a new photoblog

Today my Thursday Challenge photo is posted on my new photoblog...

 I'd love it if you dropped by!

For a while now I've been hankering after a more photo-friendly site. And so a few weeks ago I started poking around Wordpress.com, checking out all their lovely templates and finally picked a photoblog theme I liked. I've been working out the kinks for the last little while and I think it's visitor-ready.

I can display photos large and beautiful on it, and can drop my posts into categories—a real plus for an organization freak like me.

I called it promptings 2 because I won't be taking this promptings down any time soon, but will probably not post to it much any more. If you're interested in what's happening in the rest of my life, what I'm reading etc. you can also visit me at violetnesdoly.com.

password hint

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A few months ago I set out to put up a weekly blog post about some aspect of aging. I've enjoyed exploring this reality, which is stepping on my toes more all the time!

In the last few weeks, however, I've decided to simplify my online life, especially the blogging part. One item that I've decided to strike from my 'to do' list is putting up these weekly senior-focused posts. The little cartoon above is the last one in this series. I hope it gives you a chuckle.

I'll still be updating promptings, now with more photos than writing. So I'd love it if you stuck around. Pictures are better for old eyes anyway!

changes

This October 19th was promptings' 8th blogaversary! Who would have thought, when I nervously put up my first post, that  I would still be going strong (though perhaps not as strong) eight years later?

Things have changed in the past eight years. For me the big change came in 2006 when I got a digital camera. Blogging possibilities multiplied when I could share my love of nature, gardening, flowers, food, murals ... in living colour!

Seasons come to a blog's life too!

I have also taken advantage of blogging in other places during the last eight years. I have published a children's devotional blog, an adult devotional blog, a writing blog, a personal poetry blog, a mural blog, as well as contributing to several group blogs.

Lately it's begun to feel like a little too much. So I've decided to streamline my online life. One aspect of that is to change promptings from a wordy blog to a photo blog (because I can't bear to shut it down and I still want a place to share my camera finds). This Tuesday I will post my last Seniors-focused post. It's been an interesting topic to explore, but I'm finding it's taking time and energy that I'd like to devote to other things.

So expect mostly photographic fare at promptings from now on. I'm excited about this!

And you are most cordially invited to visit violetnesdoly.com to read my wordy posts (book reviews, things I'm learning about Bible times and customs, developments and trends in book publishing and marketing, links to resources that help me as a writer of prose, poetry and more).

promptings—now a blog for old fogeys

In November I will have been blogging here at promptings for eight years. Eight years! In all that time I've resisted latching onto any one theme, wanting to keep this a place where I share the eclectic variety of my life.

Themes have emerged, though. In the last two years I've concerned myself pretty much with three things—my list of 1000 gifts, book reviews, and Thursday Challenge photos.

A few weeks ago I reached 1000 in counting thankfulnesses. Though I enjoyed keeping track of and posting about them, I'm glad that project is done. Now I feel like I'm entering a new season here on the blog and have been casting about for a new focus.

Last week I read Michael Hyatt's book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. I paid special attention to his chapter on blogging and got inspiration from what he said about why he blogs: "I blog in order to clarify my thinking and archive my best ideas. In short, I blog for me (But you are welcome to read along!) .... If you are writing, you are achieving greater clarity about your life, your work, and what matters most." Michael Hyatt, Platform, Kindle location 2204)

The idea of writing to figure out what I think about things resonates. I believe that's why many of us write—because the act of writing helps us to work through issues and ideas. So, I asked myself, what bloggable things am I preoccupied with at the moment?

My kids are grown up so I'm no longer working through potty training and adolescent discipline. I see my grandkids too infrequently to make granny topics a good blog focus. I don't have cancer, or diabetes, or any other chronic disease, so coping with sickness doesn't preoccupy a great deal of my thoughts. Neither am I into shoes, or decorating, or fashion ...

But one topic does keep coming to mind. Aging; my aging, the aging of my generation.

Even as I write that, I hear you groan. I hear myself groan. Yes, in a way it's a depressing subject. Who wants to dwell on losing function, on changes in us that society makes fun of and that we ourselves resent? And yet...

As I've been thinking about taking this tack, I've become aware of age-related stuff all around me.

• There are a lot of us. The latest reports show how baby boomer seniors (we) are creating a bulge in the census numbers.

• The government is taking notice by proposing changes in OAS (Canada's Old Age Security payment, which all seniors in Canada now get when they're 65; that threshold scheduled to increase to 67 in the years ahead).

• People our age are handling retirement differently than those a generation ago.  We're living longer. Some of us are dealing with aging on two fronts—our own and our parents. We're working longer. Many of us are richer than our parents were. But some of us are poorer.

For the Christian, I believe aging doesn't have to be—shouldn't be—a negative thing. It means we're closer to what we've lived for our whole lives: meeting Jesus and hearing His "Well done."

Yes, some of the last steps will probably be awkward, uncomfortable, even painful. But by living with our eyes open to what really matters, perhaps we can take those steps with more foresight, purpose and intention.

And so I'm taking the plunge into exploring aging here on the blog—a subject I have been musing on for some years now.  I'll try to put up a new post on the topic each Tuesday. I hope you'll join me as I reflect on some aspect of the grey years, with the emphasis on aging gracefully and joyfully. We begin tomorrow with the review of almost-octogenarian author Luci Swindoll's inspirational book, Simple Secrets to a Happy Life.

(Wouldn't you know it, I'm launching this blog-focus during what happens to be Seniors Week where I live. If you're local, check out all the free activities for seniors in the Langley, B.C. area on this downloadable Seniors Week 2012 pdf.)

If you have ideas for topics, please let me know by email or in the comments.

'other food' in best canadian blog finals

As I have mentioned before, I write other blogs. One is a blog of devotions (Other Food: daily devos) based on the daily Bible readings from the Canadian Bible Society.

Some kind reader has nominated it as Best Canadian blog in the "Religion and Philosophy" category. 

Listen, I don't expect it to win... but it would be nice if it got a few votes.

Want to see what Other Food: daily devos is about? It's here.

Want to vote for it? It's in the "Best Religion and Philosophy Blogs 2010 category (third from bottom) on this page.

Thanks to any and all who take the time to do this!

sixth blogiversary

It's hard to believe, but this blog has been going for six years!  October 19, 2004 when I put up my first post ("Jim Coggins and Murder Mystery") also happened to fall on a Tuesday.

Just for fun, I thought I'd compile a few blogiversary lists:

Five stickiest posts (according to Google Analytics).
1. modern ghost town.
2. book review: The Blue Umbrella by Mike Mason
3. communion thoughts
4. book review: Is that really you God?
5. book review: Rees Howells: Intercessor

Five most common types of posts (according to labels)
1. Thursday Challenge  (a weekly photograph on a given theme): 163
2. family: 120
3. book reviews: 118
4. poetry: 83
5. Christmas: 72


Some blog features over the years:
- frivolous friday
- one-minute devotionals
- promptings potpourri
- and my favourites:  British Columbia Travels (right sidebar)

Post with the most comments.


From the time I installed a traffic counter till this morning this blog has logged:
- 103,763 page views
-    80,822 visitors

Thank you to every one of you wonderful readers who has contributed to those numbers!

a dose of thankfulness (#1-4)

I have detected in myself lately a snakiness about small stuff. I've been complaining about the weather, of all things! This is not good.

As a result, I've decided to take my mind off the negative by training it to look for the positive. One way is by practicing thankfulness.

There are many online initiatives to help us focus on thankfulness. I've decided to join the Gratitude Community begun some time ago by Anne Voskamp at her Holy Experience blog. She explains how it began here.

The object of the exercise: to, over time, make a list of One Thousand Gifts for which she is grateful. (I believe she is well on her way to 2000, however, and is now calling them "endless gifts".)

I will collect my items and post a few every week.

And I begin...

1. It is a gift that my family is intact. I helped out at a funeral tea yesterday, for a 27-year-old man. When I saw the year of his birth on the memorial bulletin, my stomach lurched: 1983. That's the year my daughter was born. He died, suddenly and they don't know the cause. My family is still intact. I hug them close for I know there are no assurances.

2. Summer has arrived! (I am allowed to be thankful for the weather, right?) It's 23C as I write this at 6:45 p.m. Yummm!

3. Today I got a laptop. I'm going to love it — no longer chained to my office!

4. And I'm thankful for hubby, who said why didn't I get the new machine instead of the reconditioned one that would have saved some hundreds (but was several years old, didn't qualify for Apple Care and had about half the numbers in the specifications department). Of course I'm sharing it with him; he's browsing on it right now.

If you'd like to climb on the Thousand Gifts wagon, please do. Some post their gifts on blogs, while others list them in private journals. Instructions on how to join are here.

spring almanac

I love spring, which has arrived on the Lower Mainland about a month early this year.

These magnolia blossoms were threatening to pop on February 19th.
(click on any photo to enlarge)

Crocuses from February 21st.

Under the blossoms - March 1st.

How is spring treating you? 

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I also blogged here today ("Did you believe?" personal reflections on the 2010 Olympics).

curling blues (call them silver)

Cheryl Bernard delivers a rock in the second end - yesterday's game. 

(Global TV photo)

The Canadian women's loss to Sweden yesterday in the gold medal women's curling game bothered me way more than I thought it would. What's wrong with silver, I kept asking myself. Nothing, except that it's not gold.

However, I think more than even that they didn't get their gold, was the way that game was lost. The whole match was a roller coaster ride for Canadian fans, and just when the gold was within Bernard's grasp it slipped away - twice!

I prefer endings where my team wins with authority, or comes from behind and triumphs, or if they have to lose, the game has a 'predestined' feeling of loss to it from the beginning. This business of having what felt like an inevitable win slip through your fingers, not so much. (Maybe another reason I'm feeling so bummed out is because the ending to that game is a lot like life. Sometimes victory, or success or whatever we want most slips away just as we can taste it.)

But do I fault the Canadian women? Not for a minute. They gave us hours of wonderful entertainment and fabulous shot-making. What a classy foursome. When I think back on these Olympics, the focused look on Bernard's face as she settled herself in the hack in preparation for her throw will be one of my most vivid memories. Congratulations on a well-deserved Silver Medal, Canadian women's curling team!!

Now to get ready for another rock-fest! Kevin Martin plays for gold at 3:00 this afternoon.

Update: 
Kevin Martin won the gold Saturday afternoon! So did the Canadian men's hockey team a few hours ago. Canada broke the records for most gold medals won by any country at a Winter Olympic Games (with the final gold medal count at 14), and most gold medals won by a host country (previously held by Norway and the U.S. at 10).  Canadian pride is running high today. How sweet it is!!

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Psst - notice the little headings ("Home" "About" and "Index") at the top of this page? I've discovered Blogger's stand-alone pages, and posted an 'about' page in my own style, as well as an index to some of my frequent subjects here at promptings. Keep tuned for more pages. A compilation of favorite quotes is in the works, and I have some other ideas too...

spring clean your rss reader

Do you still read blogs? Though I have my times when I keep up with what all my friends, acquaintances and givers of free information are up to, lately I'm mostly way behind. So I just mark the whole kit and kaboodle read and start over.

I can mark all those unread posts 'read' because I use an RSS reader. I've had a Boglines account from practically the time I started blogging in 2004 and couldn't navigate the whole maze of RSS feeds without it.

But I never organized those feeds, that is, until a few days ago. I happened to be poking around on my Google reader site (which I use sometimes - mostly when Bloglines is down) and realized that I could tuck my various feeds into folders.

Now there's nothing I like more than foldering something. So I made a bunch of folders and got everything all tidy. And then I had the thought  - maybe I could organize my Bloglines feeds in folders too.

Last weekend I discovered I could. So I did. (Here's how: Just click on "Edit" then "New Folder" below list of feeds. Name the folder, then drag and drop blog feeds into it. When done adding folders and organizing blogs click on "Finished" at the top to go to the reader pane.)

Now look how streamlined everything is! Anytime I feel like reading blogs, the genre I hanker after is all in one place and just a mouse-click away.

 If I'm wondering what my writing friends are up to, I click on "Writing Friends" to see who has updated and what's going on with them. If I'm in the mood for more doom and gloom - I click on "Writing Biz" to get my daily dose of advice from overwhelmed agents and snarky editors. If I want something else entirely I click on "Curiosities" to find out the latest from the Antarctica conservation or Bible Illustration blogs.

It's changed my whole outlook on blog reading! Hey, I'm in such a good mood, I may just drop by your blog one of these days and leave a comment! (If you tell me you're reading, of course.)

5th blogiversary

Today is my fifth Blogiversary - and I still don't know what I'm doing!

Thanks to all who come by this eclectic place which breaks most of the blogging rules by having no theme, no pertinent advice to do useful stuff like help you make money, clean your house, bake up a storm, do a craft, write a better book, or sell the book you've written. It's just my very ordinary life.

I sincerely thank all readers who have shared this blogging journey with me by coming by regularly or once in a while! (And an even bigger thanks if you've left a comment - we do ♡ comments!)☺

new poetry portfolio

In the last while I've been mulling over the idea of assembling an online poetry portfolio. I love other just-poetry sites that I often visit - sites like Poems by C. Van Gorkom, Christian Nature Poetry, and Real Poems.

Recently Kimberley Davis, a writer I follow on Twitter, wrote a blog post about doing just that as well. Her thoughts echoed many of my own feelings (positive about posting the poems with images, for example - her portfolio is here).

And so in the last two days, I've taken the plunge and put up Violet Nesdoly / poems. I will mostly put up poems that have already been published in other places. Of course it's not complete. I have yet to add more tabs, with pages for links, and other poetry-related goodies. I'll be adding a new poem about once a week until I run out of 'stock.'

So, if you enjoy poetry, I'd love it if you came by for a read!

new kidlit blog

UPDATE - Monday, May 18.

Though the Book Brew blog below is only one week old, I've already moved it.

I was feeling very out of my element in WordPress (though it's an excellent blogging platform with some nice features). So I've moved Book Brew to blogger. You can now find it here.

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I've gone and done something I never thought I'd do - started yet another blog! Am I crazy or what?! It's all Twitter's fault. Here's how it came about:

1. As I said, I joined Twitter a few weeks ago.

2. In my search to find kindred spirits to follow, last Friday I discovered a slew of people who write for children on one of those twitter directories.

3. I signed up to follow @susanwrites.

4. One of her first tweets was the children’s writers’ Poetry Friday roundup here.

5. This brought me face to face with the KidLitosphere – kids’ writers and book lovers galore, bound together by the love of children’s literature. One of the main things they do is review children’s books.

6. Besides Poetry Friday, they also have a weekly blog roundup called Nonfiction Monday.

7. My first thought: I want to play too!

And so I began my Book Brew blog, because in order to participate, you have to have a blog that’s devoted to books for young adults and children. And I’m so fine with that


Now I’ll have a place to post only about children’s writing! Whoo hoo!!

this blogger is out

but in here...
(click on arrow)

frivolous friday

(ha-ha-ha- as if...)

SLATE editor recommends the Bible

In a short interview about his new book Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, David Plotz, editor of Slate responds to Publisher's Weekly questions...

RBL: Do you have a favorite book or part of the Bible?

David Plotz: My favorite parts tend to be where you have heroes who are skeptical, questioning and doubtful. But my favorite story of all is the book of Ruth. It is so beautiful and moving, like a Jane Austen novel or a Patsy Cline song.

RBL:You mention that you've become a “full-on Bible thumper.” What do you mean by that?

DP: Every page, every chapter has something that is culturally significant that has come down to us. So going through life without knowing this book is like wearing a veil. Also, there are millions of Americans who believe in the Bible literally—that every single word is true. For you to fully engage in discussion about the issues that they and you care about, you have to do the duty of understanding why they hold the beliefs they do.

RBL: Do you think that the Bible should be taught in public schools?

Read his answer and the rest of the interview here.

Apparently the book began as a blog.

i guest blogged

on Kimberley's blog yesterday. Kimberley Payne is big into fitness. If you sit for hours at a desk, like many writers do, Kimberley is full of good tips for you. Hang around her site and you're bound to be healthier and fitter for it! (You may well ask, what am I doing guesting on her blog. Wander over and see...)

that would be a C

Update Jan 14/09

I emailed Amy, from blogged.com who gave me the heads-up about the rating. The editors re-rated the blog, gave it an 8 this time. Go figure...

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See that little button in the right sidebar - the one that says this blog scored a 7.0 - "very good"? (That's 7 out of a possible 10 - like 70%, a C or C-.) And I didn't even know there was a test.

Of course I'd liked to have scored higher. But when I plugged in one of the best written blogs I read, Cerulean Sanctum, and found my blog rated higher, let's just say I take these results with a largish grain of salt.

Want to find out how your blog rates? Go here, plug your blog's url into the search line and click on "search blogs." If it hasn't been rated, you can ask for a rating.

What are ratings based on? "Editor reviews provided by professional editors on the basis of frequency of updates, relevance of content, site design, and writing style."

Hmmm - 'Relevance of content?' - Wonder how they judged that? As far as I'm concerned, if it interests me, it's relevant! Anyone who reads here knows this blog is unapologetically all over the place.

also blogging

here today.

I blogged here today.