Nancy Stordahl of Nancy’s Point has once again invited me to her summer blog hop. This year I am actually doing it! Here are Nancy’s questions and my answers:

1. Who are you? Tell us your genre, how long you’ve been at it, who or what inspires you or whatever you want us to know.

I am Elizabeth MacKenzie, a psychologist, wife, and mother who loves to make things, hike, take photos, and live live as authentically as I can. I started my blog in 2012, the day I was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer. The blog started as a way to let my family know what I was doing and morphed into musings about life, death ( also had 2 heart attacks in 2017, due to a rare cause of heart disease), mindfulness, art, and travel.

2. What’s been your biggest blogging roadblock this year and did you come up with a way to get around it? (If you didn’t, that’s okay too. We’re here to support you.)

My biggest roadblock this year is that I just didn’t feel very motivated to write even in “these unprecedented times”! Basically, I wanted to want to write. Usually, ideas come to me when I am outside walking, something I do almost daily. During the Trump administration and throughout the pandemic, things have been different. It also occurs to me that another time ideas come to me is when I am working on ceramics and I was unable to do that for over a year due to our studio closure. I’ve just found a new studio for my husband and I to do work at and we’ve been members since about June. Stay tuned.

3. What’s something you accomplished with your blog this year that you’re proud of?
I may not have written much, but I’m still blogging after all of these years!

4. What are a couple of your best blogging tips?

I recommend that you write your blog to suit your goals. This is a personal blog and I am grateful that some enjoy reading my thoughts, learning about my life, and looking at my photos. I’m not a professional memoirist or social media writer. Consequently, I don’t edit my entries and frankly, I don’t even outline then. I typically start with an idea and see where it takes me. This means that entries have typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. People keep reading so I figure that they are tolerable. Blasphemous, I know.

5. How do you handle negative feedback or comments?

An advantage of my relative obscurity is that I don’t get negative feedback about my blog. One exception was when someone said something negative about my then teen-aged daughter. I deleted the comment and didn’t let it show on my blog. It was very upsetting.

6. Share a link to a favorite post you’ve written RECENTLY (since last year’s challenge perhaps) that you want more people to read.

I wrote a post about grief exactly a year ago. It was the kind of post that I thought I might write more of during the pandemic. These are truly historic times for many reasons and we are all working our way through it. Here is the link.

I owe it to myself to write up a separate travel post on our epic trip to Iceland in July! I hope to do that this week. I have some days off and was planning to go through my photos again. In the meantime, here is a photo of an Arctic puffin, who I met on the Látrabjarg Cliffs in the Westfjords region of Iceland.

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