Monday, December 14, 2009

Why I'm Back


It all started when Alex interrupted the silence of her "create corner" blog by sharing about the 2010 52 books in 52 weeks reading challenge.  Before that I was happily enjoying my long term blog writing break, while once in a while skimming blogs in my google reader.  The challenge, however, stirred something within me.  I love to read, and I love challenges.  I couldn't resist.  I had to check it out. While the rules said that you didn't have to blog to participate, I knew it would be that much more fun, and motivating, to blog about the challenge.  That started the wheels churning about the possibility of reviving my sleeping blog.

I decided to check out the list of participants that had already signed up for the challenge.  This led me to the Book Dragon's Lair.  I noticed in her side bar that she was hosting some challenges and it was there that I found the Reading Through the Seasons 2010 Challenge.  I thought this would help me choose some of the books I'd read for the 52 books challenge.  I had I noticed that the challenge rules stated that books may overlap other challenges and this challenge said the same thing.  I could participate in both without adding to my required reading. Good idea!  That got me thinking...maybe I could find other challenges that would help me in deciding what to read for the 52 books challenge!  I did a google search for 2010 book challenges. There are lots of them out there.  It became more and more tempting to revive my blog so that I could post about these challenges and why I was interested in them.

While going through all the different challenges that I found, I came up with a few of my own ideas for challenges that I want to challenge myself with.  That got me to thinking that if I revived my blog I could post my own challenges and invite others to join me.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  Yes, I would revive my sleeping blog and join the challenge - er, challenges!

Stay tuned for a list of the challenges I hope to participate in and a couple of challenges I would like to pose.

Like my new look?

I spent the afternoon and evening working on my blog. Found this great document on creating a blogger template. I used a picture of my girls that I took this week as part of the blog banner I created. I originally used a pattern on this page from Squidfingers for the background of the blog. I changed the pattern and the photo to black and white because that's the color scheme I wanted. What fun! I may play some more but I like it so far.

Edit:  I ended up creating my own background pattern and using it instead of the pattern from squidfingers, simply because I wanted my background to better match the blog banner.  I'm pretty pleased with what I've created!  I think I'll keep this look for a least part of the winter.

Edited again in April when I changed the look.  I wanted to show the look that I had created and was talking about in this post.