Tag Archives: Blogging

Time To Focus

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This blog has been weighing heavily on my mind for a while now. It began about seven years ago because friends said I should write a blog and I thought I’d give it a whirl. It quickly became a daily writing exercise that I gamified to see how many days in a row I could keep it going and without being too repetitive. 

It was mostly about the things I was seeing out in the world, namely while I was out weekend adventuring. Some stories featured pictures and stories of things you’ve seen and heard about but mostly I focused on the obscure, small dots on the map kind of stuff that’s off the beaten path. 

Then Scout came along and joined the mix. 

And then the Covid pandemic hit and the adventure stories came to a grinding, nail biting halt. We were all stuck at home, just trying to navigate this brave new world the best we could. I began telling some of those stories, began telling you about the nature around me, what I was reading and about the outdoor landmarks in my region. I began talking more about lifestyle related stuff and occasionally reaching back in the treasure trove for pictures and untold stories from past adventures. 

At some point though, I lost the regularity that I once enjoyed. The entire reason I forced myself into a daily writing exercise here is that I know consistency is king with me. I either write every day or I forget to write at all. But it’s hard when you’re not out running around in the world every weekend like I once did. 

It’s also hard when you feel like the stories you want to share aren’t welcome in this divided country of ours. I have gotten into the habit of thinking lots of things and feeling like I shouldn’t say most of them. So much for my First Amendment rights. 

All the same, the title of this blog is Make The Journey Fun. It’s not Let Me Tell You All That You’re Getting Wrong. 

And so, here we go again. Another rebirth of the blog where I attempt to keep it mostly light and interesting and where I sometimes take a deep dive into a place or just give you the 10,0000 foot view so you’ll want to go see it for yourself. You’ll still get a lot of Scout stories and lifestyle ones too. In other words, you won’t see much change except in publishing consistency. 

I owe you some stories and pictures now from the Sherman House Museum in Lancaster, Ohio and from last week’s trip to Cleveland. Plus, I realized that I never told you about the Ted Lewis Museum in Circleville, Ohio. We will go there next!

Could Be

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Today’s story was supposed to be about a cool library I visited last week. Unfortunately, I chose to take on a home improvement project last night and worked kind of obsessively to make as much progress as possible.

Consequently, I failed to carve out time to write that story. Since this blog is more or less a daily writing exercise, there is typically no safety net of stories in the can.

All I can say is sit tight. We will go to the library and some other interesting places soon. Maybe I’ll even show you what I am working on here! Meanwhile, my laundry room, kitchen and dining room are a total disaster and there’s much work waiting for me tonight!

On that note, I will leave you with wisdom from Winnie The Pooh’s Eeyore.

Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be.

Have a great day, friends. We will go to the library soon.

Flowers For A Friend

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The blogging community is an interesting place. We make friends with people we have never met in real life, sharing stories that sometimes make us feel like we’re old friends. Many of them are people we would never cross paths with in real life.

That’s certainly the case with Jinjer. Honestly, I don’t recall how or when we met but I have followed along as she has spent recent years working remotely from Arkansas where she cared for her elderly mother.

I never knew her mom’s name but was terribly sad when she died earlier this year. Jinjer shared with her blogging pals that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mom’s grave in Indiana before heading back to the life that was waiting for her in California. Her plate was full closing up this chapter, packing, donating and selling things. She needed to orchestrate the cross country move with an elderly cat and there was no way to justify going that far out of her way.

So when she mentioned that her mom was buried in Marion, Indiana, I knew I could help. That’s because I had been thinking about a trip to that area and this provided a wonderful purpose for going. While I couldn’t help Jinjer get there, I could at least go and take pictures of the grave. It’s a small gesture but I thought it might help.

She’s buried at Marion National Cemetery and I went there late Saturday afternoon, not realizing how enormous it would be. Turns out, I went to the wrong section – I needed section CS and was in section C. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped and rain set in so I surrendered and went into town for Mexican.

Luckily, Jinjer had emailed me a map that day so I figured out my error and returned at sunrise on Sunday morning. It was a piece of cake to find my way around with the map but I would have spent the entire day looking if necessary. It was important to me because I know how hard it is to lose someone important and what it means to visit their grave.

So I knelt on the ground, introduced myself to Jinjer’s parents and told them why I had come. Sadly, you can’t leave flowers this time of year so I just placed the flowers for a few minutes and snapped some pictures for Jinjer.

Jinjer laughed when I said that I apologized to her mom for being unable to leave the flowers. Haha! “After all, I don’t make the rules,” I said.

It’s a tiny gesture but hopefully one that helped my friend. I’m so grateful that I found her mom and the weather cooperated so she could have pretty pictures.

Jinjer’s parents have a beautiful resting place. It’s awe inspiring to be surrounded by these elegant marble headstones as far as the eye can see and to think of all the people they represent.

We all deserve to be remembered after we are gone and the living we leave behind deserve to find peace.

Here are some immortal words from one of the world’s great thinkers, Winnie the Pooh……

If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.

A New Day

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The last few months have been challenging for me personally. The first quarter is always my hardest because of a project at work but this quarter has been marked by a number of other difficulties.

In my personal life, I have been battling a issue with my health. The symptoms didn’t just start this year but it was only recently diagnosed as hypothyroidism. This isn’t life threatening but is life altering and it explains a lot of seemingly isolated problems that have been going on for a long time.

Everyone complains about weight gain and exhaustion. These are certainly the headlines when it comes to my complaints but there’s a lot more to it. My muscles and joints hurt, my voice gets raspy and my skin itches for no reason at all. Nighttime is often defined by violent cold chills while morning is defined by grogginess and the sensation I spent my night running a marathon.

I tell you all this, not for your sympathy, but because I wish more people would talk about this stuff. Had I known more about the symptoms I might have been a better advocate for myself. Maybe you or someone you know is struggling and you don’t know why. This problem often comes with a litany of other things I haven’t mentioned here. Sometimes my hands and arms go numb for no reason. It’s ridiculous, the weird stuff that has been going on.

The cause can be genetic but it can also involve nutritional deficiencies like Vitamin D, Iron and Magnesium. We caught mine because my cholesterol was creeping up there and your thyroid controls cholesterol. Who knew?

I’m now on the path to finding the right dosage of a little white pill I take every day. This can be a real chore and it can be ever changing.

The more meaningful journey for me is using food as medicine. In the interest of boosting my magnesium, I now eat banana a day whether I want it or not. I never want the banana but see value in it as those bad muscle aches and pains are starting to subside. I’m reducing gluten at home. While this isn’t a fix for everyone, it does seem to be helping with my brain fog.

I have a list of things to try adding or removing from my diet. As I feel better, I can be more active. It would be nice to take off the extra pounds and to feel healthy and strong again but I have read and heard horror stories about the thyroid and why it’s often a lifelong battle.

I put that big work project to bed yesterday. It’s in the hands of my printer now and some other things at work should improve soon as well. I am hopeful that life will get easier. You can have stress at home or stress at work but it’s crippling to experience stress everywhere you go.

I celebrated in my own way yesterday. At lunch, I treated myself to some really nice books at an Ollie’s. This included one about the artist Monet and will help me prepare for an upcoming adventure. Near the cash register, a display of bare root roses presented one called “New Day.” It is yellow and happy and you can bet it will soon grace the flower bed outside my home office window.

It is a new day.

After work, I strolled the bike path, logging two miles and stopping once to admire a nice patch of wildflowers. There’s one area where you’ll find several varieties. While there are a couple that are large and obvious, they’re mostly small and delicate. You have to look for them, and the more you see, the more you see. It’s a quiet reminder that great gifts often come in small packages and that you sometimes have to slow down and go looking to find the beauty.

It’s there. You just have to try to find it.

This blog is written as an exercise in daily creativity. That means, instead of keeping a queue of future posts ready to go, I usually have just a list of ideas and start fresh every day. The exception is when I’m planning vacation or know that there will be no time for writing one day.

That has worked great until recently as exhaustion has started to win. That’s why I took a break.

I woke up this morning still tired but not as tired as a week ago and certainly far better than a month ago. I trust that I’m headed in the right direction and that I can get back to storytelling here. This is something that I enjoy immensely. The writing is close to my heart but I also enjoy hearing from all of you virtually and in real life.

If you’re interested in an overview of hypothyroidism, the Mayo Clinic provides a basic overview here. Talk to your doctor if some of the symptoms sound familiar. Advocate for yourself.

Happy Saturday, friends. It’s a new day.

Here We Go Again

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This space has been quiet for a few days as I’ve been wrestling with a decision about Make the Journey Fun and whether or not to continue publishing here.

I started this blog a little over two years ago. At the time, it was part travel guide for friends and part therapy for me. Along the way, it has introduced me to new friends, has given me a daily responsibility to publish something, and has evolved into broader topics and a larger collection of pictures and ideas that basically cover all the random things about the world that I enjoy.

It will never be a business and I’m good with that. In fact, everything I do here flies in the face of all the blogging experts who say that you should only publish what helps the reader or that posts should have headlines like “Five things to do before a road trip.”

I do none of this, instead opting to write the kind of stories that I enjoy reading. And oddly enough, I’ve found a loyal following of people who seem to enjoy the purely random things that I pull out of my hat each day.

I won’t claim that what I do here is work. It’s more or less a quick, down and dirty exercise in storytelling that forces me to respect a deadline and to not obsess over the finer points of what I’m doing. It’s fun.

Sadly, the world seems like an extraordinarily dark place right now as people prefer strife and controversy to happy stories and pretty pictures. They opt for a thirty second video over a two minute read or, worse yet, to just read a headline or comments before forming an opinion and moving on. It’s starting to feel like no one wants to read, think or even be happy.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but all of the bickering and the destruction of social constructs that I hold dear are enough to make me want to slit my wrists with a rusty razor blade. The ugliness is exhausting and it isn’t going away.

It makes me wonder if there’s still a call for those pretty pictures and random stories that I enjoy sharing. Maybe not. Maybe I just write for me and hope that the positive influence helps at least one person.

Maybe it’s time to close up shop, delete the blog and spend more time alone and offline.

The answer isn’t clear to me just yet.

However, an email from a friend who liked a picture and a message from Christine thanking me for a book recommendation bolstered my spirits, at least a little. Perhaps there is still a desire for something light in this sea of negativity that consumes us. The best I can do at this point is to be me and hope it’s good enough.

So here we go again.

Have a good weekend, friends. It’s a long weekend for some of us. Turn off social media, breathe some fresh air, move your body, embrace the light and do something fun.

Why This Blog Exists

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Elk Peonies.jpg

Peonies on a spring day in Ohio – just because they’re pretty. 

It was a shock to realize the one year anniversary of this blog is just a few weeks away. After all, most new blogs don’t make it past the first year. I started writing here for a couple of reasons. The first is that pictures and stories posted on Facebook prompted friends to request a blog with more in-depth stories.

The other reason Make the Journey Fun was born is that I needed a project at the time. It’s not a secret that 2018 was a transformative year and a period of self exploration. Having this outlet was a healthy part of that process.

Since then, I’ve written about things that interest me and that I hope interest you as well. If you’ve been around for a while you probably know how random the subject matter can be. That’s because I write the kind of stories that I like to read – the bloggers who invite their reader into their home and life and thoughts.

Photographer Jim Grey comes to mind as he mingles stories of his personal life with camera reviews and pictures from his travels on Down the Road. I look forward to his posts every day and have learned a lot about photography as well as the National Road which frequently appears in his storytelling.

The Frugal Girl is another great example of personal storytelling as she shares about her family and their efforts to live responsibly.

Neither of them present themselves as experts in any topic but simply share their thoughts in a pleasant way. In a world of self proclaimed experts and glorified internet trolls, these blogs are like a breath of fresh air.

So I tell the stories that friends sometimes request and stories that I would want to read. And it has been a wonderful experience to do so. Near strangers sometimes strike up a conversation in the grocery store and friends often message with their thoughts. Not to mention the people I’ve met online who have provided insight and even a kind of friendship that wouldn’t have existed had it not been for this space of written word and photos.

It’s been a fun ride and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about it.

In the world of bloggers, the experts measure your success by statistics. I’m honored each time someone subscribes or says they like reading here. However, I measure my success by the great conversations that occur online and in-person rather than by my statistics.

But as the year is winding down, I can’t help but assess the future and whether writing here is the right thing to do. I’m better now than I was a year ago and no longer need this outlet.  Yet, it’s still fun to share here so I’m planning to keep going until it’s not fun anymore or until folks aren’t reading anymore.

Please accept my thanks for bringing me into your world each day and for coming into mine. It’s lovely hearing from so many of you – both in the cyber world and the real world. I appreciate you all! I’m also happy to share observations from my corner of the universe and hope that you sometimes find yourself enlightened, inspired or even encouraged.

Enjoy your day, my friends. Spend it doing something that makes you happy.