Average Jane

Average Jane Writes A Daily Haiku - January 2023

Last year when Wordle became a big deal, a group of friends of mine on Discord started sharing our scores every day as our proof of life. This year, I decided I was tired of the game, so instead I proposed a daily haiku. 

My poetry is as mundane as everything I write on the blog, so I figured as long as I’m writing a little poem every day, I might as well collect them at the end of each month and share them here. I write a lot of them first thing in the morning, which I’m sure you will be able to tell.

Without further ado and with no added context, here is the crop from January.

January 1st:
Greeting the new year
Under piles of warm blankets
Today I will rest

January 2nd:
Cleaning the freezer
So many expired foods
Need better planning 

January 3rd:
Back to work today
My password is expired
I might run away

January 4th:
Post-insomnia
Ridiculous vivid dreams
Really want that dress

January 5th:
Cat just woke me up
Why isn’t it Friday yet?
Need to win lotto

January 6th:
Up extra early
More time with the cats and dog
And the laundry, too

January 7th:
Oven set to low
Spices, sugar, vinegar
Pulled pork for dinner

January 8th:
Memento mori 
Was the unexpected theme
Of new Puss in Boots

January 9th:
Crashed with the lights on
So tired, completely dressed
I need more weekend

January 10th:
Snuggly little dog
Giant, purring black kitty
Might go back to sleep

January 11th:
This bag of spinach
NOT thoroughly rinsed as billed
I hope that is mud

January 12th:
Spilled coffee again 
My desk is caffeinated
Better than I am

January 13th:
Just one more workday
Until the three-day weekend 
My brain needs a rest

January 14th:
Thai yoga massage
Ninety minutes booked today
Ahhh, relaxation 

January 15th:
Spent time in nature 
Lovely, even with no green
I’ll sleep well tonight 

January 16th:
Baked lemon pound cake
Homemade, from scratch, delicious 
So suck it, Starbucks

January 17th:
Oh hey, back to work
What did I forget last week?
Gonna find out now

January 18th:
Taught the spouse one game 
And now he always wins it
I’m a sore loser

January 19th:
Haven’t sung in years
Going to a jam tonight 
Where are my lyrics?

January 20th:
It’s still a workday?
Why am I so damn tired?
Wish I were a cat

January 21st:
A busy day planned
But first I’ll sit and admire
My fancy new rug

January 22nd:
Early to bed and
Early to rise makes for some
Quiet reading time

January 23rd:
Office is so cold
Checked to make sure the windows
Were actually closed

January 24th:
Weather is changing
I don’t need a forecaster
My sinuses know

January 25th:
The perfect snowfall:
Pretty on the tree branches
Not much on the ground 

January 26th:
It’s time to get up
But this book is really good
And this dog is warm

January 27th:
It’s RuneQuest day - yay!
Finding my inner sassy
Shapeshifter again

January 28th:
Muffins for breakfast 
No real plans for the weekend
Guess I’ll read this book

January 29th:
I cut down a tree
Yesterday so today I
Will relax all day

January 30th:
Little bit sniffly
Swab, swirl, drop, fifteen minutes 
Nope, looks like I’m fine

January 31st:
Gas pump soaked my gloves
Flammable laundry is not
A task I wanted

Average Jane Finds Her Blog's Purpose Again

Way back in 2004, I started this blog in part to serve as a writing warmup every day before I went to work and wrote all day for clients. Today, I'm once again writing for a living and sometimes I find it challenging to turn on the word tap to the proper volume.

Last week I traveled out of town to the office where most of my team members work. As we developed our editorial calendar for 2019, I could see that I'd be writing and publishing two blog posts every week – AND THAT FELT LIKE A LOT. Then I remembered that I used to blog here every single weekday, and I was kind of mad at myself for letting that slide.

This feels like the perfect time to reinvigorate the blog for several reasons. There's no question that other social platforms have taken the place of my blog writing over the past decade. We've all known that those platforms are not ideal for content producers, but as they have become more toxic in their own ways, it feels refreshing to go back to a place where I can produce and store content that I own.

Even my husband mentioned the other day that it was sad to see my blog decline because it used to be a convenient place to find out when we got various pets and track other milestones. 

Nothing's going to change about this blog and its content except the frequency. I'm going to start by going back and filling in some of the aforementioned milestones from the past year or so, just so I'll have a place to find them easily going forward. I hope there are a few diehard readers still around, but if not I'll do this for myself.

It feels good to be back.

Average Jane Turns Ten

Ten years ago today I wrote my first post for this blog. 

The blogging world has changed so much since then. At the time, the number of blogs out there was considerably more limited and I read my favorite ones individually by visiting them one by one to see if they had new posts.

Then I went to the first BlogHer conference in 2005 and expanded my blog reading horizons just around the time I started following blogs via RSS feed. About the same time, I started meeting more and more bloggers in my own town.

My blogging conference attendance peaked around 2011 and changes to my job started to limit my ability to attend. In the meantime, other social media platforms became more prominent and led to most bloggers—including me—cutting down significantly on posts.

Today, however, I attended a party in honor of one of my most longstanding local blogger friends who is moving to another state. While I was there, I saw more than a dozen good friends that I met through blogging and Twitter, and more people in the category stopped by after I left. Even though my blog is no longer what it once was, I can happily say that I have a wonderful group of friends that I very likely would never have met if it weren't for blogging. 

That doesn't even count the additional dozens—perhaps hundreds—of other friends I've made at conferences and networking events related to blogging. It's not an exaggeration to say that I could probably go to any major city in the United States (and a few abroad) and rustle up someone to go to lunch with who met me because of my blog.

Any time I start to wonder if it might be time to let the blog go, I think of all of the wonderful relationships it has facilitated and it makes me determined to keep going.

Yes, I'm using a ridiculously outdated and technologically limited blogging platform, but that's really not so important. What is important is that I have a decade's worth of posts about my life and the things that have interested me during that time. 

Thank you to everyone who reads this for hanging in there with me to find out what happens next. I don't know for sure that I will ever get back to the kind of regular posting schedule I had back in the early days, but I appreciate that you've all stuck around and keep reading what I have to say. Here's to another decade of great memories!

Photo credit: Marcus T Ward

Nine Years of Average Jane

Today is the ninth anniversary of my first post here. This year doesn't feel particularly triumphant because I've been struggling to keep thinking of stuff to write about, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I've kept going. 

This isn't the first time I've taken the opportunity to direct you back to my very first blog post on one of these bloggiversaries, but today I've actually taken the liberty of updating that post. Back when I started blogging, I never posted photos. It was an artistic choice at the time, but since then I've changed my mind. Therefore, my very first post now has a (not very good) photo of me taken in conjunction with the event it describes.

And thus is history rewritten...

So how about those nine years? To keep you from having to read through the entire archive to find out, I can point out a few key things, in no particular order: 

• My hair is blonde again. Until I went and dug up that first post photo, I didn't remember what color my hair had been back then. It was a fashion choice then; today it has a lot more to do with covering grey.
• I sort of have the same job. When I started my blog, I was working at a small web/game design firm that was later acquired by the company where I currently work. I've jumped around to a half-dozen different departments since then, but I'm happy to say that I'm still there and getting things done.
• All of my pets are different. When I started the blog, the cat lineup in our household was Kato, Friday, Velcro and Alexandra, all of whom have since died of old age. Now our cats are the relatively youthful Xena, Velvet, Trillian and Dr. Jones, and we have a senior dog named Toby.
• I have a lot more friends. I cannot overstate the effect that blogging has had on my social life. Between meeting bloggers and social media folks in Kansas City and connecting with the same at conferences around the country (notably BlogHer, BlogPaws and BlogWorldExpo), not to mention meeting people online in different parts of the world, I've developed the most wonderful network of people I really enjoy spending time with. Thanks to this blog, there are literally hundreds of people that I would fly anywhere to visit without hesitation if money were no object.
• I'm in a band again. Never believe me if I say I might stop singing in bands. It always turns out to be temporary.

Since we're celebrating my blogging anniversary, I'd like to ask you: How long have you been reading Average Jane? I know there are some long-time readers still around and I'm curious to see if I've attracted anyone more recently.

Happy Friday! Have a piece of cake if you can get one!

Photo credit: Nakeva Corothers

Average Jane Says No To NaBloPoMo This Year

You probably figured that out based on my lack of a post yesterday.

Instead, here's a picture of a lovely piece of cake.

I'll make an effort to step things up in the blogging department this month, just not every day.

(And yes, I know that posts like this are awful and unnecessary and a blot on the good name of blogging. Yet I wrote it anyway.)

Why Average Jane Has Not Been Writing Here

Last week I started Alice Bradley's The Practice of Writing class. She provides daily pep talks and prompts for 15-minute writing sessions. I've been sharing the fruits of these prompts with my fellow students, but many of them aren't really the kind of thing I generally write about on my blog or they're things I've written about before and don't want to repeat.

However, I hate to neglect this blog completely, so I'm going to share one of last week's pieces that happens to be the fruit of two prompts (write about the first story you ever heard and extend a piece of writing from earlier in the week) and also happens to be something I'm pretty sure I've written about before here.

Still, here it is:

When I was a little girl, I would lie on the bathroom counter while my mother washed my hair in the sink. She would tell me "Tiny stories," which were about a little girl named Tiny who had a younger brother named Biggie and a baby sister named Minnie.

Tiny had lots of adventures because there were fairies living in her garden who liked to take her to magical places. She went to Candyland, visited the North Pole, met the Easter Bunny, etc. There was one story about a "zoo" where mythical creatures had been enslaved that I'm pretty sure borrowed heavily from an episode of Star Trek. But obviously I didn't know that at the time.

My mother's rather twisted imagination and dark humor got the best of her sometimes and I vividly remember her telling me a story that involved the fairies getting their heads bitten off so they were forced to talk through their necks. I’m pretty sure this story came about because she was tired of me asking for “one more story!”

Her ploy to shock me into not asking anymore backfired because I was steeped in the lore of Oz by then. In Oz, no one can age or die, so the stories are full of ghastly details about people being cut or torn to pieces or trapped at the bottom of the ocean, still alive and apparently only mildly inconvenienced by their circumstances. Then there was Princess Languidere, who had kept a collection of beautiful women’s heads that she removed from their original owners so she could change her appearance by wearing different ones on a whim.

So since I had Oz as a basis for comparison, I knew Tiny’s fairy friends would figure out a way to get their heads back, so I wasn't alarmed for them in the least. Mostly I was just curious about how they were going to eat.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote and illustrated a version of Tiny's visit to Candyland. I still have the booklet in my files somewhere and one of these days I need to scan it before the paper degrades.

In the story, I drew Tiny and her siblings’ trip to Candyland in neon magic marker detail with sherbet snowmen and lollipop trees aplenty. They meet the Gumdrop Dragon, who is rather Cowardly Lionesque in that his initial bluster turns to fear of the human children when he realizes they could eat him. I can’t remember the rest of the Candyland storyline, but of course all of the kids make it home safely except that they aren’t hungry for dinner and Biggie’s stomach aches from eating so much candy.

I really wish I had written down more of the Tiny stories because they were such a big part of my childhood and I would love to have been able to share them with my niece and nephew. Perhaps one day I’ll make up some of my own.

Photo credit: dixieroadrash

NoMoNaBloPoMo for Average Jane

For the first time in all the years I've been doing NaBloPoMo, I missed writing a post. Yesterday was just that kind of day.

The good news is that it was a very enjoyable day otherwise. I slept in, made soup, worked for my dad a bit, bought a few groceries, made dinner and a pumpkin pie, watched a movie and basically just enjoyed the heck out of the time I was awake.

Of course, this was probably the year when I was finally going to win something for my perfect NaBloPoMo participation. Nah, probably not.

Despite that little hiccup, I'm going to continue posting daily as much as I can in the foreseeable future. I like my blog better when it's this active and I feel that I managed to write two above-average posts this month already. (I'll let you figure out which ones I think those are.)

Anyone else still in the game?

Average Jane, Elsewhere

I need to spend my blogging time adding homeless cats to Petfinder so they can be found and adopted. You wouldn't want to get in the way of that, would you?

So instead, here are a couple of posts I've written at other blogs this week. I'll be back with stuff just for you starting tomorrow.

TEDxCrossroads Hosted Weekly at Barkley — Of possible interest to you KC folks.

My name is Celeste. Is that so hard? — You'll probably want to add your own story if you, too, have lived a lifetime of having your name mispronounced and misunderstood.

Enjoy your Friday evening!

Photo credit: Cathy Prather

Average Jane Anticipates New Archaeological Discovery

Remember when I mused about our ancestors drinking from human skulls?

Well, that subject is all over the blogosphere right now thanks to a new discovery in the U.K.

Here's what Pharyngula, ZME Science, Gadling and The History Blog have to say about it. No one has yet answered my question about the volume of the average human skull.

Image credit: Megan Reardon

Average Jane on Writing

Here's today's Reverb 10 prompt:
Writing. What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing -- and can you eliminate it?

Maybe I've overthinking this one, but I believe that everything I do has the potential to contribute to my writing. Even things that sound like "wastes of time" (and here I'm thinking about surfing my Google Reader feeds, checking Facebook and Twitter, etc.) can spark an idea or a line of inquiry that could lead to a blog post now or down the road.

It's what I don't do that's detrimental to my writing. I don't write down ideas when I first think of them. I don't make myself write every day (although NaBloPoMo and Reverb 10 back to back are taking care of that!). I don't always act on the ideas I have and make myself sit down and put them on the screen while they're fresh.

I'm really pretty good about scheduling writing time in the mornings and evenings. What I need is a little more focus and discipline when it comes to my personal writing. It's not an issue of something else getting in the way, it's that I need to make the most of the time I've already set aside.

That said, I have four pieces of writing that I've been procrastinating about for way too long. Let's see how quickly I can make them happen.

Photo credit: Declan Jewell