I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my life and interests over the last 10+ years. In art school I used to take photos of people in their bedrooms, it’s kind of strange in retrospect. I was 20 and awkwardly taking photos of a lot of middle aged couples in their bedroom with my clunky and obnoxious 4×5 camera. Hunkering down in their closets or bathrooms with towels stuffed up against the doors to keep out the light while trying to quickly unload and reload film sheets. I was SO insanely out of my element. I would never have the balls to do something like that these days, and I envy the time when I took more risks.

Whether I knew it or not I was already becoming obsessed with people and how they used their personal spaces as a way to communicate something about themselves. Obviously this was a theme that would stick with me, and stick hard. I am still so fascinated people and their spaces and this project was a catalyst for my strong connections to home as a representation of a family and self today.

I’ve also been thinking about how I started blogging. I had an account at a place called fotolog.com (circa 2001). Back then you were only allowed to upload one photo a day unless you wanted to subscribe to a premium account. I would diligently scan my negatives, do my corrections and then slowly upload my precious images to my fotolog account. I did this everyday for months, this was a real thing!

In 2005, when I was crazy and 24, I started a party blog combining three of my fav things at the time, drinking too much (this was new and exciting), the internet, and photos. Back then blogging was such a new concept. Platforms like Blogger barely existed, if at all. I had self hosted and designed my first blog updating links manually for the first 6 months. Eventually I wised up and started a Blogger account (www.deucecities.blogspot.com) where I took too many photos of myself getting into lots of trouble with my buds. That was the real beginning of the real blogging. I even got linked to from an MTV article and I thought I was some serious shit.

I eventually settled down (just a little bit) and in 2009 I started Deuce Cities Henhouse with my friend Nicole. I don’t know what we were thinking back then, we didn’t have a real cohesive idea of what the blog was going to be except for it to be a place that we could “cluck” (get it) about things we thought were cool and projects we had been working on. There wasn’t a real strong voice or focus to the whole thing. It was a bit of a hot mess.

The point of this post is that I’m fast approaching the four year anniversary of this old blog, but what’s even more of a milestone for me is the 1 year anniversary of taking blogging way more seriously. It was one year ago today that I migrated my blog from Blogger to WordPress with the intent of presenting to the internet world a more thoughtful and well curated Deuce Cities Henhouse. Prior to this I had been blogging from the hip, not fully understanding the concept that in order to make a blog that people wanted to read and to have them in return feel compelled to comment and share, I needed to buck up and start presenting more thoughtful, consistent, smart, interesting and engaging posts.

Thus began the era of note books all over the house filled with ideas for blog posts. I posted almost every day for 8 months before I realized that trying to keep that schedule was driving me crazy. Besides it’s not posting every day that counts but that what I am writing is good. These days I’m not committed to a specific amount of posts per week but I do shoot for 2-3 and I still have my notebooks, just not as many.

Fav Photo of Me Circa 2003

I’m not gonna lie, I had high hopes of having a very popular blog when I started out last year. I thought for sure if I posted thoughtful and interesting content every day that all it would take was readers catching on and sharing links and I’d have like 1000 followers instantly. When you spend so much time pouring everything you got into one very personal outlet, you can’t help but want it to be successful. Although my readership didn’t grow by leaps and bounds like I had hoped it might, I enjoy the blog more than ever. I love that it’s all me, I love tinkering with the code and design, I love posting when I feel inspired to post, and I love that when I do post there is a group of loyal readers who share their thoughts with me.

Writing this blog makes me feel more complete in my life, it’s the creative outlet (as cliche, stupid and dumb as that sounds) that I seriously need, and without it I go crazy. It’s been good, and kept me positive and I’ve felt a lot less anxiety in my day-to-day because of it. I’m happy that I have this place where I can share, and my thoughts can be received in a supportive community. It’s such a perfect and happy combination of things that define me and my past, present and hopefully future. It makes so much sense for me to be a blog lady.

I’m not sure I could ever give this up. Thanks for being a part of it and sharing with me.