This post contains affiliate links which are marked with a * next to them – if you click the link and make a purchase of any kind from that website within a certain time, I will receive a percentage of that purchase. This should not affect the price that you pay.
If you would like to learn more about how affiliate links work, please head over to this post on Bonjour, Blogger!
How are you? No, really, how are you? I promise I won’t say anything about unprecedented times, because quite frankly I’m tired of hearing that (as well as the phrase the new normal. I mean, it is, but it’s ok to not need to name everything)
I’ve been trying to use this time productively – this week I realised that despite installing this theme (Amelia from 17th Avenue {affiliate link}) ages ago, I hadn’t actually done anything to it besides a few tweaks to make my existing logo fit in. I still only had version 1.0 installed, when it’s currently on 2.6! I updated everything this weekend, and ran a plugin to convert all of my old posts to use blocks (which helped with setting featured images and some old formatting problems I kept manually fixing as I came across them)
I’ve noticed with people’s personal blogs more these days that the home page is more of a hub to direct the reader to all the other places that they can be found – I’ve been telling lots of people to do this, I’ve done this one my other sites and yet I hadn’t even thought to do this to my own personal site. Hopefully the homepage is now a little more useful to someone coming across it than just a list of my latest posts.
Updating the theme also meant I found that there were things in the theme that I had been duplicating with hacked together code (such as my Instagram link page) so I’ve been working through things like that to make them work better – I doubt anyone else will notice, but hey, I noticed. (By the way, I would recommend 17th Avenue Designs if you’re looking for a nice WordPress theme – their documentation is really good compared to some other companies, and they were super quick to help with a specific query!)
I also fiiiiiiinally launched my new website, The Glasshouse!
Pretty much as long as I’ve been running Bonjour, Blogger! (7 years last week!), I’ve been thinking about things I can create and do – I will always create content for free, but for more indepth and personalised work, I want to make sure it is priced fairly (because blogging should never be for those who can afford to invest significantly)
I’ve been planning out some of these things for years – I went through a lot of paperwork and notebooks recently and found many variations on the same thing! It was about time I did something about it.
I’m offering blog critiques where I look at your blog in detail and talk about what’s good and what can be improved. They’re £50 each, or you can get 50% off with the code ceriselle. I’m adding more items over time, but I want to make sure they’re perfect before I put them up!
In more real life (what, the internet isn’t real life?!) things, I got the pressure washer out and cleaned up everything (and had to drive all the way to Gig Harbor (the furthest I’ve driven ever!) to pick up a part because I may have accidentally let the hose touch the hot engine and then it wasn’t a pressure washer anymore but an engine with a hose pissing water out), including parts I haven’t done previously like the front driveway and the little pathway to the right of the garden (in the picture above). The gardeners came the next day and tidied everything up and now it all looks lovely out there, and ready to have all our friends over. Oh.
I’ve been going to the shops more regularly (although obviously not as much as before) now – I’ve been wearing a face mask (a washable one we bought at the tail end of the fires in 2018, and that we didn’t need last year, but we’re very glad to have them this year!) whenever I go out, and it’s interesting to see who is wearing masks and following things like supermarket aisles being one way, etc, and who doesn’t. Washington/King County is currently in phase 1 of reopening, and it’s nice to see that people are taking it seriously (on the whole). I went to Target for the first time in 2 months last weekend and even with the changes (marks on the floor so you don’t stand too close, wearing a mask, avoiding people if I could, etc), it was just so nice to be in a shop and looking at things!
I had my first video call with friends last week (I don’t know how I’ve managed to hold out this long, but maybe people just didn’t want to see my face?) and it was great to chat nonsense to them, but the problem with chatting to UK friends is that they were all on the booze and I was drinking a giant Yeti full of cold brew! I’ve also been playing Animal Crossing and I had forgotten how calming it is.
What have you been up to?