Who are you? Where on earth have you been?
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated. I have no excuse except that I was thrown completely off my axis. The day after I left the hospital I received a jury summons notice for the month of October. Usually I wouldn’t have minded this disruption, but this was my third time being summoned in five years. Instead of acting outraged over that, I went with it and got excited about the process. In all actuality, I really enjoy jury duty. The people, the legal aspect, and taking part in the community. Before I knew it, the month was over and I hadn’t sat down to write anything.
At the beginning of November, I realized how long it had been since I did anything except my basic things. I hadn’t been reading, I hadn’t been writing and I’d been existing on a little sleep and a lot of Netflix. That’s okay for awhile, but eventually I knew I needed to do something that engaged my mind more. It didn’t take me long to realize that what I was missing was structure in my days. One thing out of sync and it was just throwing me all off.
Then just as I was sitting down to plan and write this blog, my neighbor passed away. We’ve lived next door to her and her daughter since I was in Kindergarten, so we’re all close and are friends. I’ve been spending a lot of time with her daughter and still trying to keep up with my own household. As a genealogist, I know that the people in our lives are so important, and I’ve been making sure that the people in mine know that. On a production level, that leaves me here, one month later exactly and still behind! Now I’m just wondering where to pick up the pieces and get things back on track. The great thing for me is that I had already started to get very organized, digitally at least!
Okay, so where do we start?
Finding out where to start is easy. If you’ve been following my Genealogy Do-Over, then you know I was already starting to get pretty organized.
That means that my research/Do-Over will be easy to pick back up. That’s for another entry though. This has nothing to do with my research and everything to do with my new way of keeping a plan together for the blog. The last time you saw my excel file, “Blog Tracker” was in June. That file has gotten a little bit of a makeover.
My Blog Tracker is now bigger and better
Before I just had one tab in the file that was a catalog of my previous blog posts. That now lies in the “Blog Archive” tab of the file. The “Regular Topics” section is what I hope will keep me inspired. I’ve added the daily blogging prompts from GeneaBloggers.com under each corresponding day and I’ve made a list of my regular blog topic series. Only time will tell if this helps me be more regular in my blog writing.
The Post Ideas section is where I am keeping a log of my post ideas with a target date, suggested category, and a brief description of the idea. The rest of the sections will be me logging what I’ve already posted in the regular categories. This will help me know what I’ve posted before. With a blog a few years old, I’d hate to repeat myself when I can just link to a previous entry and then add to the subject.
You can see from my Post Ideas tab that I’m going to try an alternating post schedule. It might take me a few weeks to get into the groove of it but we’ll see how that goes! I’m already one day “behind” because I meant to write this post and finish it on Monday, but I just didn’t make it in time.
Even the Blog has a few new things
I’m not sure if I’ll be doing another entry for this or not, but I’m also overhauling the organization of my blog. As I work on my blog archive, I’m creating indexes for my posts that turned into “series”.
The links to the indexes can be found by hovering over “Indexes” at the top of the screen or using the links in the sidebar.
In Conclusion
I’m feeling really good and organized about the future. Not just for my genealogy and blog, but overall. I’m hoping that by doing this my stress and anxiety levels will start to decline and my night in the hospital will be the last one I have for quite awhile!
I hope you all are doing well and I thank you for always sticking with me through these absences. I really appreciate it.
