One Year

Happy 1st Birthday Sandcastle!

Sand Tarts

Last year at this time, I was fantasizing about sandcastle cakes. Now, I’ve decided to celebrate the birth of this blog with Martha’s fittingly adorable sand tarts. The recipe is simple, relatively mess-free, and yields the perfect treat for the special occasion. Though my boyfriend and I will be enjoying most of these tomorrow, I’ve tucked a few away in the freezer, with plans to take them down to the beach in my picnic basket as soon as the temperatures turn.

Lessons Learned

The start of a sandcastle that I found along Lake Michigan when I first decided to begin this blog

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my beloved blog. As they say, time flies when you are having fun. Though I can’t profess to have been the most consistent poster of all time over the last twelve months, I am proud to say that I stuck with it, and I now have over 130 posts (!) chronicling my days spent along the shores of Lake Michigan. This is all the encouragement that I need to keep the entries coming, and I look forward to sharing more of my life with you in the years to come.

As predicted, I have learned and, in some cases, confirmed a great deal through the blogging process. Among the lessons thus far:

• Delicious food, nice shoes, fresh flowers, and clean sheets do wonders for a healthy state of mind.
• Being in your 30s is an experience unto itself.
• There’s something magical, addicting, and downright blog-ish about creating the bokeh effect with your camera.
• Sometimes, work, after-hours commitments, wild weekends, travel and/or pure laziness get in the way of posting. When the opportunity arises, you reemerge, remind yourself of the importance of balance, and begin to compose your thoughts again.
• Winters in Chicago are very, very, very long.
• There are very few dilemmas that fun nail polish can’t cure.
• Patient, camera-wielding boyfriends make life worth living.
• There’s something incredibly special and uplifting in the act of appreciating the mundane.
• An 800 sq. ft. condo can only hold so many possessions and afford so many adult luxuries.
• Life is not perfect. Not even close. And the sooner you accept it, the better off you are.

Sky's the Limit

Today marks the one-month anniversary of sandcastle, an achievement certainly worthy of celebration! I started this blog for many reasons: to push myself to learn new skills, to remember what it feels like to think creatively from time to time, to advance my almost nonexistent technological skills, to show far-flung family and friends what I’m up to, and perhaps most importantly, to create a journal of sorts that I could refer back to and remember things that made me happy, things that made me think, and things that defined a certain period of my life.

In the very short time that I’ve been at this little project, I’ve realized how diverse my interests are (and how many people share them), how many things I still don’t know (and, after being the only one under the age of 60 at a recent Mac class at an Apple store, how many things I already know), how pleased (and at times, incredibly anxious) I can become by putting my thoughts on the web, and sadly, how little free time I have to myself after a full work week (and how important balance is for maintaining my sanity). More than ever, I’m excited to build this sandy little site and look to the horizon to see where it takes me. Thanks for stopping by to monitor my progress!