I started blogging a long time ago. It wasn’t called blogging when I first started, but looking back, that’s what I was doing on bulletin boards, etc., and I’ve had several blogs on different platforms and on my own website, with a few different names, since the mid-90s.

My favorite blog was called “Friday’s Child,” and was hosted by a site called journalspace in 2003 or so. I loved that site, and nothing has come close in all the years since to the sense of community I found there. The site died in 2006, and with it, “Friday’s Child.” I started another blog after that, and hosted it on my own site for a few years. I started on WordPress,com in 2008 with a blog called “Green Tea and Gratitude,” and found my way to “The Electric Idealist” about 10 years later,

My last post on The Electric Idealist was soon after I retired. Much has changed for me in the last 2.5 years, and though I’m probably still an idealist, I’m no longer electric in the way I was then. (Uranus was transiting my rising sign, and if you know astrology you’ll understand the reference. If not, don’t worry about it.) LOL!

So,,,now. New life, new blog, new name.

I retired at the end of 2023, and I feel like I’ve changed a lot since then, In 2024 I was just trying to relax and trying to find my way back to a life without the stress I had experienced in the 3 years prior to retirement. I worked in public health and the pandemic and some other things were difficult about that job, and I was so happy to be free of it, though I was and still am, very proud of ACME Health Services and the work we did in the 24 years I was on staff.

Last year, I just enjoyed life, for the most part – doing the things I love and now had more time for – expanding my art journaling practice, writing most days, riding my bike, reading, sitting in my backyard in the summer, just breathing in the sights and smells for hours at a time.

This year, I feel like a different person altogether. A combination of “old” me and “new” me, and definitely a more relaxed me. Still full-time caregiver to my mom, who will be 94 this month, but with a lot more time for myself and the things I like to do in the place I like to do it – my little house.

So I’m returning to blogging, which is something I have done and continued to love for nearly half of my life.

In 2003, when I started the original Friday’s Child, I had lost the business I loved, declared bankruptcy, started a new job, and had zero money. I was rebuilding my life, and my sense of who I thought I was, from the bottom up. I was still grieving my losses and deeply depressed, for a long time, but the community on journalspace rallied around me and lifted me up with comments on my blog and emails, and I will always be grateful for that space and those people.

When I was thinking about a new blog name, I was thinking about that blog and who I was at that time, during that life transition, and feeling like I would like to bring forward the best parts of that time, and that me, and start over. Version 2.0, (or 3, or 4 or 5.0,) maybe.

My life has changed dramatically in 23 years, and I’m grateful for that. The work and the people at ACME had a lot to do with it, as well as good friends, a good therapist, and anti-depressants, which I took for a time. I was struggling under the weight of essentially 2 full-time jobs at the end of 2023 (never let anyone tell you caregiving isn’t a full-time job), but now life is just soooo good in so many ways.

There are still lots of questions. Always have been, always will be, right? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Do I need to do anything? What matters to me? What seems fundamental? What have I learned? What have I let go of? What have I hung on to?

So here I am again. Friday’s Child again. Alive and well in Michigan, thinking about life and living it as fully as I can, day by day. What will happen in this new chapter? Or the next? There is always change, and I’m here for all of it, whatever it is, for as long as I can be.