My Summer Hiatus
I realize that it's been quite some time since my last post. While I haven't actually published anything in close to three months, I have still been very active in blogging. My last post for Mother's Day was that delicious Pinata Cake. Shortly after, June and July were a whirlwind. So I figured I'd recap what's been going on this summer and why it's taken me so long to come back!
I quit my job at Amazon at the end of May so that I could take the summer off and just enjoy my time prior to returning to school full time. While I've been looking forward to starting at NYU Stern, I knew I wanted some time to myself to spend with family and friends as well as to get my life in order prior to the upheaval of moving to New York. One of the things I worked very hard on in June was the presentation of my blog.
Up until May 2015, I had been using Blogger. I loved its simplicity and most importantly, the cost: free. But with a free platform comes limitations. I wasn't happy with the way my blog looked at all. I'd done quite a fair amount of customization through hard-coded HTML, but I was hitting my limits. So, for a good part of June, I looked for an alternative to Blogger.
I opened accounts with just about all blogging platforms out there, and even some website building tools. While Wordpress seemed like the logical choice, I thought it was a bit on the expensive side. I knew what I wanted my blog to look like, and while I'm no designer, I wanted to stick to a simplistic approach. But the free themes offered by Wordpress lacked customization without an upgrade. And if I wanted a completely new theme, I'd have to go with .org rather than .com, bringing on a whole new wave of expenses. Since my blog is essentially a platform for me to share content with a few family members and friends, rather than to sell a product, I didn't want to spend the hundreds of dollars it would add up to to switch to Wordpress. So I kept looking around.
I eventually landed on Squarespace. While it's not free, at just $8 a month, it lets me do just about anything I want to my blog. I am absolutely loving the level of customization that's available with simple drag and drop fields, no HTML knowledge required. Since I'd spent weeks looking around and hadn't found anything, I figured at that price point, I could deal with it to be happy, since after all, this blog really is for me. So the remainder of June was devoted to migrating all my content to Squarespace and making sure nothing had broken in the process.
July was gone in an instant as well. With my move to New York happening through the last week of July into the first of August, my summer month was essentially spent on cleaning up, donations, and packing. I was preparing for a cross country roadtrip, looking for a way to fit all my possessions, three people, and a dog into a Ford Expedition. We left Seattle on a Sunday, drove through 14 states in 7 days and 6 nights, and got to New York on a Saturday. It was an incredible trip, which more than deserves its own post, so stay tuned for that!
And that's my summer! I'm now in New York, starting at Stern on 8/19, and absolutely cannot wait. I've got lots more posts coming now that I'm somewhat settled, and hope to learn much more about New York, all the while sharing it on here with everyone. And lastly, again, loving my new blog!
