Category — Uncategorized

The Wolvog was able to make his research position start date align with the ChickieNob’s summer abroad program, so we were able to tack on a short family trip to Ireland beforehand. Josh and I have been to Ireland several times, but we had never been to Belfast, so after some time in Dublin, we headed to Northern Ireland. I finally got to walk on the Giant’s Causeway.

And we went out to Galway and Inis Mór so the kids could see the Burren.

We spent one day in London together, which happened to unknowingly coincide with Trooping the Colour.

And then it was time to say goodbye. That felt awful. Leaving London, the last place we were all together, felt awful. But Josh and I went to Cornwall for a week and walked on the beach and visited some of the towns listed in the Magicians, imagining where Quentin and crew emerged in Fowey or Rupert’s home in Penzance.

And then finally, we returned to Exeter to see the Exeter Book. It was our second attempt, this time successful, and it was worth the wait.

It was hard to leave and fly home. I apologize publicly to the poor man who ended up sitting on my other side during the flight. But the kids are having an amazing time with their work and travels. That’s a small good thing when I miss them so much.

Every time I finish a book, I log it on Goodreads, give it a star count, and write a brief review. I do it (like I said yesterday) because those reviews make a difference to the author. I have a personal policy of not rating something if it will be below three stars. In those cases, I would just log the book and move on.

I read something that made me think about this whole system of rating and reviewing art. It’s so subjective. There are plenty of books that I can admire, quality-wise, that I didn’t enjoy, and other books that will never win major awards that I thought were brilliant.

She asks why our impulse is to immediately decide how much we like it vs. let it sit, unrated. She writes: “I’ve been trying to stop doing this—giving a work of art an immediate thumbs up or thumbs down, like I’m rating a mop on Amazon. But the habit seems to spring from my subconscious: watch movie, submit verdict. This is how I’ve been trained to respond.”

And because my four-star read is different from your four-star read, and how I would rate something ties into how I was feeling at the moment while I read the book, so many of those stars are completely useless in using to decide how you may feel about a piece. She writes: “The aggregate star ratings on Letterboxd presume to communicate something standardized, but in fact they give cover to chaos … Book ratings on Goodreads raise the same questions.”

These are all great questions. I don’t have answers, and I am going to keep writing those tiny reviews because I know (as an author) that they matter to authors. They help with book sales or making the decision to check out a book from the library. I could write the little review without the stars, but would that review hold as much weight without the star anchor to immediately give context to the words below it? Unsure. But this made me think. A lot.

When I started this blog, I assumed I could keep it going for a few months. I would consider it a major win if I got to two years of semi-regular posting.

By the time I got to the fifth year, I started to wonder if I could keep this thing going all the way to ten years. Ten years! A decade! How many projects reach a decade?

But now it is 20 years. 20 years, five times per week, I write something. It isn’t usually profound. Sometimes the posts are super brief. I don’t always remember a story when I look back on past posts. And many other times, we’ve used my blog to remember when something occurred. It is like a time capsule that I keep adding to over the years; a nest where I can figuratively curl up in a cozy space created out of words.

I have thought about stopping. A lot. I don’t have a date anymore in my brain where I’ll stop writing in this space; I’ve stopped thinking about the end. I may reach 25 years or 30 years. Who really knows?

Because isn’t that the point? That we can never know what the future will be? All I know is that when I started this blog, I was writing a book about infertility, and my twins were giving up their bottles. And now that book is massively out of date, and the twins are in college. I’ve changed. You’ve changed. Blogging has changed. And yet, if you’re reading this, you’re still here. And I’m still here. Thank you.

I am enormously proud of what I’ve created. And at the same time, all I have done is convince myself that it would be a good idea to sit down and get into the spirit to write by writing a blog post. I don’t always post what I write. It doesn’t always come easily. My only advice is not to think too deeply about it. If you sit down and do it, you too will one day have 20 years of blog posts.

I am grateful to everyone who has read any part of this journey. Thank you for being here. For letting me know you’ve seen my words. For letting me know that I’m not alone out here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they leave for their summer plans. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty, using a random date generator (from random.org) to choose the posts. Having the kids go is still really, really hard. I’ll be back soon.

After the bags had been taken to the dump and the boxes were lined up for Goodwill; after the bins were labeled so I’d never have to open them again if I didn’t want and the things we are passing along to others were neatly packaged up in the laundry room, waiting delivery; after the play room had been tidied and combed over for items worth discarding, Josh and I sat down on the sofa and surveyed the room while the twins played upstairs. Despite containing four walls covered in books — thousands upon thousands of books — as well as sporting equipment and a few random toys, the basement looked empty. Part of my brain looked at it as pristine, a space waiting for something to happen. The other part of my brain looked at it as deflated, void of all those early years — the climby toys and the bouncey ball pit, the ride-on toys and rockers. It looked like a place where something once happened instead of a place that was waiting to become something new.

Read the whole post here.

I am not writing my blog right now because I want to spend time with the twins before they leave for their summer plans. I scheduled these posts so the blog wouldn’t be empty, using a random date generator (from random.org) to choose the posts. Having the kids go is still really, really hard. I’ll be back soon.

I came to pick up that weight recently when I had cause to go down into the storage room to find an old toy. First of all, the storage room is unusable once again. There are too many boxes and there’s nowhere to shift them around. I managed to move a few into the laundry room and sift through some boxes, but I realized two things. (1) I had saved much more than I needed to save. There were a lot of things in those boxes that I would never use again such as random stuffed animals or puzzles that annoyed the crap out of me the first time around. (2) Having my hands in those boxes was so emotionally painful that I felt like I was underwater the entire time I was down there. I couldn’t breathe normally.

Read the whole post here.