Blog Week is Coming

From Eskimimi Knits

Eskimimi Knits has announced the 2nd Annual Knitting & Crochet Blog Week! My friend Laura participated last year. I thought it was a great idea then, but I wasn't blogging much at all then. This year, I am very excited.  I am already thinking through what I might write up.  I even have a challenge I am setting up for myself for Day 5. Are you planning to participate? Have you looked at the topics or are you waiting until the time comes to look? (I confess, I peeked before I finished looking at the rest of the page.)

Surge in Activity

Those of you following along have probably noticed the dramatic increase in activity and posting here. the very observant of you, will have noticed that it began on January 1st. You will just have to believe me when I say, this wasn't an intentional New Year's resolution. The truth is, I was inspired by my uncle while we were visiting over Christmas.

He's writing a book. Reading his chapters and listening to him talk about page counts made me think about how little writing I've done over the past few years. I had a writing intensive undergraduate program and during my graduate program I kept a blog to work out my ideas. My current job has a lot of writing involved but most of what I do is editing and working with other people's ideas. For the past couple years, I have toyed with the idea of taking an open source course to start writing again, but I have also been enjoying not be a student for a little bit. It wasn't until this Christmas that I started to remember how fun writing can be. I also realized that value writing and my post-college adult life was missing it.

I've decided to start in again by blogging. I don't expect this blog to full of lofty or remarkable ideas. I just want to get use to expressing myself again. Daily posts are a goal, but not a promise. I cannot think of a good knitting picture to complement this post, so I'll share one of my amazing uncle instead.

He is the best at making me laugh.

Election Thoughts

Yesterday started with voting, but we quickly found our way back to our normal Tuesday routine of heading into the city for our free movie, dinner, and a nice walk. I skipped my knitting group partly because we came back later than normal and mostly because I wanted to get things ready for our election results monitoring. Since we weren't going to or hosting a party, I knew we would have a lot of time to pass that normally would be spent tuning out pundits and chatting with other people. Our distraction solution was to second tv in the living room so we could watch the election and still busy ourselves with the PlayStation. Clearly I haven't been living here long enough, because it never occurred to me to congregate at Times Square for last night. By the time I saw all the people there on tv, I had already opened a bottle of wine and I was settled into my comfy pants. I stayed up way past my bedtime and had a great night. Even though I was exhausted, when I went to bed, my head was swimming with things to write about. Here are just some of them:

• How I feel about Barack Obama
• How Barack Obama feels about Higher Education
• How Academics feel about the election
• How awful general chat was in WoW yesterday
• How distasteful it is to boo someone who has just been elected president
• How disappointed I am about Proposition 8
• How it was different to be in a blue state
• How I made my voting decisions as a Hillary supporter
  
• How uncomfortable I was with the rest of my ballot since I haven't been a part of this community for very long
• How knitters have shown support for their candidates
• How exciting the voter turn out was
• How beautiful it was to see people partying in the streets
• How it felt to vote for the winner for the first time

Thankfully, I slept on it and remembered that those are not the conversations that I want to have with strangers on the Internet. Those are the conversations I want to have with my friends over a good meal. It is difficult because they are all so far away, and those dinners will probably never happen. That will change though, and the excitement has just begun. Since I am not a political writer, and I have no intention of becoming one, I wrote about the technology used to share the election results.