Well, the end of June has come and a few days later I have finally come to the end of my 30 personal #blogjune posts, or rather I will be when I get to the end of this one and press the publish button. So I sit in Melbin's cold eating cake, drinking T2 Gorgeous Geisha tea and reflecting on what #blogjune meant for me.
Was I absolutely mad to take up the challenge? I had already taken up the #2011PAD challenge on 1 January and that involves a photo and sometimes a comment every day. I find with #2011PAD that I simply don't do it every day. But I basically do keep up to date by posting every few days. And yay! 30 June must have been the halfway mark for that as well as the end of #blogjune.
With #blogjune I decided that I wouldn't stick to one blog for my posts but I would spread the blogs over my three active (er semi-active?) blogs depending on how the mood took me. This meant that I would be focusing on technology (Hecuba's Story), books reading and writing (Hecuba Reads) and food (The Librarian and the Kitchen). This also meant that the focus of my blogging was restrained and not limited to random reflections. So what did I actually post about and what was the spread of topics?
I started off with Hecuba's Story as I needed to blog about the death of my feline Hecuba and the barriers her death had given me to writing in that blog. After the struggle of writing that one I didn't get back to Hecuba's Story for a while but did eventually do eight other posts there: 16 paper-li, 17 paper-li reprise, 18 Martyn Wyndham-Read, 20 Neighbourgoods, 21 Rouxbe, 24 Keepmeout, 26 Google+, and, of course, I am now doing 30. So that meant I did a total of ten posts on the general theme of technology - be it exploring new sites or commenting on the value of others. There probably were at least another 30 posts I could have written on this all-absorbing topic :)
After my initial post, I moved quickly to the comfort zone of books and writing and did a total of 14 posts on my blog Hecuba Reads. These basically focused on what I was reading during the month of June: 2 Macrobertsonland, 3 Dorothy L Sayers, 4 More Peter Wimsey, 5 Beyond the Ladies Lounge, 8 Striding folly, 9 Vale Patrick Leigh Fermor, 10 In the teeth of the evidence, 11 Last gift of time, 14 In tearing haste, 18 Manhattan dreaming, 22 Five books meme, 23 First Merchant Venturers, 25 Lord Peter: the end, and 27 Franklin and Eleanor. On looking back I am fascinated to see that what I read and thought about serendipitously in relation to recreational reading in June held no surprises: crime fiction, biography, local history, Greece, feminism, archaeology. Yes, these are always my key reading interests.
Another key interest is food and cooking and this was reflected in the six blogposts I did in The Librarian and the Kitchen. They were: 6 Chicken coriander and mushroom pie, 7 Mackerel and vegetable pie, 12 Turkey and coriander balls, 13 Turkey and coriander balls in tomato sauce, 15 The Flavour Thesaurus and 28 Sweet chilli prawn pies. There were no surprises there either. I love reading cook books and books about food and in terms of actual cooking I have been going through a phase of cooking different pies recently. And the meatballs? Well, meatballs are simply one of my favourite meals so again I am always trying out variants. During June I was so pleased that one of the other bloggers actually cooked one of my recipes and another friend whipped out a camera to take a photo of a pie I cooked her! Cooking and reading and writing about it is always fun and a constant in my life.
So would I do #blogjune again? I certainly would take up the challenge again as it provided me with a framework and a discipline. That being said the only topic discipline was provided by the actual blogs and I am really interested to reflect back on what I actually blogged about and how reflective it was of me. Will I blog more as a result or heave a sigh of relief? Well, probably the answer is yes to both.
This post is, of course, only my comments on my own personal blog challenge. I was also absolutely blown away by the volume of blogposts and the wide range of topics my fellow #blogjune bloggers came up with. To review my reactions to all of that would just take a lot more space than a blogpost. And I don't need to anyway as my colleagues provided regular updates for us on Libraries Interact.
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