here.
I went crazy for strawberries.
I dazzled the world with my awesome homemaking skills.
I melted over this picture by Beanie.
I rhapsodized about quiet time.
I started the Carnival of Children’s Literature. (New one goes up tomorrow, by the way. Check it out at Wizards’ Wireless.)
I gabbed about lots of other things, but if I don’t go get ready for Mass we are going to be late and it will be all my fault and I’ll have to write another post about embarrassing moments at church. So I’ll just end this with a big THANK YOU to all of you who keep on coming to visit me here in the Bonny Glen!
November 26, 2007 @ 8:31 pm | Filed under: Blogging
Is getting to go back and re-read the funny stories you would never have remembered otherwise. Like this one:
So I’m on the phone with Alice, and I hear one of her daughters say something in the background.
Alice says to me, in all seriousness, "Can you hold on a second, Lissa? I just need to teach the girls to decoupage."
August 23, 2007 @ 12:33 pm | Filed under: Blogging
Someone clicked on this post* today as a result of an Ask.com search for "how to fit five booster seats in a Honda Odyssey."
Glad I could help!
Doesn’t it make you feel warm and fuzzy to know you’ve posted something useful? What’s your favorite "Ooh, I helped someone!" moment? From your own blog, or in real life, either one. I bet you have some good stories.
*(Bad link fixed.)
July 27, 2007 @ 3:22 pm | Filed under: Blogging
Karen (mom of three). Congratulations! Email me your address and I’ll pop it in the mail. Enjoy!
And many thanks to Shannon for organizing such a fun event!
July 27, 2007 @ 1:47 pm | Filed under: Blogging
As promised, I’ll be drawing the name for the winner of our Amo Amas Amat & More giveaway at 3pm my time (Pacific). Jane has already prepared the slips of paper for our drawing, but there’s still time for us to add any last-minute entrants.
Back soon!
July 14, 2007 @ 5:42 pm | Filed under: Blogging
Speaking of rockin’ girls…
Coffeemama says I’m a rockin’ girl blogger. Awesome!
Little-known fact: I do a fabulous Cyndi Lauper impersonation.
You never noticed the resemblance before, did you?
That’s because I never wear more than eight bracelets at a time anymore.
Anyway, thanks for the compliment, Coffeemama.
I am now supposed to name five Rockin’ Girl Bloggers of my own. What’s hard about this is narrowing it down. I decided to tag only people I’ve never tagged before, but whose blogs I read regularly and who do, in fact, rock.
Sarah rocks, and this I know not just from her blog, which delights me, but from having been so fortunate as to live in her neighborhood for five years. She’s got funny kid stories to rival Karen’s Ramona.
Mrs. MoneyDummy rocks very large. She is rockin’ her way right out of debt, and that is totally tubular.
Beck. I wish I rocked the house like Beck. If I am Cyndi Lauper, she is Chrissie Hynde: smart, wry, oozing cool.
Patience. I utterly dig her gentle, thoughtful vibe.
Sister Mary Martha. I hope she will not think me disrespectful for saying that I think she is one of the rockingest bloggers out there. Her deadpan style will make you howl, and the truth she speaks just might rock your world.
