Category: Blogging

Prompts Coming Together

~ Ruth ~ 4 Comments

Sometimes I take my hat off to the spectacular synchronicity of the WordPress gods – it’s already 8pm and a bit late in the day for me to be looking at my blog for the first time today, and what do I find? The Word of the Day challenge is ‘ebb’ and the Ragtag Daily Prompt is ‘flow’ – perfectly matched! 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Hat

April A-Z 2022: Reflections

~ Ruth ~ 6 Comments

Yay! I did it! All 26 letters of the alphabet in order, posted on time, and on the correct days… success!

And I managed to check out most A-Z posts of most of the bloggers I already follow – what a diverse set of themes they had this year, I really enjoyed keeping up with all their interesting takes on the challenge 🙂

But not so good was my new blog checking out from the master list… I started out reasonably well but as ever things soon tailed off and by the end of the month I’d given up completely… 😦

Time is always a big issue for me, I choose to give only a set amount of time to blogging so have to prioritise and prefer to keep up with all daily posts from bloggers I already know, not just those doing the A-Z challenge.

I had fun though, and will no doubt try again next year! 🙂

April A-Z: B is for Blogging

~ Ruth ~ 13 Comments

I’ve been blogging on WordPress for the last eight years, and in that time have had four consecutive blogs although this current one is the only one to remain floating around in the ether – the others have all been deleted along the way. I just blog about the everyday stuff of life, and I like to read other personal blogs in a similar vein. I’m really interested in finding out more about the people behind them, what they think, what they see, what they do, and I really love the feeling of community and connection I get from blogging – thank you, blog family, for just being out there in the blogosphere!

Life events have conspired to pull me away from blogging over the last couple of months, and the idea of taking part in this year’s April Blogging from A-Z Challenge seems like a good way to try to get back into the habit of reading and posting regularly. Originally I thought of just using any old random words to go with the particular letter of the day, but realistically without a clear theme to work towards I’m not sure I’d be able to keep my focus for a full month… So instead I’ve opted for a relatively simple, if slightly self-indulgent work-around: This year I’ll be posting 26 things about me, nothing too taxing to write about yet still fulfilling the brief!

SOCS: April A-Z Challenge

~ Ruth ~ 9 Comments

I usually love to take part in the annual April Blogging from A-Z Challenge, but this year I’m just not sure if I have the mental energy to give it the thought and time it deserves.

Life has become quite complicated for me lately and blogging has inevitably taken a back seat while I attend to the real life family issues unfolding in the background, so if I did attempt to take part I’m really not sure I’d be able to complete the entire challenge?

I suppose I could always reduce the complexity of it all by choosing a far simpler theme compared to previous years? One that needs far less forward planning and much less research? After all it’s not a competition, and it might be easier just to compose shorter daily posts on the fly?

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do, maybe instead of signing up formally I’ll just wait and see what April brings, and take it from there, day by day? 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Comp

Family First

~ Ruth ~ 10 Comments

Didn’t mean to disappear without notice for the last three weeks, just have some urgent family stuff going on that inevitably takes priority over everything else at the moment… Will be back blogging soon enough when life calms down again, see you all on the other side… 🙂

Stuff I Share…

~ Ruth ~ 15 Comments

My blog is a place I share stuff… personal stuff, everyday stuff, overall life stuff… thoughts and feelings. I like that level of sharing, photographs I take and poems I write and experiences and opinions and the occasional rant and just… I don’t know… a general commentary on my very ordinary existence, day by day. I don’t share everything, of course, that would be creepy. But what I do choose to share is real.

My favourite blogs to follow tend to share the same kind of everyday things as I do. Some blogs are more image based, some are poetry based, and some just share the same kind of ongoing everyday life stuff as I do. There’s just something human that connects us when we know someone’s name, and what they look like, and where on the planet they live. And the longer we stay connected through our blogs, the better we get to know each other.

My blog content inevitably changes along with my reality – when I first began blogging I lived in a one-bed flat in London with no outside space at all, and now I live in a three-bed bungalow in Inverness in the North of Scotland with a garden front and back, so of course I now have a completely different lifestyle. And over the last 20-odd months we’ve all had to adapt to the global Covid pandemic, too. Lives change, circumstances change, and so our blogs change, too.

As a result what I share on my blog depends mostly on what’s going on in my life, how busy (or not) I am, and how I’m feeling about things going on around me. Sometimes I share quite a lot, but at other times, not so much. Some days I’m just more chatty than others, and on some days I just want to hide away from the world and shut everyone and everything out.

So I may as well take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone for sharing my blog with me, and for giving me the opportunity to share yours with you, too… Here’s to all of us keeping on blogging! 🙂

Weekly Prompt: Sharing

April Blogging from A-Z 2021

~ Ruth ~ 13 Comments

Last year’s April Blogging from A-Z Challenge for me was seriously curtailed by Covid restrictions – well, by the whole country being in full lock-down, actually. I’d originally planned to take you on an alphabetical journey around my new home town of Inverness in the North of Scotland, but of course by last April we were on a Stay at Home order and everything touristy and interesting was shut anyway. I did actually succeed in completing all 26 letters of the challenge, but only by staying a lot closer to home than I liked, and fudging a bit where necessary.

So my hope for this year had been to be able to repeat my truncated theme from last year but taking the all-inclusive, belt-and-braces approach, the way I’d originally intended. Except of course April is right around the corner and here we are on long-term lock-down yet again! It looks like I’m going to need a Plan B, and sooner rather than later. Or perhaps a non-plan plan… Hmm… Anyway, I think I’ll go with a fairly flexible theme based on collating my thoughts and feelings about the pandemic – hopefully that allows me to be as random as I like, but still with an over-arching focus on the most topical issue in my life at the moment.

I might post a few photographs, or write a few poems, or rip a few rants, or find a few relevant quotes, or just whatever gives me the feels on the day, letter by letter – but the main thing is I hope to have fun, alphabetically! 🙂