One Year of Blogging

November 27th, 2007 marked one year that I have been blogging. My first blog post was about getting our first house. Most of my earlier posts have been pictures with some description sprinkled in. Later I started to put more emphasis on writing. Earlier on I saw my blogging as a good chance to show some pictures of the girls. As time has gone on I saw more of an opportunity to really write about things in my posts. When I look over the past year, my blogging has really evolved.

In September I started Systems-Overload, my newest blogging effort. I decided that a lot of the things that I wanted to write about didn’t really fit into the dcheronfamily blog, that it would be too much of a stretch to put these post there. I decided that I wanted to post more about productivity, organizing, and some other topics more removed from our family. The new blog is a more serious attempt at blogging than the dcheronfamily blog has been.

Why do I like blogging? I’m sure that question has been asked by a lot of bloggers (if not openly, at least there has been some thought given to the topic). One of the dreams that I had as a child was to be a writer. There have been several periods in my life where I have kept a journal solely to write. I wrote several short stories and like many others I have wanted to write the “Great American Novel” (who knows maybe one day?). For me blogging is a natural extension to my writing. It provides a lot of opportunities that conventional writing just doesn’t offer. In traditional writing, if you’re published, someone can pick up your work many years after you have passed on, and maybe there will be a connection to what felt or thought when you wrote it or to your message or they can even spin the ideas into a whole different direction. While traditional writing does still exist, Blogging seems to be a natural evolution. You can create a post and due to the magic of RSS, search engines, and various other things that would probably have seen totally foreign to Jules Vern, the post can be read immediately by anyone on the internet. Unlike newspapers and magazines that have a short shelf life, your posts can be found on Google months after you wrote them. Ideas that you write about in your posts can be taken in totally different directions by people that you have never met (and maybe never will) in other posts. It also gives you the chance to let your feelings and opinions be known that didn’t really exist before. It has brought a common man element to writing that hasn’t really existed before. You can also write about what you want to write about. If you want to write about the color, shapes, and sized of your button collection, you can.

With my new blog I have wanted to be more of a professional blogger (or at least a more serious one), this has been a lot of work that most people don’t see, not would they understand the effort put into it. As I’m not a trained web designer, coder, marketer, and so on, these are all things that I have had to tackle (and in many cases am still tackling) by myself. This has taken a lot of time that isn’t always visible to the average reader when they see a post. I have always liked learning new things, so it is interesting to learn about all the things that you need to run a successful blog (or one that I hope to make successful). When you create a post, you do want an audience, that it to say, that you do want someone to read what you wrote. How do you find an audience for your posts has become a challenge of many bloggers, one that has led many to market their blogs.

As I embark on my second year of blogging, I look forward to what life will bring. I look forward to what I will learn. I hope that I will be able to interact with my audience more and am able to continue to grow. I hope that you will give me comments on what you liked and what you didn’t and how you think that I can improve my writing. If like what you read be sure to let others know about it. Please come with me on my journey.

St. Martin's Day

Friday, November 9th, was the St. Martin's Day celebration at the girls kindergarten. St. Martin's Day is officially recognized as the eleventh of November. At 11:11 am on the eleventh of November is the kick off of Karival season in Germany (and other parts to the world as well).

St. Martin was a Roman solder who later became a monk and it is his good deed of sharing his coat with a begger during a snow storm that is most known. Many kindergartens and pre-schools celebrate the day (often on other days, so that parents can attend more than one!) by creating decorative latterns and parading around singing songs about St. Martin. There is often a bon fire, with various food and drink sold available that warms the body on this cold time of of year. The fire department built and oversaw the bonfire, but because of concern about it being too rainy for the little kids, the singing of songs was done in the kindergarten this year. The kindergarten taught the kids some new songs, so they didn't sing the couple of songs that I remember from the past. I have posted some videos on YouTube.

Carnival (Karneval) season kicks off on November eleventh at 11:11 am. Karneval (the Rheinland area of Germany), Fastnacht (around Mainz) , or Fasching (around Munich and Austria) are all differnt names given to it within the German speaking areas of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The season is a celebration before the quiet period of lent, prior to Easter. The high light of the season is Rosenmontag, which is usually occuring the 42nd day before Easter. Although many German cities have their own parades and celebrations, the most famous are held in Mainz, Colonge, and Dusseldorf. Venice, Italy has a well known costume ball, but many of the German cities have their own costumed gatherings (especially for the kids). We've taken our kids to several parades and activites related to Carnival. The kids really enjoy being able to dress up.

Here are a few links where you can learn more about St. Martin and Karneval...

• St. Martin from Fun Social Studies
• St. Martin's Day from German Culture
• St. Martin from Germusa
• St. Martin's Day from Wikipedia
• Karneval from McKinnion Secondary College
• Fastnacht/Karneval from About.com
• Fasching from Germusa
• Karneval-Fastnacht-Fasching from Germusa
• Carnival from Wikipedia

Anna is outside in two of the pictures while the other two pictures are of new dresses that we recently bought for the girls.

I recently did a post on the other blog on the Thanksgiving Review.

Halloween 2007

We celebrated Halloween last week. This is the fourth time that we have taken the girls trick or treating. It still amazes me to see the kids dress up and that houses have candy to hand out. The surprising thing about this is that while I believe the holiday started in Ireland and came over to the U.S., where they kind of made it their own. Halloween is a huge holiday in the U.S., while the candy and stuff produced for this holiday is not a much a Christmas, I'm sure it has to be up there with some of the other holidays. I don't believe that kids have been trick or treating on Halloween for that many years, but it does seem to grow every year. The first few years that we did this we made a point of only stopping at the houses that were decorated. This year we went to all the houses in our little neighborhood, and most everyone handed out candy! Since it was rather cold and the housed outside of our immediate neighborhood, didn't seem to be into it as much, we didn't get too far away.






I showed the girls "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" a couple of times to get them in the spirit of Halloween. Anna designed a pumpkin that had chicken pox, a unique idea I thought. I now realize that I didn't take any pictures of it. Christine found a nice recipe for making pumpkin seeds and they turned out rather tastey. Here are a few pictures that I took of the girls. Anna was a Snow Queen, while Sarah was a unicorn. I posted several photos on Flickr account, I have created a folder for them here.

Darryl's Dad...
Darryl's dad returned home from the hospital on October 22nd after having a double heart by-pass surgery. They originally wanted to do a quadrupple but two the artaries weren't wide enough to do them, the doctor had said that they might not have taken and might have done more damage than they would have done good. He has an irregular heart beat, which apparently happens to 25% of the people having by-passes, of those, 75% tend to correct themselves within a couple of months. They have put him on a blood thinner and are monitoring his progress. I wrote a post about signs of heart attacks and what to do at my other blog, you can find the post here. I recommend that you read the post and prepare for the possiblity of a friend, loved one, worker, and so on having one, as it is critical to act quickly in such an event.

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