Wow. It has seriously been a while. My last blog post was 10 months ago! What the heck. I guess I’ve just been living life? Nah, actually my reasoning is a bit different than that. I have been living life, but I just honestly haven’t really felt the motivation to blog in a while. My interests have just been taking me elsewhere. So… let’s catch up and talk a little bit about that.

The last post I made was about planners. That’s kind of what led me astray, maybe. I got a planner, then really got into the world of decorative planning. If you don’t know about it, I’m sure that sounds pretty strange. But there’s a whole subculture around this, basically. Lots of women (and some men) are really into it. There are tons of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and Etsy shops dedicated to materials and stuff involved in planning… stickers, planners, inserts, paper clips, etc. I even ended up setting up my own Etsy shop making stickers. It kind of took off for a while, but lately I just haven’t put nearly as much effort into promoting it and updating it like I should. Hopefully that will change at some point. It was fun and a nice little source of additional income. Like I said, it hasn’t really been updated lately, but if you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

So besides the planning, what have I been up to? Well, I did travel a bit last year. Ricky and I headed to Europe again, with a big focus of the trip being Oktoberfest in Munich. We had a blast, as usual. I should blog about that at some point and post some of the pictures I took there. Maybe I’ll get around to that too. Man, I really sound like a slacker, don’t I? Anyway, we also visited a few cities in Switzerland near Zurich as well as going to Prague.

Something else that took of quite a bit of my time and energy last year was one of my dogs, Sophie. I had Sophie since July 2008, about 6 months before Ricky and I started dating. She was a wonderful dog and I loved her so much. She had some health issues, though, and they got more serious right around the time we went to Europe last year. It turned out to be the beginning of the end. Her health began deteriorating to where she was on four different medications, kept getting bloated (poor thing), and had trouble walking to where I had to carry her around a lot even. Rather than prolong her suffering, we made the decision to let her go right before Christmas. It made the holidays rather difficult, and we ended up going to San Diego over New Years just to get out of town and have a change of scenery. It’s still taking some adjusting to going from having two dogs the last 3 years to only having one. She is missed very much.

Since the holidays, we’ve been just a bit busy with goings on around here and such. January through May is a busy time in Arizona, as that’s when our weather is best and we have more visitors than usual (we call them snowbirds, people who come here to get away from the cold and yuck in most of the rest of the country). There are a ton of festivals and events going on during that time. One is the Phoenix Open, which we volunteer for every year. Another is Arizona Strong Beer Fest, which we also go to every year. Stuff like that has kept us pretty busy, but having fun.

I’ve also been trying to read more lately. I’ve gotten kind of behind the last couple of weeks or so, what with trying to catch up with some other things, but I’m really trying to make my Goodreads goal of reading 40 books this year. It was my goal last year, and I didn’t quite make it, so I’m determined to get it done this year. I did good and got a bit ahead last month, so I’m still ahead of schedule, but I need to get a bit more momentum going soon in order to not get behind. I’ll work on that.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. It’s no excuse for not blogging, really, and I hope to get back into it. I just got a new, very portable MacBook, so I want to put it to good use. Hope to blog at you again soon!